There are few experiences more painful than being
rejected. We vividly remember the hurt of not being picked for a
football etc. sports team, not being invited to a birthday party or social event, or not being accepted to
university. Our basic human need to belong
causes these incidents to stick with us through the years.
Even as adults, at various times in our careers we're not selected for
jobs, promotions, or projects; or even less significant benefits
such as parking spaces, preferred offices, or new computer equipment. Whether
it's fair or not, the hard reality is that everyone cannot have
everything.
Accepting rejection however is not an easy process — for
children or adults — and majority of us handle it poorly. When this happens
repeatedly, it often leads to two types of dysfunctional patterns in
organizations: entitlement and resignation.
Entitlement is when someone feels that he deserves certain benefits, no
matter the reality of the situation. For example, I recently worked with a
company that reduced costs by moving staff members into other building and
having them share meeting rooms, printers, and other services. A few people
refused to accept the new standards, arguing their unique needs for privacy,
space, and administrative support. They felt entitled to these benefits and
considered anything less to be a rejection of their status and personal
self-worth.
At the other extreme is resignation,
when people avoid situations where they might be rejected. In the example
above, some people resigned themselves to the reduced space by not engaging in
conversations about how the design of the office would work. By passively
accepting the new constraints, they made sure that none of their ideas were
rejected (because they didn't offer any). This may have been psychologically
comfortable, but the organization didn't benefit from their contributions and
their buy-in to the new facility was minimal.
In light of these behaviors, leaders need to encourage a
more conscious and healthy toleration of rejection. While all employees should
feel comfortable offering ideas, raising issues, and making observations — they
should do so with the knowledge that they may be rejected. If they get
discouraged or angry about not having their ideas accepted, they might shut
down and stop contributing. Similarly, if employees feel so self-important that
the organization should never turn them down; their sense of entitlement will
make it difficult to drive constructive change.
It's easier to talk about learning from rejection than to
actually experience it. Rejection often triggers painful emotional doubts about
our own competence and self-worth, so we either try to avoid it or pretend that
it doesn't matter. A more constructive approach is to remember that rejection
can be beneficial; it can force us to come up with more ideas, redirect us to
different paths, and keep us humble and open to learning.
