Hunting dogs NEED to hunt; what do YOU need to do?

 

 

 

During one election campaign, I visited a rifle club with my candidate. It was an absolutely gorgeous Ontario fall day, bright blue sky and flame-coloured trees. The rifle club was full of happy target shooters, cheerfully absorbed in friendly competition as they honed their skills before hunting season opened.

One man pulled up in a white cube van; he wasn’t there to practice but had some business with the manager of the club. He popped inside the small building, leaving two or more dogs in the back of the van which had no windows – I could hear, but not see the dogs.

The man was gone only a few minutes, but the dogs began yipping and then barking, growing steadily louder and more frantic as the moments passed. The shooters continued shooting at targets; the dogs were going crazy, howling, baying and barking urgently. Then they began leaping, throwing themselves at the sides of the van, which was rocking back and forth on its wheels by the time the owner returned from inside the clubhouse.

“What is wrong with your dogs?” I asked. “They are REALLY upset about something!”

The owner laughed heartily at my concern. “They are upset because they are not hunting,” he explained, smiling at my city-girl naiveté. “They hear the guns shooting on the target range and they do not understand why they are not involved in the hunt.

“Hunting is what they have been bred to do, and trained to do all their entire lives. They live for it. You can’t hold them back or keep them from doing it. When they hear a rifle shot, their entire nervous system goes into high gear; they have a job to do and they want to be doing it. This,” he gestured to the range where the shooters were practicing, “is driving them crazy. They’ll be fine as soon as I drive away.”

I thought a lot about that conversation in the months that followed. It even affected my management style, as I realized that some of my staff – the issues managers in particular – had a predictable reaction to just about every challenge that arose, no matter how large or small. One woman was fanatical about being on top of every detail of each issue that popped up. She’d be awake at 4am scanning the media and on the phone with reporters like a dog on a bone, making sure they had every fact that could possibly be relevant to the story. It would drive her almost insane if she provided correct information to a reporter and they failed to use it.

“You are like a hunting dog hunting,” I would laugh to cheer her up. “Your brain is hard-wired for the hunt. I hope that never changes.”

In August 2010, I was contacted by an executive search firm which was looking for a bureaucratic Communications Manager for Toronto’s Mayor’s office. I was interviewed by a man who, ironically, seemed to have not the slightest clue what makes communications people tick. The interview dragged on as we went over my experience – 25 years of on-the-ground communications, protests, strikes, pandemic preparation, isotope shortages, bomb threats, anthrax quarantines, listeria outbreaks – until he finally blurted out in disbelief:

“Why on earth would ANYONE want to do this job?”

My instinctive first impulse was to reply, “Why on earth would your company send YOU to interview ME?”

Thankfully, my Dale Carnegie training has taught me to ignore my instinctive first impulse and so instead, I paused before shrugging my shoulders and responding with a question of my own:

“Why do hunting dogs hunt?” I asked. “It’s what we do. It’s what we’re good at. It’s what we WANT to do. What you view as stressful, we view as thrilling: we’re in it to win it. We love it.”

Unsurprisingly, I was not invited back for a second interview. I have watched the endless, incredible stream of controversy surrounding Mayor Rob Ford with the same level of astonishment as the rest of the country – although, I view it all with detachment, through the lens of effective crisis communications.

A few weeks ago I ran into one of the Mayor’s most trusted staff, a man with whom I have worked before and know to be smart and dedicated. He stopped me on the sidewalk.

“Mayor Ford needs a press secretary,” he told me. “Can I put forward your resume?”

I considered this nightmare scenario for all of 5 seconds.

“YES!” I said instinctively, imagining the stress and insanity of managing relations with the press gallery during whatever crises lay ahead. My brain was already ticking; I could really learn a lot about new media and technologies, plus meet all the new Bureau Chiefs…no matter what happened, I’d be living history and seeing it from the inside…this could be a blast!

Nothing came of that conversation either, but it did give me pause and make me wonder: Why ever would I say “yes” to such a question? What the heck goes on inside my brain, that I would even consider a job from which most sane people would run screaming?

“Nobody is so miserable as he who longs to be somebody and something other than the person he is in body and mind,” Dale Carnegie wrote in Stop Worrying and Start Living.

“You are something new in this world. Be glad of it. Make the most of what nature gave you…you must be what your experiences, your environment and your heredity have made you.”

Experience, environment and heredity ensure hunting dogs need to hunt. They aren’t stressed by hunting; they are stressed by NOT hunting. Apparently, crisis communicators are the same.

Carnegie’s stress management advice is brilliant: “Find yourself, and be yourself.”