The Moan Management Matrix: Three Approaches to Handling Complaints in the Training Room

There’s a particular moment that every facilitator and trainer learns to recognise, usually about forty minutes into a session, when you’ve just asked what sounds like an innocent, open question about workplace challenges. Someone raises their hand, and before you can fully appreciate what’s about to unfold, they’re three minutes deep into a detailed character assassination of Janet from Finance who apparently can’t be trusted with a spreadsheet, let alone strategic decisions, and honestly, the whole department’s a mess because leadership won’t listen, and by the way, did you hear what happened at the Christmas party?

You’ve lost the room. Or rather, you’re about to unless you handle this well. Sigal Barsade’s 2002 study at Yale School of Management examining emotional contagion in groups found that negative emotions spread faster and more effectively than positive ones, with unpleasant emotions eliciting stronger and quicker responses than neutral or positive events. When one person vents their frustrations, others begin to mirror those emotions subconsciously. More concerning, Evangelia Demerouti and Russell Cropanzano at Eindhoven University of Technology discovered through three-day diary studies with over one hundred employees that workplace venting creates an “emotional amplification” effect where negativity intensifies over time within groups, making it harder for people to bounce back from bad experiences (Demerouti and Cropanzano, 2017). Left unchecked, your carefully planned workshop becomes a therapy session where you’re cast as counsellor rather than facilitator, and that’s not a role any of us signed up for.

I’ve developed three responses to these situations, deployed depending on what I’m observing in the room and the nature of the complaint itself.

First, I’ll shut it down entirely if it’s not connected to what we’re actually discussing, if it’s deliberately disruptive, or if I can see others withdrawing because they’ve stopped finding it constructive. This is particularly important when the complaint feels unfair to the party who isn’t present to defend themselves; if someone’s being named or their perspective clearly hasn’t been considered, I’ll intervene immediately and redirect the conversation. The complaint still gets communicated back to my contact in the organisation, but it doesn’t get to derail our session.

Second, I’ll acknowledge the challenge but park it for later if it sits outside the scope of what we can address together. This requires honesty: “I can see this is causing you real frustration, but we’re not going to be able to impact that situation today. This is something you’ll need to explore with your manager.” Erin Craw’s work at the University of Arkansas on workplace communication found that whilst venting can provide temporary emotional relief, it also creates what she terms “co-rumination,” where conversations of complaint foster burnout because people relive negative experiences without resolution, creating exhaustion and empathy fatigue in both the speaker and listeners (Craw, 2023). Parking the issue acknowledges its existence without letting it spread through the group.

Third, if there’s something genuinely actionable that the people in this room could influence, we’ll explore it properly. Usually, this reveals a communication failure: “Have you communicated these challenges clearly to the people involved?” The answer is invariably no, or some variation of “well, kind of, but they didn’t get it,” which means no. We then work through what clear communication would actually look like in their context, which is far more valuable than collective commiseration.

Having a plan for dealing with these matters more now than ever, particularly for those running training for the first time or those who’ve somehow avoided these situations despite years of facilitation. Our training rooms can too easily become grievance-sharing spaces where participants seek validation rather than solutions, and where the facilitator gets repositioned as a therapist. Alyson Meister and Nele Dael at IMD Business School in Lausanne found that negative venting without solution-focused discussion not only fails to resolve issues but places a double burden on listeners who must handle both the complainer’s negative emotions and their own reactions to those emotions, creating what they describe as “empathy fatigue” (Meister and Dael, 2023). We owe our participants, and ourselves, better than that.

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References

Barsade, S.G. (2002) ‘The ripple effect: emotional contagion and its influence on group behavior’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(4), pp. 644-675.

Craw, E. (2023) ‘Venting at work—a double-edged sword’, Psychology Today, 17 August. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/navigating-mental-health-through-a-communication-lens/202308/venting-at-work-a-double-edged.

Demerouti, E. and Cropanzano, R. (2017) ‘The buffering role of sportsmanship on the effects of daily negative events’, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 26(2), pp. 263-274.

Meister, A. and Dael, N. (2023) ‘3 strategies for tackling workplace complaints’, Harvard Business Review, 3 May. Available at: https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2023/05/05/complaining