Give and Get Blog

A Simple Handbook to Living and Leading in Uncertain Times

Living and leading under emergency conditions is a skill set on its own. We quickly become aware of the gaps in our experiences when we face a situation where we have no choice but to navigate well, yet feel wholly unprepared to do so.

This crisis is different than a routine emergency. It’s existential. Potentially life-threatening. Global.

I’ve put together a simple guide to be helpful while we live under the dark shadows of COVID-19. It’s a compilation of information along with my own experiences that I want to share so that you are better able to deal with the transitions of loneliness, disruption and online life. It’s by no means complete, but a start.

Click here to download the Handbook.

Stay healthy and safe.

Image credit: Matthew Henry

Give and Get Blog

What To Do When You’re Overworked

“No one takes their foot off the pedal when they’re in the game.” 

Be forewarned, this idiom tells us, you need to go full tilt without letting up if you’re going to be successful, meet the deadline, or delight the client. As the belief goes, maybe those people who slow down “just don’t think like champions.”

That’s what a new client of mine said was the reason why he was exhausted at work. It resonated with me because my own work ethic used to be driven in this way. When I used to work intensively for years, I didn’t see the point of pausing or celebrating my milestones. It just slowed me down. When people around me insisted I take better care of myself or leave time for other interests beyond work, I felt they were distracting me from getting things done. My resistance seems nonsensical to me now, all this time later, but for many, this is still their reality.

For so many leaders, keeping your foot on the accelerator is an admonition not to slow down no matter what. Although giving up may not be a great idea, the belief in going without stopping can be dangerous. I’m not referring to the few who end up fully burned out and hospitalized, but there’s an agreement in the workplace that ceaseless change and churn will never stop, and we all know that it’s unsustainable. Just yesterday an executive told me that although it was crazy at work, he was going to take some time off to re-energize because “it never stops.” The charged-up velocity of change has many more people lamenting and asking themselves how much longer they can go on this way. The “slow season” is no longer. There’s only one season — it’s full-on.

Leaders often say that they don’t want to pull back because they want to model productivity. Ask yourself what you are really doing when you stay at work yet again dragging yourself from meeting to meeting with your head down, shoulders rounded, and maybe even shutting yourself away to “get work done” in your office. It’s easy for others to see when someone is working late most of the time and is tired and frustrated. Your emotional skills as a leader are what we know now as a social contagion. This means that if you are grouchy, showing stress and frustration, you’ll soon see it spread and reflected in the culture.

You don’t need an executive coach to tell you that this is real. You or someone you know probably lives this. The question on leaders’ minds is what to do about it. There are many good strategies to consider. Consider these three.

  1. If you’re feeling that you are doing too much, you most likely are. Capture your activities in an audit of your own making, documenting how and with whom you’re spending your time. I’ve observed many leaders discover that they have been over-involved with their team, for example. There’s an opportunity to pull back and nudge your rock stars forward without your full involvement. Too often, CEOs who are new to the role or leaders who have assembled a brand new team have let close stewarding go on for too long. Think about efficiencies for you while nurturing those around you. Where else can you elevate yourself to fly at the right altitude doing high-value work while providing new opportunities for others?
  2. How do you start your day? Do you set yourself up to be hooked by urgent matters? If you’re searching for business problems and urgent matters, as many do, you are looking to be helpful, but ask yourself if your work is really moving forward. Instead, begin with your strategy and then reverse engineer it so that your daily to-do list sets you up to achieve strategic objectives.

A client of mine was a fastidious list maker and then gave it up, priding herself that she could store her to-do’s in her head. It was one thing she started doing before she became a CEO for the first time. Then when she took a job as CEO, she continued to keep much in her head until she realized that she was prioritizing fighting other people’s fires. Without a written list she committed to of what she wanted to accomplish each week and day, she was easily taken off track.

She’s back at list-making now, and it didn’t take much effort to restart the daily habit. They say that our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction. It can be much easier than people imagine. Consider the productivity hacks that have worked for you and assess if it’s time to bring them back. Winging it just means you are receptive to whatever comes up. There’s not much strategic thinking in that.

  1. It’s necessary to give yourself a break, no matter how strong you enjoy your black coffee or how long you claim you can keep going on with little sleep. What often holds leaders back is their belief that they’re indispensable. Don’t believe your own good press. You wouldn’t tell your own team to postpone their vacations indefinitely, would you? Or encourage them to avoid organized social activities at work because it’s busy? Start planning so that you can absent yourself from a meeting or take the two-week vacation you are owed.

Perversely, if you don’t let up, you’re likely underperforming and dragging your people with you.

This article was first published here on Forbes.com. Photo credit: Matthew Henry.

Give and Get Blog

How To Stop Ruminating And Build Your Confidence As A Leader

While working with a senior leader I was surprised to learn that what was stopping her from taking on a new sizeable challenge at work was her incessant rumination about a situation that happened long ago. She was overthinking it, and it was undermining her confidence.

Rumination is the habit of hanging on to the negative things that happened in the past and retelling the story to yourself again and again. According to Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith in How Women Rise, women often blame themselves for what they did (or didn’t do) in the past, while men tend to show anger and lay blame on others. Rumination can be tough to detect in both women and men who do it because it operates as an internal monologue that we can’t hear. Most corporate leadership development programs don’t address rumination, but its impact on leaders is nevertheless real.

Why Do We Ruminate?

There are many reasons why we repeat unpleasant stories to ourselves. In the moment, we may think we’re doing something purposeful by extracting the learning from a situation by going over it repeatedly. Yet after a while, the learning stops, and the self-criticism can exact a toll on our confidence. Or we continue to go over the negative story because we don’t feel we should let ourselves off the hook for something we regret. We may believe it’s right to feel bad about ourselves.

Still others may not be aware that they’re ruminating. It’s understood that girls start to ruminate in adolescence, so it can be the air that they breathe when they reach adulthood. That’s the impact of perseverating over something negative.

In their book, Helgesen and Goldsmith offer amusing and memorable commentary on the meaning of the word “rumination.” Ruminants are cows, goats, deer and other animals that eat only plants and work hard to extract the protein from them. They predigest their food, and then they chew it before it’s finally digested. That’s essentially what we do when we return again and again to “chew the cud” of our negative stories: We turn them over and over in our minds.

In the case of my client, she was ruminating about a situation that happened six years ago when she was criticized at the start of her new role. During our coaching sessions, I encouraged her to catch herself each time the situation came to mind, and she learned that she did it far more often than she’d estimated. When I first asked her whether she ruminated about the situation, she said no, but as her awareness grew, she recognized that she did and expressed an interest to work on it so rumination would no longer restrain her.

With time, she came to see that the story was acting as a cautionary tale that impaired her ability to view herself objectively when faced with the decision of whether to accept a new assignment. She feared that she would disappoint herself and others from the very start and that history would repeat itself with the same players. Does that sound familiar?

Getting Unstuck

It’s easy to read about self-limiting behaviors and think that we can self-manage them by simply spotting the behaviors. But it takes resourcefulness and action to lead ourselves in a healthier direction. Men and women all ruminate to some degree, but there are strategies that can help stop the ruminating before it gets out of hand and hardens the way we think about ourselves and our capabilities.

There are many ingenious ways to stop the ruminating early to avoid getting stuck. Here are three:

1. Identify what’s at the root of the story.

We can blame ourselves even when it’s unjustified. Is the root of the story about being criticized or your quest for perfection? Figure out what’s really bothering you.

2. Consult others, especially those who were involved.

Others who are part of the story may be more objective about what happened than you are. There’s a time when I wish I had consulted others. Early in my consulting career, I conducted a workshop helping people identify the psychosocial barriers to medical rehabilitation. Some people pushed back loudly on the content. It wasn’t until years later that I was recognized by someone in that training session who told me how transformative the training had been. I was caught off guard by her praise. She picked up on my surprise and said that the resistance I received wasn’t noteworthy in their culture and that the resisters often challenged new information. I remember thinking about how much time I’d wasted because I’d been needlessly ruminating about the experience.

3. Talk it out to gain a new perspective.

Even though my client returned again and again to her story about being criticized and knew that she wasn’t to blame, it wasn’t until she talked it all out that she could view it from a new perspective and say that she was ready to let it go. And she did.

Rumination And Self-Reflection

Rumination and self-reflection can be confused with one another, but they’re different. Rumination is unproductive and occurs when you have involuntary thoughts that linger far longer than what’s needed to problem solve. As you ruminate, you’re likely adopting a fixed mindset about your potential where you come to believe that you’re either good at something or you aren’t and that there’s nothing you can do to develop yourself. The impact of ruminating often is taking fewer risks, so making safe decisions becomes the game.

Self-reflection is part of the thinking process where we adopt a growth mindset and appreciate that with more effort and practice, rather than withdrawal and feeling bad about ourselves, we can succeed. The impact of reflecting on our effectiveness is a healthy appetite for risk that’s often necessary for learning, creativity, general well-being and leadership.

This blog post is revised from the original, published by Forbes.com. Thank you to Matt Thornhill for the photo.