Suzanne was a human resources manager at an east coast consumer packaged goods company. Why was she always exhausted? Let’s find out.
We had Suzanne start a tally. Within the first week nine victims came to Suzanne for rescue. Their complaints were varied: colleagues withholding information, someone they didn’t like, the cafeteria needed more healthy food, and so forth. None were issues Suzanne needed to be involved in.
Suzanne was a rescuer.
What Role Do You Play?
We all have a default role, one we learned early in life. It’s often our biggest blind spot.
Think of your default role as the lens you look through, a lens that affects everything we see. In my work with hundreds of varying cultures in businesses of all sizes, I’ve found there are three basic default roles:
These three roles are interdependent (there must be a Persecutor for there to be a Victim for the Rescuer to save), and together they make up what we refer to as the Tension Triangle, which looks like this:
When we’re in the Tension Triangle, we’re Problem-focused, and tend to see things like this:
Being Problem-focused really sucks. It drains our energy, leads us to look for ways to allocate blame, and generally feels constricting, like a jacket that’s too tight.
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