During our almost 50 year working lives we experience many ups & downs. Whether it’s a challenging assignment, colleague’s personality or difficult boss they always exist. Work “nirvana” is hard to find. When we look back on these trying situations it’s often who maintained dignity through it all that we remember. Who dealt with the adversity the best? Who came out better for it in the end? How did they grow?
Since the age of 13, when I got my first paycheck for some kind of work, there have been many wonderful challenges & learning opportunities. For the most part, I’ve been lucky in that the jobs have not been about the money. Of course that was a benefit but it was who I worked with & the growth afforded through hard work that I fondly reflect upon.
Recently, one of those assignments came my way due to a lack of personnel with the right experience. It featured a lot of diverse tasks to prepare a team for a difficult assignment involving advanced training, remote communication, outside agency networking/coordination & team building. After months of painstaking detailed work my bosses felt I had not asked the right questions, sweat the small stuff enough & let too many “balls drop”. In a one-way conversation…I was fired.
This hit me hard. I’d never been in this situation before, ever. Even with this personal set-back, the team was off & running. They had the resources needed to get the job done & had all dealt with changing variables out of our control the best way possible. Their adaptability was impressive! But why had this happened? I’d done all anyone could do in my position, or so I thought. It seemed my best wasn’t good enough. Needless to say I was devastated.
Moving On
We are all secondary players in everyone else’s world. Anything people say is a product of where they are in their lives, not ours. There isn’t just one world there are 6 billion understandings of it. It’s hard not to take what others say personally, especially if they are in charge but we have to try. We must understand the reality they live with to begin to understand what they’ve presented to us. Without this step we can’t move on, adjust expectations & learn from what’s happened. After this realization we can begin to figure out more in-depth takeaways objectively. In pondering the situation further here are my discoveries about the workplace & my part in it…
Culture of Comparison
When the environment is one of placing blame you can cut the pressure with a knife. Blame wants, even demands some sort of revenge. This often promotes a sense of the “Lone Ranger” syndrome throughout the workplace. One that focuses on whoever screws up least gets ahead & is seen as being the most successful. This way of evaluating people is shortsighted, creates unwanted stress & promotes competition over collaboration. This is largely a product of transactional leadership stemming from an intense “management” focus toward people. When “blame avoidance” is commonplace employees develop coping mechanisms which lead to straying from who they really are & disconnectedness from the special things they bring to the enterprise. Second guessing your every move & looking over your shoulder creates emotional stress that degrades effectiveness. There is such a thing as too much success & can lead to over-confidence, complacency & destroy our self improvement. None of us knows everything & displaying humility no matter how much experience we have can go a long way.
Coaching Culture
Remember what Zig Ziglar says; “Failure is an event, not a person.” Creating a culture of collaboration takes intentional focus on leading people & managing stuff. There is a distinct difference & both are needed to be truly effective. When we focus on fixing the process & coaching our people everyone constantly learns, bureaucracy boundaries are lifted & things get done. We don’t manage a team into battle they deserve to be led! It takes courage to give away our control to teach others how to “run the business”. If our leaders are forced to assign someone a job they might not be well suited for, taking the responsibility to help them through it becomes paramount on our “to-do” list. Letting them flounder alone means we’ve failed them. We all face situations where we simply need a job done but when we aren’t engaged in their success reactionary management results. We hold them accountable only when things have gone wrong instead of working with them & having their back. Accountability has to go both ways to work effectively; re-directing when events don’t go quite as planned & figuring out who’s responsible for success large or small. Help more, judge less!
Transformational Leadership
We get the results of what we reward at work. If you encourage management above leadership you’ll get the environment you’ve promoted. You’ll get “led” by successful ladder climbers instead of authentic leaders. Kouzes & Posner in their book “The Leadership Challenge” state people primarily look for honesty, forward-looking, competency & inspiration from their leaders. These four concepts speak to the foundation of what it takes to transform an organization. They are what we need to do as leaders to take our companies past what the science of management says is possible. Honesty builds trust, forward-looking provides vision, competency commits us to learning the trade not just the tricks & inspiration engages everyone’s personal power position; the diversity of workforce advantage. This isn’t easy stuff, it’s complicated because people are involved not just machines, but it’s essential. These concepts also mean everyone is free to challenge processes, discuss ideas openly, take risks & re-define themselves everyday. Make mistakes faster, learn quicker, improve “you” genuinely!
Honesty without tact is cruelty!
When we deliver feedback of any kind it’s an extension of how we deal with relationships. The disappointments of yesterday can’t be more important than learning from what has happened & sacrificing the likelihood of success today. The essence of leadership is trust. To build it properly workers have to feel the feedback they are getting is “feeding forward” for positive development. We all want to be led by someone we can trust right? Nobody is perfect or free from hypocrisy. When we are surviving the workplace instead of engaging with it even simple things become difficult. Taking responsibility for the job we’ve been assigned comes first, then figuring out how we are going to get it done with our innate skills/abilities. Judging how someone has dealt with problems through your lens creates an adversarial relationship at best. We can’t make the decisions others would make we can only control how we adjust to changing conditions. If we want our people to do exactly as we would, we end up having to do everything ourselves & nobody learns anything. This is micro-management in reverse. Workers falsely feel as if you trust them but your second guessing makes them freeze instead of act.
In looking back on my situation, there were some definite situations I could have handled differently. To be fair, I didn’t actually lose my job, just eventually moved into a different role. The disappointment of not being able to share in the overall team’s success has been damaging in many ways personally (mainly credibility & competency). Had I done my best to keep leadership informed? I did work like a “lone ranger” in a sense feeling like everything rested on my shoulders. I didn’t take time to ask for help or inform my leaders of potential issues. I did seek out help from experts & learned a ton. The reverse mentoring I received was invaluable. Had I done my best to get work done through others? I was hesitant to give away too many tasks but what I did ask others to do they tackled wonderfully. I could have trusted them to do more! Did I do my best to develop positive relationships? I believe so with the exception of the leaders above me. With all that was on their plate I hadn’t given them timely communication about our challenges. The other internal/external relationships gained continue to serve us well & I’m proud to have been a small part of fostering them. Had I done my best to maintain dignity & grow? Initially I retreated inward, was angry at the way things were handled & became a distant disengaged employee. After some mentoring sessions I began to get back to my old self & learn from it all. Being disappointed is OK but resenting others actions is damaging. This is easier to say than do if we take our contributions seriously. Overall, I feel as if I took the high road to preserve my own dignity & have learned that rebuilding trust is very hard. However, it’s a 2-way street & this situation has fueled my personal leadership development most of all.
We all know the way work works is changing. Technology is making most management aspects easier to handle; big data, logistics, etc. This makes adapting our approach to leadership paramount to hire, retain, develop & coach our people. Great leadership can & does make the key difference in all facets of our organizations. Hopefully you never find yourself in the same predicament I found myself in. Hopefully your model of being the boss you want to have permeates where you work & creates the right environment for trust. I know each of us can do it & more importantly the people are counting on us to deliver!
All the Best,
Karl
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