How’s your team holding up?
The Change Question: How’s your team holding up?
Your team might be a little more eloquent than I was as a teenager.
(“How was school?” “Good.” “How are you?” “Good.” “Everything OK?” “Mmmmm.”)
But maybe not much.
We’ve ritualized the check-in until, often enough, it’s become an empty exchange.
“How are you doing?”
“Well, you know.” “It’s nuts, right?” “Oh, sigh, fine I guess.” “Busy.” “WTF, but what can you do?”
And that’s (too often) the way you answer the question yourself.
And, what can you do?
Sometimes, not much. It’s worth saying that up front.
But bringing the questions — “How are they doing? And how am I doing?” to your attention, getting a little closer to the truth, and being more present to what’s there, is more helpful than you might suppose.
There are clues in their/your vibe. Compared to normal, do you experience …
Slow breath vs held breath
Calm vs frenetic
Supple vs brittle
Wide perspective vs narrowed focus
Still vs twitchy
Light vs heavy
If you were to ask some questions to learn more, to diagnose more specifically what might be going on, then perhaps …
What do you feel responsible for?
How would you want to shift your load?
What do you (still) have capacity for?
What would make things easier?
What’s hard right now?
You don’t have to fix it
The fear of tapping into those vibes and asking those questions is sometimes the anxiety, the dread, that you’ve got to make everything alright for everyone. That’s an impossible task, a crushing burden.
If you can do something, great.
As with all change, sometimes small moves can make a big difference.
But often, seeing and sharing what’s hard can bring its own measure of relief.
Pod Wisdom: The two change muscles every leader must develop
Dan Heath from the Change Signal episode "You’re Over-Flexing This Change Muscle":
"We have what I consider to be twin muscles. One bicep is the problem-solving bicep. That's the dumpster fire chasing bicep. And we work that thing all the time... And then we've got another bicep that's the success spotting and reproducing bicep that is just sad and weak and flaccid because of lack of use. But their power, their potential power is exactly the same."
Listen to the full episode with Dan Heath now
Dan Heath’s most recent book is Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working, one of my Change Signal Top Shelf books.
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The Last Word
“Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that’s the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.”
~ Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard
