Hey Leaders!
As I write this, I’m sitting at my dining room table staring at a half-eaten breakfast and drinking the dregs of my coffee. I can’t use my office upstairs because I sprained my ankle three weeks ago after missing a step on our staircase while yelling at my husband about my recent “just in case” unemployment research. I’m praying that my dogs stay quiet, that my husband doesn’t wander into my Teams meeting background without a shirt on, and that I can pay attention long enough to make sure that I get the information I need without missing any deadlines.
We don’t have children. We’re lucky to have two well-paying jobs (for now). I’ve got a separate work space (barring sprained ankles and advice to not use stairs for a while) and I can work remotely easily. And I am drowning.
We’re all drowning. We’re afraid and we’re frustrated and our normal routines have been disrupted, and that doesn’t even touch on those who are sick, who have lost loved ones, or who are fighting on the front lines of this invisible enemy without proper protection.
If I could say one thing to leadership everywhere, it would be this: you have to acknowledge what is going on in the world. You cannot proceed as if things are normal. Nothing is normal.
Your employees will not speak up about this right now because we’re all scared of losing our jobs. There’s going to be an entire generation of people ready to sacrifice their mental and emotional well being to remain employed. We graduated in the Great Recession after promises of good jobs even with our college loans. We were told that if our SAT scores were high enough, that if we worked hard enough, that if we gave everything we had, that we could attain the American dream too. And now we’re throwing ourselves fully into our work because we’re terrified to lose the ground we’ve fought so hard to win. We’re going to flame out in this race of productivity.
(And none of that even touches on the privilege inherent in that experience. If we’re struggling with white collar jobs and middle class lives, what happens to everyone else? If this experience is on the better end of the spectrum, what does that say about us? We are lucky and part of that luck brings guilt that I’m not sure we know how to measure right now. Structural inequality is real and I worry about what ground is being lost right now. How does someone like me, safe for now, help? But that’s for another day and another blog.)
So you have to acknowledge what’s going on. Go beyond business as usual and ask about our families. Give us the emotional energy to see that you care. That we’re just not labor or a resource. Take time in our 1x1s to ask us how we’re feeling, how we’re doing, how we’re coping. Because the dirty secret is that if you treat us like people, you’ll get better work from us. It will be sustainable, healthy, productive levels of work instead of a mad race toward burnout.
None of this is a new perspective. I’ve been advocating for human leadership for a while now. It lingers in the background of my 1x1s with my team and stays on the tip of my tongue during every meeting I have. We are human. And our best, brightest, most brilliant ideas come from being nurtured and mentored like the complicated people that we are.