Andrew is extremely knowledgeable and has been developing his mindfulness curriculum over the last few years.
His corporate mindfulness sessions emphasize focused attention training, awareness, managing negativity bias, and stress management. He really helps you get at the underpinnings of what mindfulness is, how it works in your brain, and how it can help you.
As a leader you're trying to effect change in your organization.
So, what do you do when you run across this:
This change is wrong. Why are you doing this thing that damages our culture? Before you make any changes you should have consulted the whole organization.
Let me say first, if you actually get this question, consider yourself lucky. It means people trust you and you have made some progress already. You also may not hear it. But many will be thinking it as you try to make changes and improvements.
You have change occurring in your company (who doesn't). This person is looking at it and their brain is processing the information. The first thing it is going to do is look for threats. Evolution has programmed us this way.
"Where is the bear?" this person's brain is saying, "If there's a bear around here. I don't want to get eaten."
Of course, there isn't a bear (hopefully) but our brain is going to look anyway. Specifically, this is being done by primitive parts of our brain that don't handle logical reasoning.
So, you can't reason with it. Not really.
Things you should do:
Listen
Respond with empathy
Give people space to process.
Encourage questions.
Things you shouldn't do:
Don't tolerate overt negativity or poison attitudes in group settings. Take people out of rooms if they seem to be going overboard.
Don't react strongly to concern or fear.
Don't go into authoritarian "Do it because I said so." mode.
Depending on the stage you're in, questioning can mostly be encouraged. Questions can make a policy or change better.
People do come around to positive intent, but they need time and you need to encourage them to consider things from different angles.
Your focus as a leader should be answering questions, not reacting strongly to negative emotions, and listening to concerns.
Now, when a manager or another leader sees this and says, "Why can't so-and-so assume positive intent?" You now know the answer - we're programmed not to.
If you really want to tackle this head on, a mindfulness program can take you far. It gets at the root of the fundamental issue and helps people understand their brains better.
They'll still experience negativity bias. You can't stop that. But they can be better prepared to handle it.
As leaders it is up to us to understand both the source of these challenges and help people become their best selves, including managing their responses to challenging situations.
It comes from a little brighter place, in the sense that it is about approaching your culture from a non-firing perspective (at least it shouldn't be your first step) and making changes to corporate culture.
I very much agree with this.
This is good to read to keep you focused on problem solving and solutions. Those solutions are out there in many cases.
If you are a leader you're going to have a decision to make and the rules aren't necessarily going to help you.
What do I mean? I mean this: when you run up against a personnel problem that has escalated you start to think about having to let the person go.
There are laws and organizational rules for all of this, and you need to follow them, whatever they are for you.
But, whatever rules you must follow, there will be plenty left to your discretion in many organizations. AND this is where we come to it: If you are a leader you're going to have a decision to make and the rules aren't necessarily going to help you.
So what should you do? My advice is to act like a human, and I will give you my guidelines of what that means:
Is anyone else doing anything? Sometimes complaining to you is all anyone's done. If that's the case you may (or you may not) owe it to the person in question to say or do something. Or you may want to make sure that others are saying something. You may need to sit in on a meeting with the employee to help.
Think about what can be done about it. There are times where remediation can help with a challenging or failing employee. Some times strong messaging, encouragement, support, or an improvement plan can help. If it can help do it.
Be aware of team impacts. When team members begin to struggle - through negative outlook, non-productive behaviors, incompetence, or material failure - you need to think about acting for the morale of your other employees. Leaving a negative or failing person in place creates drag on and possible resentment from those around the troubled person - they may not admit it all the time, but it does. Be aware of it. Don't wait to act until others have quit. This is something you have to weigh when thinking about number 2.
In my opinion, 3 outweighs all the others. But that doesn't mean you should overreact every time there is bump. But you must protect your best employees, and you certainly must protect your best employees from being impacted by those who are struggling.
How are you going to get the best from your best if you have someone around them with a negative attitude always slowing them down.
This isn't what the HR team or my boss at the time would have said. They would have said, "We let him go."
In fact, through the rest of these posts, I will use the same euphemisms because that's the world we live in.
But, since this one is about me specifically, I can tell it like it is or was.
I was not "let go." I was fired. And I'm not saying that about how it happened, or what someone else did to me.
I'm saying it because I deserved it. I had skill deficits. My attitude was not great. I wasn't making the company money. I didn't want to help with sales.
The company needed to make money, and they needed more adaptable employees with a better outlook. So they fired me. It's as simple as that.
I didn't see it that way right away of course. I was mad. Things had changed and it wasn't my fault. The new office didn't understand my value, blah, blah, blah.
All of it true up to a certain point, and all of it - all of it - ultimately beside the point.
Fortunately for me, I realized I had changes to make and I started to make those changes.
I started quickly, but I'm still not done. I never will be.
The world keeps going all the time. You can decide that you're done learning or pushing yourself if you want to, but that isn't going to help you stay competitive.
So we push ourselves, we learn new things, and we work to stay competitive. That was my choice in that moment and I'm glad I made it.
I wish that I could say that this was a mindful choice for me. I wish that I could say that I recognized the need to be proactive, stop blaming others, and move myself forward. That did come with time, and today I try to handle things that way. But the truth is that initially this was all driven by fear.
My skills weren't competitive, my attitude was problematic, and the labor market, even for developers, wasn't that great in 2002. I had to change and I had to change fast to stay competitive, so that's what I did.
Today I recognize this as a significant turning point that led me on to a lot of great opportunity I wouldn't have had without it. But it's hard to see it that way right away. Right away I was just fearful about my job prospects and started making changes that I felt would make me more competitive. And I took contract jobs at a significantly reduced rate to get some experience.
Today I can see it their way. But it took a long time. I understand that the best path to change and to managing these type of stressful, life-altering situations is with mindfulness and distance, though of course urgency remains important.
Fear can be a good source of urgency, but if you use fear to generate urgency you get all the stress and distrust that come along with it. Even if that stress and distrust are only pointed at yourself.
Looking back on it, I was fortunate to have had the upbringing I had. I think that is what made me react with a mostly 'can-do' attitude toward the challenges I had as a young person in my career. It wasn't mindfulness back then. It was Mom and Dad. Thanks Mom and Dad.
What does this tell us about letting someone go, if you are the person in the position of having to do that?
It tells you that it can be for the best. But almost no one will see it that way in the short-term.
It tells you that it isn't your place to tell anyone that. You absolutely are not in a position to tell someone "It's all for the best," because only they will be able to come to those realizations, and only on their own or with the help of good friends or family. And only in their own time. You can't rush that and you certainly aren't in a position to try.
And it tells you to be as kind as you can because inevitably this will be hard and scary for anyone impacted by your decision.
Jonathan Fries on .