Managers: let’s stop pretending it’s business as usual. Instead of telling your team “get back to work,” try, “here’s what’s making it hard for me to focus. How about you?”
It’s challenging to be a manager, team lead, or empathic colleague right now. Even as the pandemic seems to be slowly loosening its grip, the impacts of the last year are going to be long-lasting, especially on people’s mental and emotional states.
How can you discuss the grief, losses, and stresses of the last year, which everyone has experienced differently, in a way that’s helpful and supportive? You may think it will upset your colleagues if you raise more “emotional” topics. By avoiding them, though, you’re implicitly sending two messages: first, you don’t care about your people, and second, you’re ignoring them. You are also missing a key opportunity to connect and build trust with your teammates.
Gianpiero Petriglieri, a professor and psychiatrist, offers practical guidance for exactly how to normalize talking about the most abnormal year:
“First, acknowledge that people will be anxious, vulnerable, and disoriented — and so are you. Don’t just pretend that things are normal: Share your experience, invite people to share theirs, and make that behavior normal. Even just sharing what you miss most of your old working days at the office, and how you are struggling to learn how to deal with it, might be liberating.
Second, right after sympathy, offer truth. Here is the data. Here is what we are dealing with right now. Take questions. It will soothe people’s anxiety to be heard, even if you don’t have answers to their queries. If it is hard to make long-term predictions, better not make any. Sharing your company monthly revenues and your plans to deal with a steep drop, for example, will be more honest and useful than giving people a pep talk about how bright the next quarter will be.
Third, simplify the work. Make it more manageable. When we are anxious and remote, it helps to focus on clear and concrete goals, to know what is expected and what is enough. Such clarity is ever more important as people return to the office, but not to old normality. Knowing where, when, and how long people are expected to work, for example, is grounding. Grief hijacks the imagination, filling it with catastrophic projections. Just like mourners can find some comfort focusing on their breath, a meal, or regular exercise, there is value in manageable work. Grief erases our sense of agency, and work can help restore it.
All of these actions help to ground your colleagues in reality and orient them to the present. That is the best work can offer: Reminding us that we are here for now. We often tell those who manage and lead to portray confidence, spark the imagination, and focus on the future. That future orientation is ‘all well and good,’ [psychotherapist Bill] Cornell cautions, ‘but it’s difficult when you are sitting with people who have no idea what next week will be like, let alone the future.’
I do not mean to say, with all this, that we need to just get on with an ill-defined ‘new normal.’ That would be like telling those who have lost a loved one that they ‘will get over it.’ We never do. But staying in the present, focusing on the reality of uncertainty and remoteness, can keep us going and connected as we learn to live with loss and maybe, slowly, grow through it.
For managers to make room for loss, however, they must brave a loss of their own: of principles and prescriptions that have long oriented them. By turning from the future to the present, from a sparked imagination to a held heart, from confidence to care, a manager can help us regain our footing and, slowly, some hope…If it reminds us that we need space to share and soothe our grief, remoteness might even bring us closer. That might be a hopeful ending for a year of loss.”
