If someone does something you would not, that is not a good reason to go and do it yourself.
Sticking to your values, your best behavior, the best version of yourself is easy when everyone around is nice, pleasant, and accommodating. But can you do it also when you meet the asshole, when your boss sets a negative example, when your group is up to something you would not normally be proud of?
They started it! is a weak excuse for grown ups.
Leadership means asking questions.
What is the problem?
What can we do that is new and better?
How do we tackle this issue?
What if we do something else?
How can I help you?
If your days, your meetings, your interactions are filled with answers, you are doing something else entirely.
Take Gary Kaplan, who changed the culture of a hospital in Seattle. He took his top people to Japan and said, “Look what they’re doing over here. Do you see anything that might apply to our hospital?” He was very humble. He knew they had to fix the hospital, but he didn’t know how to do that. He was also very autocratic about, “We’re all going to go to Japan”; he managed the process. But the content and what they actually ended up doing, he built from the ground up.
Edgar Schein, In Conversation with Edgar Schein
In the face of adversity, we can sit down and complain, or stand up and do something.
A couple of things.
Sitting down and complaining makes us complicit in the adversity. If it was not our fault to begin with, it is after we make the decision to merely sit there. It does not matter if we do it because we are desperate or because we have no clue where to start from.
Standing up and doing something is always possible, even after having sat down and complained for a while. It might be to late to manage the adversity, and in that case doing something is about taking responsibility, measuring the damages, showing a way forward.
One way or the other, it is an active choice we need to make.
Disappointment is about anticipated rewards.
Sometimes the anticipated rewards are the result of our ambitions, aspirations, dreams, desires, experiences. We are active part in building up our expectations, to the point that it often becomes impossible for the actual thing to satisfy them.
Sometimes they are set by others with their ads, content, hype-building tactics, public relations, supposed culture. They prepare a mental image for us that buys us in and eventually turns out to be just too good to be true.
Disappointment is a fundamental part of life. The first type helps us stay grounded, adjust our course, understand how things work. The second type tells us about relationships, who to trust, to what extent and in which circumstances.
And most of all, disappointment is a reminder that while we often govern the inputs, we have little to no power over the outcomes.
That is fine.
When one gets squeezed between two opposing forces, it is quite usual to start depicting both forces as enemies.
Lousy middle management is a great representation of this.
Middle managers are at the crossroads of contrasting needs and ambitions, and the result can easily get to “management has unreasonable expectations” and “my team is lazy and ineffective“.
Of course, this is a divisive approach. Soon enough everybody hates everybody, nobody is happy, and things never get done.
Being in the middle, though, also means having the opportunity to build a bridge. To stop and sit down and listen to what those needs and ambitions are about, help each part to formulate them in a way that makes sense to the other, and finding ways to be helpful and support action in a common direction.
It takes time, energy, and a lot of confidence in ourselves and others. And it always pays off.
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