I’ve heard many people say the pandemic is our chance at a “Do-Over.”
Although I understand the sentiment, I disagree. That mindset seems backward.
Instead, I suggest this is our “Do Better” opportunity.
It’s not just semantics.
A ‘Do-Over’ mindset suggests that we erase away the past and begin anew.
But the risk of this mindset is that we approach the future from a place of fear, cynicism, and scarcity in an attempt to avoid the losses, hurts, heartaches and mistakes of the past.
A ‘Do Better’ mindset suggests that we build on and use our learnings, losses, and acknowledgments of what was and wasn’t working to get stronger.
It challenges us to accept our mistakes, take a hard look at our beliefs, be thoughtful about our decisions, and honest with the consequences of our actions.
It allows us to approach the future with courage and bravery. To use empathy to connect our differences and to extract meaning and knowledge from our adversities.
As we start to prepare for opening back up, I challenge you to think about how you can take something that has impacted so many people in so many different ways and hashtag#DoBetter in the future.
Why it’s time you put the “push through” mindset away.
If you are one of those people who can get focused quickly and maintain concentration even while distractions are competing for your attention, this article may not be for you.
If you are great at proactively scheduling breaks into your calendar and taking those breaks throughout the day, keep doing what you’re doing.
If on the other hand, you find your legs going numb from sitting too long, your eyes crossing from staring at your screen and you’ve moved your coffee maker onto your desk to save getting up throughout the day. And still find yourself exhausted and somehow further behind on your most crucial work, then this article is definitely for you.
Before COVID-19, the research arm of my company, BrainAMPED, uncovered some interesting data. We found that leaders who proactively build breaks into their day (and took them), self-assessed themselves as being more focused throughout the day, less tired at the end of the workday, and in the case of having a partner at home, felt more present with them outside of work hours.
None of that was surprising. The data on working in 90-minutes cycles followed by a break is well documented. What was most surprising was that the difference between leaders who were scored as being “good” and those being “great” by their manager, direct reports, and their partners at home, wasn’t dependent on the quantity or length of breaks. Instead, it was much more connected to the quality of the breakstaken throughout the day.
Our research shows that high quality breaks consistently have five key elements. I’ve organized them into an easy to remember mnemonic, we call them P.O.W.E.R. breaks. These are short (typically 5 minutes at the low end and an thirty minutes at the high end), reset breaks taken throughout the workday.
Let’s look at the key elements of a P.O.W.E.R. break:
P: Proactive Pause
By far, the biggest difference between those that took breaks throughout the day and those who didn’t was if they proactively scheduled them and diligently worked to keep them free, even when a request came in that would overlap.
When asked why people don’t take breaks throughout the day, even when they knew they are helpful, the most consistent answer was, “because I was too busy.” This is all a matter of brain science. The longer you work, the less time it will feel like you have to take a break. This is because your Pre-Frontal Cortex (PFC), the part of your brain that helps you keep things in perspective, fatigues when constantly engaged – and is less able to recognize when a break would be most beneficial.
The second key piece is that it is a “Pause.” This means you “pause” doing work. If you schedule a 15-minute break following two meetings and you fill that time checking email, you have proactively scheduled a work execution break – not a pause break. The goal is to give that hard-working PFC a break allowing it to function best and therefore serve you best.
O: Oxygenate
This element is about consciously slowing and deepening your breath to oxygenate your brain and body. If you’ve worked with me before, you know that “Oxygenate” is a part of many strategies.
The reason for this is simple – it is necessary. For many of you, much of the day feels fast-paced, pressure-filled and demanding. This stress kicks in the ‘fight-flight’ system resulting in quick, shallow breathing.
Slowing down and deepening your breath activates your vagus nerve. This nerve bundle is critical to turning off the ‘flight-flight’ stress response system. It instead activates the relaxation response, reducing your heart rate and blood pressure.
To build this into your reset break, take a minute or two and just focus on taking some slow breaths. When done throughout the day people report lower frequency of headaches, less muscle tension and more energy.
W: Water
As counter-intuitive as this sounds, one of the biggest contributors to dehydration is immobility. When you are sitting most of the day away, water delivery to the cells is slowed which in turn decreases the flow of waste particles out of those cells – dehydrating the system and increasing the feeling of fatigue.
This is often further exacerbated by attempting to get that ‘second wind’ by replacing a glass of water with a cup of coffee. Unfortunately, this has a tendency to further dehydrate you.
But it’s not just that you feel tired. Because your brain functions via electrical impulses between synapses, the brain requires water to serve as the conduit. When you are dehydrated the connection between these synapses slows down impacting on your ability to concentrate and think in a nimble way.
Simply adding in more water throughout the day will have a huge impact on energy, focus and attention.
