Mark Twain once advised us to “dance like nobody’s watching; love like you’ve never been hurt; sing like nobody’s listening; and live like it’s heaven on earth.” I think if he’d ever resigned from a stress-filled workplace, he’d have added, “share like it’s your exit interview.”
I often wonder how much more productive we’d be if we told the whole truth. Instead of a watered-down statement like “while your enthusiasm is appreciated, it would probably be better for you to focus on one thing at a time,” it’d be more effective to say “you have the attention span of a gnat and I’m tired of having to clean up after your hair-brained ideas.”
You could swap “there are times when I get surprised by deadlines on projects I didn’t know were assigned to me” with “it drives me crazy when my schedule gets whacked because you hoard information like a squirrel hoards acorns!”
“It makes people feel like they’re second-class citizens when you keep them waiting outside your office” would have much more impact than “perhaps you should consider allowing more time in your calendar between meetings.”
Think of the spring you’d have in your step if you could regularly unburden yourself from lingering resentments instead of carrying them around until your last day at work. And, wouldn’t it actually be more humane to hit your colleagues with the brutal truth instead of making them unearth the mysteries of your oblique clues?
I think so. We should start a new tradition of giving feedback like it’s our exit interview at least once a quarter. So all you information-hoarding, absent-minded, defensive, overly critical colleagues need to get ready. The honesty train is leaving the station!
Just give me a few days to update my resume, okay?
Franny Fried