Stow the Anchor

 

Complaints, we hate making them and if you’re on the receiving end, you hate getting them. I’ve always wondered why we have such a negative view of complaints. After all, how can we improve ourselves without receiving feedback? A saying I once heard notes that a diamond needs a lot of cutting before its sparkles, how are you and I going to improve if we grumble at each cut?

We have lots of local and national agencies (LA, NHS etc.) who receive and deal with complaints, some of these, like ombudsman services, are there just to deal with complaints. There is all this intelligence coming in, of what’s not working, and yet nothing seems to improve. As an advocate why am I dealing with the same complaints and issues that I was ten years ago?

Think of luxury yacht costing millions, that you want to sail in. As long as the anchors down, you’re stuck and you can’t move. To move, you have to lift the anchor and stow it away. You can spend millions on making the boat look sleek, get a new and experienced crew, fit a more powerful engine, but unless you lift the anchor and take it with you, your progress is slow and you will drag along at snails’ space. The anchor here is your complaints. They can’t be ignored.

Too often organisations pay little attention to this important part of their business. Why is it that we as organisations, or even personally, can’t take negative input and any complaint is seen as negative, not a chance to improve and better ourselves. We are human after all… and we will definitely make mistakes from time to time.

We all go around thinking it’s not our fault, it may not be, but if it’s your job and you get a salary, it is your responsibly to deal with it. It shouldn’t matter if it’s the process, or policy, it is each of our individual personal responsibility to do something about it and to try and fix the issue at hand.

For a long time, both individually and collectively, we’ve played the blame game. In fact, at this stage it is almost a national sport of who to blame and often playing said game seems more important than putting it right. Our multimedia is all about how someone needs to do something and how it is someone’s fault. People really need to start looking at themselves and see what they can do to contribute to the solution as opposed to be stuck blaming individuals and organisations.

Feedback shouldn’t always be negative. We need to praise the good too and I don’t mean clapping at your door either! Take the time to say thank you, show your appreciation not just to doctors, nurses but to refuse workers, the postie, vegetable pickers, drivers. In our society, for example, doctors are held in high regard and respect. Obviously, they study hard for many years and do an incredibly important job saving lives and is therefore salaried accordingly, but is the refuse worker any less important? If we didn’t have the refuse collectors managing with our waste, how many people would be affected by disease or illness? In our society, why are they viewed of less value than the doctor?

Each one of us is connected without which the system doesn’t work. If we all take the attitude that “it’s not my fault”, we will never move forward and become or demonstrate our true human potential. It’s time for us all to take responsibility.