E: Exercise
If your initial reaction is, “I don’t have time to exercise in the middle of the day!” rest assured, I am not suggesting that. In the context of a P.O.W.E.R. break, think of exercise as simply standing up, extending your limbs – moving your body.
However, if you want to amplify the impact of your breaks, add in some actual exercise that will increase your heart rate such as brisk walk. There is a reason people often say “I’m going for a walk to clear my head.” It is because the brain is optimized when we move. Focus on adding additional movement to your day, especially if you attend a lot of virtual meetings (because you don’t even need to walk to those ones!).
R: Re-evaluate
Now that you’ve proactively disengaged from work, taken some breaths, sipped some water, and moved your body, now it’s time to get back to work. Before diving back in, use that now rested PFC to re-evaluate your approach in terms of time, energy and attention. .
This can be done by asking some simple questions such as, is this a priority? Would a phone call be a better option? Who should I engage in this decision or communicate my decision to? Is this the most impactful work you could be doing at the moment? Is there a better way?
Who hasn’t finished a day and wondered where the day went and what was actually accomplished.
When busy, most people become reactive focusing on the moment. As a result, they end up prioritizing answer emails and focusing on low value, easy-to-complete tasks. This is inevitably at the cost of high-impact, high value, strategic work. A rested brain will question your choices, a tired brain will not.
The P.O.W.E.R. break strategy is simple. Executing on it may not be easy. Your day will fill up and it will feel like you don’t have time. Remember, these are exactly the times you need a break the most.
As someone who studies, writes, coaches and speaks about how to develop exceptional leaders, I have seen how a crisis can distinguish the best leaders from the rest.
Never are strong leaders needed more than amid crisis. This is also when it is hardest to be an exceptional leader.
In crisis is where the ‘rubber hits the road’ when it comes to leadership. This is when a leaders proclaimed values are tested. It is much easier to be a good leader when everything is going well. But that’s not when we need leadership. Leadership is tested in the tough times – when the tide goes out.
Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked. ~Warren Buffet
Earlier this week, I had a coaching client who was distraught about a decision that needed to be made about letting people go.
I have heard some of the most beautiful and compassionate stories of how companies have executed this hard decision. Unfortunately, I have also heard other examples that I’ve had a hard time understanding.
Today, I would like to say thank you to all of the leaders who’ve lost sleep trying to figure out how to save businesses and jobs;
Who are sacrificing just as much as they are asking their people to sacrifice;
Who showed up and engaged human to human, even though most were forced to communicate these difficult messages through screens;
Who made sure their people understood the contribution they had made to the company’s success;
Who pushed for their people to be able to say goodbye to colleagues and clients because the decision was due to circumstance not performance;
Ultimately, those who put people over process and did it with care, kindness, and compassion.
In crisis, the majority will over-focus on what needs to be done and under-focus on how they will do it.
It is these leaders, who focus on how to demonstrate their values, who take ownership of their impact, who will make the hard decisions but communicate them in a way where people feel seen, heard and valued; these are the leaders whose positive legacy will stay with us long after the crisis is behind us.
Following our call, my client realized he had been fighting the wrong battle – the decision that had to be made.
Accepting it was leadership of the business.
But his leadership was on full display when he started fighting for how he was going to communicate it – that is the leadership of people…even after the tide goes out!
You have some feedback for a direct report. It’s a conversation you should have had pre-coronavirus, but you put it off, hoping things would get better. Unfortunately, they didn’t. Now the frustration is building, but so has your compassion for the situation your employee is working within.
You don’t know if you should hold off having the conversation in an attempt to avoid adding to their stress levels or engage in the conversations now to keep things from getting worse.
After analyzing 360 Leadership Feedback Assessments of managers from over a dozen different professional service companies, I identified two of the most consistent traps well-intentioned leaders fall into when it comes to difficult conversations.
If these conversations weren’t challenging enough, now they are occurring over the phone and through video calls in the midst of a global pandemic. Unfortunately, this means that the consequences of these mistakes are often magnified and can have a lasting effect on the relationship long after people return to regular work conditions.
Tapping into your Emotional Intelligence (EQ) skills can help you avoid both traps.
EQ Trap #1: Not Managing Emotions.
No matter how experienced you are, initiating a performance or behavioral focused feedback conversation tends to fall into the “would rather avoid” category. The challenge with putting these off, even in the best of circumstances, is that frustrations fester the longer the conversation goes unaddressed.
Given that most people are working remotely at the moment, the opportunity to further avoid these conversations is now even greater. As a result, email after email is exchanged, call after call happens and these seemingly small frustrations start to compound.
Then one day, perhaps because you as the leader are stressed, or simply because your patience is low, a small frustration triggers an outsized negative response. Before you can catch yourself, you launch into your feedback conversation. Suddenly a potentially (difficult), but positive feedback conversation quickly morphs into a negative blowback conversation.
