What Really Happened? Reframing Workplace Letdowns

Think of a time you felt let down by a co-worker or partner. It could be a relationship with hierarchical reporting, or a relationship without hierarchy. 

What happened? Is your answer along the lines of “I needed something from this person and they didn’t provide it, or at least not sufficiently”? 

But what really happened? To explore this, think of a time you learned that a co-worker or partner felt let down by you. Presumably they felt like you did when you were let down – they needed something from you and you didn’t provide it, or at least not sufficiently. But in this case, you know a lot more about what really happened. 

Maybe you didn’t know they needed it.
Maybe you didn’t know the form or timing or quality in which they needed it.
Maybe you thought you knew, but you ended up being wrong.
Maybe under time constraint, and without ability to consult with this co-worker, you had to choose between competing priorities and you chose away from this one.

There is a very straightforward way of reducing these moments in your life, and I’m going to lay it out for you now.

Clarity is Hard to Timebox

Many times, we are pursuing certainty, when what we would benefit more from is a pursuit of clarity.

Clarity is one of the four paths Brook and I choose to focus on, as helpful to making work feel better. Gaining clarity on how and why you are making particular choices – around initiatives or hires or paces or indicators – helps to improve your choices over time. It builds cogency and synergy into your plans. It helps your learning.

Don’t Underthink It.

Knowing what we hope for in any given situation – or undertaking, or conversation, or relationship – plays a big role in whether that hope will be realized. And yet there is a common way of thinking about this which assumes it only applies to momentous, major stuff – there’s no need to be mindfully intentional about the run of the mill, moment to moment minutia of life. Even those with mindfulness or meditation practices may relegate the practice to non-working time.

In workplaces, this might look like carefully crafted values statements, formal retrospectives on projects, and shared agreements for meetings, but… no intentional practices around informal, in-the-moment ideation or feedback.

The Urgency Audit.

The organization may stop encouraging or rewarding needless urgency, but if it hasn’t mapped out and implemented the corresponding structural or process supports (resource allocation, incentives and performance metrics, accessibility supports, roles, workflows, policy) to enable this shift, it will either become less effective or it will continue operating in perpetual urgency.