The Best of The Money Show: Workplace venting, AI and jobs, rebuilding a business and lessons in leadership

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

You're listening to the best of The Money Show.

Stephen Grootes (0:07)

Welcome to the best bits of The Money Show, a digest of some of the best interviews, conversations, thoughts and insights from the show this week. If you'd like to hear more, please go to our website or your podcast app and search for The Money Show. Always a good idea to send it along to someone, perhaps on WhatsApp, someone you think might benefit from one of the conversations. In Business Unusual this week, we spoke with the Organizational Behaviour Specialist, Siphiwe Moyo, about how someone who complains all the time in the workplace, can actually poison team morale. That balance between, please be honest with me and stop venting. Siphiwe, some very interesting thoughts on that.

Siphiwe Moyo (0:44)

I think the line gets drawn, particularly because we already know those things are good at work, like having honest conversation, particularly with colleagues, it builds trust. When we know people are truthful, we tend to trust them a little bit more, it creates bonds. It can actually improve well-being as well because we are able to vent and so on. But we also know that there comes a point where you are just venting at everybody else, and it can create problems because now you're emotionally dumping all your stuff on someone else. The question is whether are you also holding space for everybody, because you can literally have people at work who become what someone described as the emotional pack mule at work, because they are taking everybody. When everybody needs conversation, training, everybody goes to that particular person. So that person can eventually become everybody else's self-space, but are we creating that space for them?

Stephen Grootes (1:44)

I mean, part of it is that you have to work out where the limit is, you have to manage it, you have to manage the vibe in an office, because we are, for obvious reasons, quite an angry country. And if you're given a place to vent that, you're gonna.

Siphiwe Moyo (2:00)

You are going to vent, and for me, the line is always interesting, Stephen, because on the one hand, we don't want people to, I guess, express what we call toxic positivity, what other people call toxic positivity, where we want people to always be positive. But you could swing the pendulum to the extreme, where you're always complaining. There's always some on the news that you want to discuss.

And if you're given space at work, you have to think very carefully, again, about what is the workplace for, because otherwise, if you're always venting about something to someone, there comes a point where you can create a negative situation, a political situation at work, to a point that people end up avoiding you, and so on. So we have to draw the line, because work is there for a reason. It is a place where we spend the most time, and we want to maintain closeness, but we also want to make sure that there is some level of distance that we have with everything else that is happening in a country and in the world that is quite noisy.

Stephen Grootes (3:08)

If you have a person who's just venting all the time, how do you tell them to stop? I mean, that can be quite a tough thing. If they're doing that, they probably have a really important reason as to why they're doing it. You want to be sensitive. You want to help them where you can, but it will be having an impact on everyone else. How do you tell them to sort of cool it a bit?

Siphiwe Moyo (3:29)

Yeah. So first of all, if they're coming to you to vent, you are the person with the emotional container. I think one of the things you have to try and do is to put a container around your availability, right? So saying something like, I've got 10 minutes, tell me what's happening. Already it primes that person to understand that your availability is not limited.

And then maybe once in a while ask them, what do you actually need help with? Do you need us to introduce to our employee assessment program? Do you need me to introduce to someone who can actually solve the problem? And what that happens is that the person starts thinking, oh, what it actually means is that I could be referred to someone so that it's clear that we don't just have this open space for you to vent, but if you want us to refer you somewhere, then you should. And I think that helps us because what it helps is it's redirecting also without abandoning. So for example, would you like us to refer you to a manager who can help you with that? So it's always interesting, Stephen, because as soon as you ask someone for a potential solution, if they have some emotional intelligence, they realize that, oh, okay, this is not just an open tab for me to pour and pour and pour.