Friday evening, just before six. I knock on my daughter's door, and from inside comes a “Come in!”. The appointment is in the calendar like any other. It lasts an hour. My task in it is simple: listen.
Mara has Down syndrome, and she is preoccupied with a question that won't let her go. She wants to know who is good and who is bad. She watches fairy tales and series and sorts every character. She repeats sentences someone has said, says them over to herself and waits to see how they feel. Good, bad — or the third thing.
Because she has three categories, not two.
Good people do everything right. They are everyday heroes, they are kind, they save the world. Bad people are evil wizards and witches and everyone who is bad gladly and on purpose. They were simply born that way and can't be otherwise.
And then there are the grumpy people. Those are really good people who have been disappointed by others or are at odds with themselves. That is why they behave unfairly and do mean things they regret later. Grumpy people sometimes just don't have their behavior under control, she explains to me. But at some point they see their mistakes. And then they are capable of wonderful deeds.
I know when this third category came into being. She had had a tantrum, a real one, and afterward she came to me and asked: “Papa, I'm not bad, am I? I'm only grumpy.”
She did not invent this category in order to sort other people. She needed it in order to sort herself without ending up among the witches.
Ever since, I have thought differently about her three kinds of people. Two of them are fate. You are born a good person or a bad one, and nothing about that changes. Only the third category has a story: a disappointment, a struggle with oneself, a behavior that follows from it, a regret and the possibility that something great comes after. Of the three categories, it is the uncomfortable one that is the only one in which anything moves.
In companies I mostly encounter only the first two.
He's just difficult. She's been blocking things since the day she arrived. You can't talk to him. We've given up on her. Those are sentences about a person's nature, and sentences about nature end all further work — there is nothing left to do if someone simply is that way. I have heard these sentences in board meetings, in HR conversations, in leadership circles, and I have said them myself. They are convenient. They cost nothing and explain everything.
Mara's third category asks a different question: by what was this person disappointed, and what are they struggling with? That can be answered. Usually the answer falls back on the organization, which is why the question is so rarely asked.
She has sorted me into the good category. Although, she says, I used to be pretty grumpy myself. Apparently I've gotten over it.
I don't know whether I have. For a year I let a board member keep me waiting every week without saying anything, because I was well paid for it. I hired people because it flattered me that they wanted to learn from me, and later parted with them. By her definition that is almost exactly a grumpy person: someone at odds with himself who therefore does things he regrets afterward. Presumably that is the normal case. We disappoint ourselves and others, and the question is not whether, but what comes after.
I prefer her classification to most of the models I work with professionally for another reason. It knows no irredeemable people except those who like being that way. Everyone else who behaves badly is someone to whom something happened.
The objection to that is serious. There are people whose behavior destroys so much that asking about the cause becomes an excuse — for the organization that watches and for the person who settles into it. An explanation is not a permission. Nor does her category say that everyone changes. It names one precondition: you have to see your own part in it.
That is why the third category is not leniency but a demand. It requires honesty about your own disappointment. Whoever can summon that goes on developing. Whoever cannot stays where they are — no matter what disappointed them.
Sometimes I get worked up in her room about something, about appointments, about something that went wrong. Then she looks at me and says: in your world that may be a problem. Not in mine.
At seven the hour is over. There is nothing to settle, nothing to decide and nothing to take away. Next Friday I knock again.