To truly understand the impact of each, let me clarify the differences.Feedback conversations are thoughtful conversations where the goal of the message is focused on the problems (i.e., you are late for meetings). The intention of the conversation is to lift performance by creating awareness, initiating learning, and creating positive, lasting change.
Blowback conversations are ones driven by the emotions felt in the moment, shifting the focus of the conversation to the recipient’s perceived character deficits (i.e., you are disrespectful). The intention of the conversation becomes tearing someone down by making them feel bad, guilty, or ashamed as a way of initiating change.
No one wants to admit to a blowback conversation. In fact, our data reveals that less than 10% of leaders acknowledge or are even aware they are engaging in blowback conversations. Interestingly, over half of the respondents said that they experienced performance conversations more like blowback than feedback (the recipients included direct reports, colleagues and vendors).
As negative as this sounds, it is understandable. When an employee, colleague, client or vendor breaks your trust, disappoints you, undermines you, questions your motives or performs poorly, it is understandable that you feel fed-up, angry and even resentful. Those emotions are not wrong or bad, nor are they even the problem.
The problem is the timing of the conversation in relation to the intensity of the expressed emotions.
The goal isn’t to remove emotions or side-stepping candid feedback. Instead, it is to recognize, understand and use emotions as important information to help you address the core issue in a more timely and productive way. A quote from Aristotle sums it up well:
“Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not easy.”
Engaging in low-emotion, touchpoint conversations earlier and more consistently will increase the likelihood of a more effective conversation. As a leader it is essential that you deal with your own emotions before involving someone else to ensure the conversation is thoughtfully, feedback-focused and not emotionally, blowback-driven.
EQ Trap #2: Not Managing the Message.
In other instances, unmanaged emotions aren’t the problem; unaddressed feedback is the problem.
Too often a leader initiates a feedback conversation, but they never actually articulate the feedback. Instead, they avoid the potentially emotionally triggering parts hopingthat the recipient figures it out. Although this may make conversations less difficult in the moment, it almost certainly creates misunderstandings later on.
As George Bernard Shaw is quoted as saying:
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
When leaders describe their frustrations of needing to have the same conversation multiple times without seeing the changes they are hoping for, I challenge them to check in and ask themselves if they have had the full conversation. Specifically, have they avoided any of the hard feedback in attempts to protect the relationship or lessen the risk of the other person getting upset?
Often the answer is yes, followed by an explanation to attempting to spare the feelings or minimize additional uncertainty in an already complex situation.
Although the intention is admirable, the impact of not clearly sharing feedback often has the exact opposite effect. Instead, this approach leaves the recipient to figure out what you meant and how to be successful in the future, which only adds to worry and stress.
Factor in remote environments and pandemic-driven anxiety, and unclear feedback has the potential to be totally misconstrued or taken much more negatively then the original feedback would have been if expressed in that moment.
I have heard clients, friends and family members recount the sleepless nights that followed a vague conversation with a boss leaving them to wonder and worrying if they were next to lose their jobs. This being the case even in situations where the likelihood of that occurring was considerably low.
Feedback may be hard to say in the moment but saying it once in a single conversation where the recipient is clear on where they stand and what you expect is easier than spreading it across multiple vague conversations – for both parties involved.
The reality of this pandemic is that emotions are running high and many difficult conversations will not end on a happy note. And yet, when you use your EQ to manage emotions and articulate the message, even the most difficult conversations can activate powerful, long-term trusting connections. It’s these relationships that will get us through and make us stronger on the other side.
On
my computer, you’ll find a folder called “File of Funnies.”
That
is what the actual file is called. As you might expect, this is where I keep
videos, pictures, memes, stories, and basically anything that I find funny.
Some are just for me and others I share.
If
you have ever been in one of my audiences, you know that I love to use a funny
video, first to make people smile but also because I believe that when we
laugh, we let the learning in.
It
turns out the science would back this up. Laughter raises our overall
well-being by:
1)
Increasing perspective and creativity.
2)
Decreasing stress hormones such as cortisol.
3)
Triggering the release of endorphins, our body’s natural feel-good chemicals.
In fact, my research on exceptional leaders and what differentiates the people that experience higher levels of Leadership Vitality versus Leadership Fatigue, (appropriate) humor and laughter are consistent contributors.
This makes sense as laughter inspires hope, it strengthens relationships, it is grounding in the midst of chaos, and it can lessen our burdens, even if only for a short time.
I’ve seen what a laugh can do. It can transform almost unbearable tears into something bearable, even hopeful. ~Bob Hope
I have been filling up my “File of Funnies” lately, not just because there is a lot of funny things being shared, but because with the accumulating impact of social isolating, I need to go into the file a little more often.
Every time I scroll through, I am reminded never to underestimate the power of humor.
