The only way forward is through

We all have our emotional hot buttons; things that throw us off balance and cause immediate, often significant reactions. Maybe it’s when someone interrupts you, is late for the meeting again, or sends you a late-night email with the expectation of a speedy response. We know from experience these are not our best leadership moments – we lose empathy for others and struggle to make decisions – and yet, we find ourselves here time and time again.

It helps to understand why we – and we really mean all of us – react this way. The good news is you’re not “just over-reacting.” Our capacity to think clearly and act wisely is seriously impaired when the forebrain – our rational, adult mind – is hijacked by our limbic system. The amygdala, a part of the limbic system that registers threat and generates fear, evokes immediate physiological responses such as increased heart rate and more blood flow to the muscles. All of this happens almost instantly, long before our cortex can access more sensory information and determine whether or not the threat is “real.”

In terms of threat level, most of the time, we are not about to become someone’s lunch. The real threat is actually inside us (“the call is coming from inside the house!”). The amygdala is not only responsible for our fight/flight/freeze response, it also stores and surfaces the personal memories and stories associated with emotional events of our past, making the same incident unremarkable to one person and inflammatory to another.

Picture this: a manager at work uses a disrespectful tone when delivering feedback to their junior reports. Overhearing this exchange, you’re incensed. The less self-aware you charges back to your desk, furious on behalf of the team, and starts an email to the leader berating their management style. The junior reports, meanwhile, have already moved on. They heard direct and focused feedback. With personal reflection and greater self-awareness, you uncover that one of the norms in your childhood home was to respect authority, but to also demand it in return. You’re able to see that this scenario has caused outsized reactions, or “triggering,” in both your personal and professional realms for many years since.

Left unattended, these reactions become the norm, and our resilience begins to dwindle, fast. Which, at its worst, creates a continuous loop of cortisol and a fast track to burn out, and at best, closes us to new opportunities and personal growth.

So what can leaders do to build self-management skills and support their resilience over the long-haul?

Balancing personal vs professional

Now that we’ve had some time to adjust to a new way of working, we find ourselves in various stages of acceptance and affliction. By now, many organizations have undergone initial shock and reaction, but questions loom large about how long this will last and what the future holds.

Before the pandemic, many of us felt we had to carry personal burdens alone and keep them private from our teams. Given the widespread impact of crisis, there is a sense of shared struggle, and our personal lives are bleeding into the professional world.

In periods of intense change, it’s not necessary or sustainable to shy away from the challenges your team is facing. We all need to feel cared for holistically to feel supported and motivated at work.

Whether you have already shared your personal struggles, or are trying to find better ways to support your team, now is the time to lead with vulnerability. “Your openness gives others permission to share,” says Laura Gale, Coach, Facilitator and Coach for ThinkHuman. “Responsibly sharing what you feel (without putting it on the team to hold) makes space for others to express worries, uncertainty, hopes, challenges, and ideas and allows for safety, connection, and innovation.”

Encourage your team to share their experiences, but keep in mind that this will be harder for some individuals. Existing workplace power dynamics mean it’s up to managers to pave the way. When leaders share their own vulnerability, it opens the door to the entire team. While you likely won’t share every detail of your personal ups and downs, sharing parts of your own struggle opens the door for teammates to do the same.

Creating a safe space

“If you don’t invest in delivering on your culture, then it means nothing,” says Didier Elzinga, CEO of Culture Amp. “And I can guarantee you that the companies that will be standing on the other side, their culture is the reason why. Their culture is the thing that will make them successful during this time,”

Traditionally, work hasn’t been seen as an appropriate space to discuss personal challenges or show vulnerability. So much about the professional world is about how you present yourself, whether that’s through how you dress, the contents of your resumé, or the small talk you make. Over the years, organizations have slowly invited their teams to bring their whole selves to work, but individuals still tend to keep their very personal lives to themselves.

With the sudden shift to crisis management, people are forced to balance work, childcare, grief, physical illness, and more. As a result, the boundaries between the personal and professional worlds naturally starts to blur. During challenging times leaders should be empowered and encouraged to create safe spaces to talk through personal challenges with their teams. “Your role as a leader is to set the emotional weather for your team,” says Meredith Haberfeld, Founder and CEO of ThinkHuman. “That requires being real and responsible for your energetic wake (how you leave people feeling).”

People won’t feel comfortable being vulnerable unless they see their leaders do the same. Lead by example and create a safe space for your employees to share their burden with the team. Make sure this is done without any expectation of fixing other people’s problems, but highlight that you’re also struggling and can empathize with them and cheer them on.

Aubrey Blanche, Director of Equitable Design & Impact at Culture Amp, shares her personal approach to leading with vulnerability: “as a leader, you need to make it clear that you’re not asking for help from your direct reports. Instead, you can frame it as ‘here's the struggle I am having as a human being.”

This shows your team that if they’re struggling, you understand what that feels like. A lot of the work here is normalizing individual struggling. Simply creating space for peers to share what they’re working through and cheering them on goes a long way.”

Leading through uncertainty

“As a leader, when you sit down and question, ‘what do I have to do?’ the most important thing in a crisis is communication. Our people don’t need us to be heroes, but they need us to show up,” says Didier.

