Avoid leaving things unsaid : "the ticket book"

The last straw is a little story that you can tell your teams to encourage to deal with their problems as you along.

In day-to-day business, there is a lot of interaction going on between team members and sometimes the wrong word is uttered, humiliation is felt, a misunderstanding arises...these are small things but they are a little unnerving : each of these little events give rise to a “ticket” :  you tell yourself that it was no big deal and “wipe the slate clean” and the ticket is placed in your pocket.

And then, you keep getting more and more of these tickets until they form a whole ticket book.

One day a new little event will occur and that time it is the last straw ! All the“tickets”that had piled up come rushing out. The person who has just slipped-up gets criticized for all the missteps he had been making for the past months with a violence that is totally disproportionate with what triggered it.

In Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols – 2011), Curtis is wrapped up in his problems and his complaints. It is only when he starts sharing how he feels with his wife that the solution starts to appear.

What this teaches us is that we should deal with those “tickets” as they arise when it is still easy to do something about. To do so , you need to know how to express disapproval.

Failure to do so will make loosening up your crisis-torn team much more difficult.

This story is also that of the straw that broke the camel's back. It is characteristic of a child/child relation or child/parent one as seen in Transactional analysis.