When you're having a hard week
What to remember to find steadiness through the storm.
This has been a hard week for me, personally, as a leader.
Feeling overwhelmed and overburdened. Too much to do, not enough time to do it.
The air feels thicker to breathe. Gravity seems to have increased its pull.
This altitude is not foreign to me: As a founder and CEO over the past decade, I know that some weeks are harder than others.
I also know, having worked with tens of thousands of leaders, that difficulty is a consistent experience for all leaders.
Because of this, when things feel hard, I’m tempted to brush it aside and remind myself that “this is part of the job.” That inherently, every leadership path involves heaviness.
But, it doesn’t have to feel as heavy as it currently does for you and I.
Over the past decade, I’ve found there are a few practices most useful to me that help lighten my load – things I’ve been leaning into this very week! – that I’d love to share with you.
These simple practices have gotten me through the hardest of times, and I hope they do the same for you.
A small but important question
I was chatting with a fellow CEO of a 70-person organization, recently, who was going through a hard time. Stressed and overworked, she was trying to do everything possible to get her team to perform at a high level and meet their goals, but it felt like sand slipping between her fingers.
It wasn’t until I asked her a small but important question that she realized a few things:
She was overly focused on the minutia of execution rather than facilitating the team itself to do its best work.
She was spending more time worrying about her team’s mistakes and fixing the work, rather than addressing root cause issues of those mistakes in the first place.
She relished her “comfort zone” of overseeing the execution of a specific team – but it meant that no one in the organization was thinking about how work progress could be improved or accelerated on a system-wide level, between teams.
What was the question I’d asked that helped her realize this?
The question was this:
“What is your ultimate role, as a leader?”
In essence, she’d forgotten her true role as a leader: To create an environment for her team to be successful.
Not to do all the work of her team, herself. But to enable her team to do their best work. She needed to step back, and start communicating expectations more clearly and creating stronger structures of accountability, rather than trying to patch up all the work herself.
To you and me as outsiders, it may feel like a fairly obvious insight. But remember how it feels to be engulfed in the haze of the work day-to-day: This leader was heads down trying to hit crucial milestones. Desperately trying to get the team to pick up the pace. Company revenues and reputation were on the line.
The question, “What is my ultimate role as a leader?” can seem luxurious to ask when so many challenges are stacked against you.
But remember how helpful it can be to ask, as you navigate those very challenges at hand.
You can’t control the colors
Do you ever find yourself longing for “the good ol’ days”? When things were calmer, smoother, and just easier?
I worked with a senior leader previously who expressed his nostalgia for when “things seemed to be going right.”
Now, for him, nothing seemed to be going right… And he was frustrated. Frustrated that things weren’t what they were, frustrated by his own hand in them. The guilt, the sadness, the anger, piled up inside him.
It’s understandable. You feel a meaningful sense of loss because of “what was.”
Mourning that loss is necessary and helpful.
Yet, what is unhelpful is holding on to the idea that you “need to get back” to that past place. To recapture and make things exactly as they once were.
It’s as futile as a sunset to recreate itself exactly in all its splendor.
Accept the reality that you don’t get to control the colors of the sky. And while you’d prefer certain colors over others, fixating on the fact they’re not there anymore does not increase the likeliness of their return.
The quicker that you can embrace current reality – to let the colors be what they are – the less power it holds over you.
Less energy can then be spent on “what was,” and the more energy can be spent on “what could be.”
Add to the margin
Imagine a sheet a paper.
One of those lined notebook papers you used back in school with blue horizontal traces – and those faint red margins running vertically along the side.
You start writing something down on that sheet of paper. You’re confident it will all fit on the page.
As you approach the right-hand side of the page, you find yourself running out of space, and so you tell yourself, “I’ll write in the margin. No big deal.”
Now that you’re using the margin, you add more and more words as you go….
But as you’re nearing the bottom of the page, you notice everything might not all fit. All your margins have been used. You now have no room to finish your writing.
There’s nowhere to go.
As leaders, we have been writing in the margins for a very long time.
We initially told ourselves it’s “no big deal” to add more responsibilities to our plate, to push ourselves harder and harder…
Now you’ve reached the end of the page.
While we are resilient and determined as leaders, if there’s no more room – if there is no margin – there is truly nowhere to go.
If we’ve been writing in the margins for a long time, it’s time to rebuild them in.
Rather than working your normal full day til 6PM, call your day in early at 4PM.
Rather than spending the 15 minutes between meetings answering emails, take that time to step outside and take a few deep breaths, or make yourself some tea.
You don’t need to push yourself to the edge, when you’re at the edge already.
Add to the margin. There’s nowhere else to go if you don’t.
You’re not alone in this.
In working with thousands of leaders over the past decade, I can tell you every leader has hit troughs of difficulty and frustration.
It’s okay that things are hard. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s merely the situation you’re facing, at this moment in time. And many others are facing a version of it, themselves….
Including myself! :-)
In many ways, I wrote this piece for myself. I hope you find this piece as useful as I did writing it.
On the journey with you,
-Claire
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