Whether your organization has experienced layoffs, is considering structural changes, or seems to be in the clear, people around the world are feeling unsettled and uncertain. As nations hurry to find a solution, there are constant periods of ebb and flow. Things will get better and worse in waves, and it’s important to keep this in mind when managing a team. Not everyone will experience the same challenges at the same time, and the future could impact different individuals in very different ways.

It’s hard to know exactly what the future will look like and what kind of challenges might present themselves. As a leader, now is the time to truly be human with your team. Stay attuned to the fears and uncertainties of different individuals – don’t shy away from difficult conversations.

“We naturally want to ease the burden for team members,” says James Rosseau Sr., Executive Coach at ThinkHuman, “but people are often stronger than we give them credit for and ultimately appreciate you respecting their need for information.” You may not have the answers or even the ability to assuage fears, but you can make your team feel heard and supported.

At the emergence of COVID-19, our founder and CEO Meredith Haberfeld, was personally impacted by the unfolding crisis. As ironic as it may seem, being a leadership and human development expert does not make people infallible from leadership breakdowns and insights. After all, even experts are humans first.

With the intention to alleviate the pressure on others created by uncertainty and fear, Meredith detached from her own needs and tried to absorb the pressure of the team. With the ultimate intention to ensure her team and community were shielded, she failed to take care of herself.

As an unintended result of Meredith’s blindspot, ThinkHuman team members felt pulled in different directions, made decisions without taking time to think things through, and even experienced a conflict on a call due to collective rising stress levels. Two people on the team gave Meredith feedback about her impact, prompting her to reflect on how she was taking care of herself.

“I joined a regular peer call with a group of other CEOs and shared how pulled I was feeling. When I shared that experience with the rest of the group, four out of the five other CEO’s were having the same experience,” says Meredith.

Meredith had an insight: she had been focussed on paring down the goals of others but had instead taken them on herself. Once she saw this reflected in other CEO’s, she saw it in herself and decided to deprioritize the goals of others. Shortly after, the ThinkHuman team experienced a restored sense of groundedness and focus. By checking in on her own needs first she was able to lead others. Meredith engaged in a process known as “leading self.”

What is “leading self”?

Leading self is the utilization of yourself as an instrument to inspire change in those around you. It starts with an honest exploration of all parts of yourself that influence how you show up, support, react, and lead others. Think of leading self as the catalyst for creating beauty, hope, and inspiration for your team by starting with yourself.

Leading self is a call to action to revamp how leaders show up for their team and it is at the core of ThinkHuman’s leadership philosophy. The concept of “Leadership of Self” was popularized by Charles Manz in 1983, who defined it as an “inward process of creating self direction to accomplish our external goals.”

Leading self embodies taking charge of the narrative leaders tell themselves about a challenging experience, such as how they choose to describe a crisis in their mind right before they react or respond to it. By taking charge of a crisis narrative, leaders take control of the personal impact it has on themselves enabling them to more intentionally lead themselves and their team through it.

How to lead with self

1. Start with honest self-reflection

   To start leading self, an honest self-reflection is vital. This embodies a non-judgemental observation of your actions, impact, character, and motives. It is the introspective process of getting to know yourself better in that moment in order to lead yourself better in that moment.

   To start, take time for yourself and reflect on these questions:

   • What are the assumptions, actions or dynamics that are draining or filling you?

   • Who are the people on your team who can help you think that through?

   • What are the routines that you need to thrive?

   • What do you need to deprioritize to keep the boat afloat?

   These questions offer a way to start the process of getting to know yourself as a means of understanding yourself and the way you may be impacting your team. The answers to these questions unearth things a leader should hold on to as well as let go of to more effectively lead themselves and others.

2. Define your North Star

   The second part of leading self is the creation of a North Star. This is a leader’s vision, or intention, for who they will be when presented with a challenge. ThinkHuman conceptualizes a guiding intention as a North Star because the North Star is the only star in the constellation that remains stationary. This makes it a reliable source of guidance for travellers. Let the intention you set for yourself be the guiding source that motivates and grounds how you respond to crisis.

   To determine what your North Star is, imagine that it is six months to a year from now and you write a description of who you have been during this time. What kind of description would make you feel proud? The steps you take to get to that description is following your North Star.

3. Swim toward the sharks

   When decided, a North Star prepares leaders for a transformative part of leading self: the ability to face challenges with boldness and courage.

   Did you know that when a swimmer encounters a shark, the safest thing to do is approach them head on? Surprisingly enough, when you swim perpendicular to a shark, they are triggered to attack. When you swim right at them, however, they are disarmed. When you have a clear vision, or North Star, of who you want to be remembered as during a crisis, you are empowered to swim directly at the shark. With your North Star illuminating the way, swimming toward the sharks is finding where you’re shrinking, and a first step you can take in that direction.

   “Bring all of you into the light to illuminate the way for your people. The foundation of today is to show all of yourself as we navigate these times together.”

   Meredith Haberfield

   Founder and CEO of ThinkHuman

   Leading self creates permission for leaders to be compassionate towards themselves, enabling deeper relationships with their team and an increased ability to effectively lead. Through leading self, we become more connected to who we would like to be during times of crisis, which ultimately impacts how we lead ourselves and our teams through it.

Written by Jocelin McGovern and Fatma Ghedira