You can’t know the effect that a negative news – a lay-off, a missed goal, a demotion, a change in responsibilities – will have on the team you are leading.
But you can, and you should, create the space for people to talk about it. Both among themselves and with management.
Going back to work as if nothing had happened is forceful.
When you ask, you are exposed. Vulnerable.
And when you get no response, or a rejection. If you are made fun of, or are belittled. That does not mean that you asked the wrong question.
It just means you asked the wrong person.
Try again.
We live in the tension between a version of us we despise and a version of us we would like to become.
And we also live in the tension between our failures, which we see so vividly, and other people’s successes, which we fantasise a lot about.
When we get going, we often reach for the positive extreme. We are at our best and we aim to emulate those who have succeeded before. We know we can. Then we meet criticism, bad weather, rejection, difficulties of various kind, and we fall to the negative extreme. We are suddenly incapable to complete the most trivial task, unworthy of anybody’s attention, care, empathy.
Most reality, though, happens in the middle. And that’s also where we can anchor to achieve real and incremental progress.
It’s when we embrace the version of us we are today and the work we are doing today – neither bad nor good – that we get rid of the tension and we can start enjoying the journey.
Sometimes we make decisions that have a negative impact on our community, on the people around us, on the group.
We might break a rule, or demote someone, or take a controversial stance on a shared opinion.
And when we do that, it looks like the immediate need is to degrade the object of our decision.
The rule is stupid, the person is incompetent, the shared opinion is naive.
We end up creating friction and eventually the fracture is inevitable.
We could instead own the decision. Be straightforward about it. Acknowledge that perhaps, this time, we might be seen as the bad guy, and still we believe we are doing something that make sense for the purpose we want to achieve.
It is a better way to frame what’s happening, one that goes beyond a false sense of righteousness that we too often use to shield our own responsibilities.
Not every story needs a villain.
Don’t take yourself too seriously. Make sure you have enough space to even make fun of your failures, your fears, your weaknesses.
We are wired to spot the threatening, the bad, the negative. But for most of us, in our modern world, that is very often overreaction. Bombing a presentation, missing a quarter’s goals, getting rejected is not going to be defining our own persona.
Unless you let it.
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