1/ Burnout. Boredom. Grief. Languishing. Grace. The pandemic gave us a new vocab at work & I've been thinking about how to turn crisis-forged ideas into lasting intuition.
Here's a pandemic retro 🧵 on my lived experience as a manager who cares about team #wellness
2/ Lesson 1: Name it to tame it 💯
The biggest leadership moments I saw last year were when leaders named their emotions. Feeling sorry about missing seeing coworkers? That's GRIEF: the sorrow felt from a sense of loss.
3/ Asking "What is the name for what you are feeling about this project?" is a powerful 1:1 convo tool for managers.
4/ Lesson 2: Burnout, Boredom, and Flow 🌄
Our jobs were upended & everyone was pushed out of their flow state into burnout or boredom territory. I love asking colleagues to place how they feel on this simple chart:
5/ I find 40% of team is in the flow on average. 20% in challenge territory and 20% boredom danger - both of those require plans to fix. A final 20% is in challenge but that's OK - they are finding their flow on a stretch project. Here's a table on action plan:
6/ Lesson 3: Find your First Team 🤗
First Team is the people at work you can be yourself around. Joke. Make mistakes. Share news (important and irreverent). @TedLasso's coaching staff is a first team.
7/ I used to think finding a First Team was a trivial afterthought in my work life; I now know it's the most important part.
8/ Lesson 4: Stress Dashboard 📊
I have a new relationship with stress as a result of the pandemic. I used to think stress was a binary state – either an “I’m stressed” or “I’m not stressed” state.
9/ Instead, I realize it’s more like the barnacles that build upon the underside of a ship that’s been at sea a long while. It creeps up on you slowly and builds on itself.
10/ Let me reframe stress management for you. It's not about starting with the hard-to-find causes of stress after you are already maxed out. It's about creating early warning signals using the easy-to-measure symptoms of stress, like this:
11/ It comes down to this:
12/ Lesson 5: Set boundaries 🧱
This damn pandemic changed our equilibrium overnight, forcing us to relearn where our mental limits and stores of energy were - changing the wings on the plane while it was still flying.
13/ If it helps, here the new set of boundaries I created over the past year or so. I didn't let the job define my boundaries, I optimized for my own peak performance and fit the job to match.
14/ I think if we do this right, we make ourselves more resilient, empathetic, gracious, and more. A silver lining of sorts.
More thoughts on all this: mindthebeet.com/pandemicretro
15/ 🙏 Thanks for reading! Share out your own thoughts on managing through all this and what works/doesn't for team wellness.
16/ My wife @helenharmetz and I publish thoughts like this every Sunday morning on leadership, career, product management, and life. Subscribe! blog.mindthebeet.com/about
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