There are days it’s important to soldier through the normal and there are days when you have to read the freaking room.
The penultimate class of our work Leadership Development Program is titled “Getting It Done” . . . it’s all about focus and productivity. I have people track their time and create ideal schedules and we talk about Gary Keller’s The One Thing and watch a Ted Talk about finding time for what’s important.
Going through the content the day before I felt energized by it — with my own reset I’ve leaned into habit work again to help float me through and I like talking about things like knocking down dominos and time blocking. But when we started the hour discussion . . . well, let me just state the obvious and say it’s pretty damn impossible to get people fired up about productivity and focus in the middle of goddamn pandemic.
I pivoted the discussion pretty quickly because it was clear this wasn’t what we needed right now. We could have tried and kept it surface-level and talked about how we get shit done. But that’s not the culture we’ve built or the kind of leadership we’re trying to model. Instead, I let myself get vulnerable and we kicked off a much more real conversation about how we were doing and the conflicts we were feeling managing external stress and trying to do well in our jobs and the ugly shame cycle it creates. In the end people said it was what they needed, though it certainly wasn’t what I had planned.
But sometimes you have to read the room and show up for people rather than asking people to show up for you agenda.
With Love,
Natalie