Rachel speaks
Rachel, my close friend just got fired
By Rachel
Sep 11, 2009 - 1:08:35 AM

Dear Rachel,
I'm worried. My very dearest friend at work got fired, and frankly she had it coming. She argued with her supervisors and showed up late. She was disruptive to the whole operation. She is not taking it well. She's talking about suing the agency, and she calls in daily to former co-workers to bad-mouth management. I think she is making a bad thing a lot worse, and I want to help her. She's young, just 24, and I fear she's going to wreck her chances for a career in media, which by the way she loves. She's smart, too, though sometimes you wouldn't know it. What can I do?-- Worried in LA

Dear Worried,
You have good cause to be concerned, and as a friend you should step in before she does something really stupid. She needs to cool down, and she needs a good talking to. And it appears you're the one who's stuck with the job.

One course might be to attempt tact with her, or sympathy. You could tell her that, sure, her bosses were incompetent losers but that she needs to think about her next move and quit wasting so much emotional energy harping over how she was mistreated.

The problem here is that it most likely won't work. As long as she feels she's been horribly mistreated she's not going to change her behavior.

I propose that in the gentlest terms you help her come to see how she was the cause of what happened to her. You've got a tough job ahead, but if you handle it right you can get her to begin to change how she sees the events leading up to her dismissal.

You are not out to get her to accept the entire blame. She won't, so don't even try.

Try to get her to accept some blame for one very specific incident, say the time she sassed her supervisor after she arrived late to a meeting. Deal with specifics.

If in going over that one incident she comes to allow that she was out of line, that could be enough to get the process of acceptance started.

Get her to put herself in the place of her supervisor on that day. Had she been that supervisor, how would she have reacted to a subordinate who behaved as she did?

Then move on to another incident. Go through how that turned out ugly and what she might have done to have it end differently.

Part of what you are trying to do is get her to see that handling those situations poorly doesn't make her a bad person or wrong in any larger sense. She just blew it.

People like your friend may be well developed in what you might call book-learning intelligence, the ability to evaluate problems in the abstract and to come up with solutions. But they are underdeveloped in their emotional intelligence. They read other people very poorly, if at all. They seldom give much thought about how their behavior affects others. They see the world through only one set of eyes, their own.

They need to grow up emotionally, and that means coming to see the world as others around them see it. That doesn't mean they have to agree with that view of the world, just simply understand it without feeling threatened by it.

The good news is that people can and do change. It's called growing up. With some it happens later, but it does happen. As her friend, you're there to help her along.