The No-Whinin’ Zone: How to Handle a Whiner

Tony, the tour director, stood at the front of our bus and said with a soft southern drawl, “There are forty strangers here that will spend the next eleven days together in a foreign country and I have one basic rule:

1. No Whinin’

There were plenty of opportunities in the following days to complain, but no one did.  Each time a person would start to complain, they would  mutter no whinin’ and the rest of the group would chuckle. It sounded silly; but it worked.  When I began to lead international mission teams, I invoked Tony’s rule and mimicked his soft southern drawl with his no whinin’ rule. It is also one of my top five parenting rules.  Here are a few things I’ve learned about whiners:

• Whiners are like fingernails screeching on chalkboard
• Whiners can ruin the mood for the entire group
• Whiners sow seeds of discontent that create more whiners
• Whiners create distrust because they usually complain about people
• Whiners cause people to dislike them and then they wonder why
• Whiners drain co-workers of motivation and enthusiasm
• Whiners- if left unchecked- can single-handledly destroy the morale of an office or a team

So how do you stop someone from whinin’?  Here are a few suggestions:

• Create a culture and set the expectation that whining in considered childish
• Don’t give into their demands; you’ll live to regret it; if the child in the checkout line is whinin’ for candy and gets it, he’ll whine for car when he’s a teen
• Challenge the whiner to provide his or her own solution
• Ignore them

There’s a difference between legitimate complaints and whinin’.  The way to differentiates between the two is to see if there is a solution attached to the complaint. What tricks have you learned to handle a whiner? Please tell me, I’d like to know. If you’d like these short essays delivered to your email automatically, just hit the “subscribe to my blog” button on the side of this page. I promise never to sell or give away your contact to others and you are free to unsubscribe at any time without hassle or guilt! And I won’t spam you.