The suicide rate among youths in Hong Kong aged 15 to 24 years doubled in 2022 compared to 2014, according to the Hong Kong Jockey Club Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at The University of Hong Kong (HKU). Meanwhile, the Mental Health Association of Hong Kong found in 2022 that close to half of the students aged 18 to 25 years had varying degrees of depression that required medical consultation. However, only one-third of students surveyed by the Chinese YMCA of Hong Kong expressed a willingness to seek help for their mental health issues. 

Worldwide, almost one billion people live with a mental health condition that interferes with all aspects of life and causes disabilities or death. 

To raise awareness of mental health issues and promote efforts to support mental well-being, World Mental Health Day is celebrated every year on 10 October. Coinciding with this year’s World Mental Health Day, FSI’s Impact Lab Course partnered with City Mental Health Alliance Hong Kong (CMHA HK) to host the “Developing a Resilient Mindset for Success” workshop, led by Hilleke van Osch, CMHA HK’s Managing Director with 15 years of experience in health program management and evaluation. 

As an alliance of businesses with a shared mission to create a mentally healthy workplace, CMHA HK is a not-for-profit membership organization that collaborates with mental health experts and partner organizations to protect and support positive mental health for people. A former partner company of the Impact Lab Course, CMHA HK regularly publishes research reports on employee wellbeing and offers training to increase mental health literacy among leaders, managers, and general employees.

Where Stress Comes From

To begin the workshop, Hilleke asked the participants to input on Mentimeter the words that came to mind when they thought about mental health. 

“Five years ago, the words were very negative,” said Hilleke when looking at the word cloud on the screen. “Most of those you’ve written today are positive: ‘confidence’, ‘therapists’, ‘relaxing’. I think that’s a really lovely thing for someone like me who works in this field.” 

However, the word with the highest appearance was still “stress”, which was the main topic of the day. 

“Sometimes, it’s the stress and how you deal with it that teaches you things and makes you realize you can do things. But if you let stress build up too much, you can be less able to deal with the next thing that comes along,” said Hilleke about the spectrum ranging from “good mental health” to “mental ill-health”, with “coping” and “in need of support” in between.

Hilleke’s next question for participants was: “What stressors have had a negative impact on you over the last two months?” The responses were mainly academic and career concerns, family issues and other interpersonal relationships, and managing expectations. 

“It’s interesting that many of you mention family, friends, and relationships. You’re at the age where you establish relationships, so it’s good to see that you’re valuing these things in life. It reflects the stage of life you’re in, and that you’ve got full lives that are full of people,” Hilleke noted. 

Sharing Personal Experiences

The workshop was interactive, and participants had many chances to share their personal experiences with stress. Sharon Feng, a final-year student working with Migrasia, shared, “When I’m stressed, I make a schedule and list out what I need to do. Seeing the list gives me a sense of control. I also talk to people I trust, like my parents, about the tasks I struggle with. After a detailed conversation with them, I feel much better.”

Kathleen Francisca Liem, a student working with Foundation for Shared Impact, added, “My primary source of stress comes from my commitments, both extracurricular and academic. The way I deal with them is to list down all that I have to do within categories like academics or leadership roles, because sometimes I get overwhelmed.”

Hilleke also shared her own struggles: “My biggest source of stress recently has been juggling people’s expectations and demands while trying not to take it personally. I try to see it from their perspective rather than just throwing my hands up in the air and saying, ‘This is ridiculous!’ We’re all just trying to navigate the pressures of meeting someone’s expectations.”

From Classroom to the Workplace

After a brief guided breathing exercise, the discussion shifted to workplaces and the imposter syndrome students may face when transitioning from school to work. Imposter syndrome is characterized by feelings of inadequacy and a lack of belonging, particularly when people step into the unknown, feeling unconfident in their abilities. 

A student offered his experience from a recent internship, “The level of burden is different compared to university. For example, if I do badly on an assignment, I’m the one that fails. At work, other teammates have to take over the work I did not do or cover up my mistakes.”

To that, Hilleke offered her advice: “Stay authentic to yourself and be realistic in what you can do. Don’t try to oversell yourself. Trying to overcompensate for your imposter syndrome only undermines you more. Find what you can do and do it well, and build yourself up from there.”

But how do we do that? Hilleke said the key to supporting your mental health is to build resilience: “Keep trying, but take a break. A lot of literature around resilience shows that resting is as important as pushing. Just pushing yourself on and on won’t get you nearly as far as if you were to stop for a rest.”

She introduced the participants to the PERMA method, which stands for positive emotion, engagement, relationship, meaning, and accomplishment. PERMA is a tool to help with self-care, and the five factors can be integrated into our daily lives to support our mental health. 

 An Essential Workshop for Students and Supervisors

“Through today’s workshop, I learned to recognize my stress triggers,” said Kim Dong Woo, a fourth-year student, after the workshop. “By knowing the triggers and reasons for my stress, I believe I can now find solutions to solve my stress much faster. I would like to start by applying the self-care plan utilizing the PERMA examples discussed today. I want to especially focus on the positive emotions first, as I believe it is the most important aspect among PERMA.”

Sumichhya Gurung, Senior Program Manager at EmpowerU, said that as a supervisor in the Impact Lab Course, she tries to be more mindful about the stress students might deal with in their personal lives. “I will pay more attention to checking in with our interns on a casual basis. I will also create a safe space for our interns to communicate with us if they are dealing with personal challenges, and see if there are resources and professionals to whom I can direct them,” she said.

Hilleke said she loved the unexpected discussions that sparked from participants’ sharing throughout the session. “The conversations give me an idea of what resonates with people. They highlight the areas that are important to people, where I can potentially focus my attention on when I talk to people again on this topic.” 

The last piece of advice she offered was this: “Everyone has to find their own thing. For me, that’s trail running and socializing with friends. Having a laugh with friends is definitely really important, but you need something physical too. You’ve got to give your body something as well. And lastly, plenty of sleep. Sleep is so important.”

If you or someone you know is struggling to cope with overwhelming negative thoughts and feelings, contact the mental health support hotline on Mind HK’s website.

*This blog post was drafted by Hyewon Lee, Communications and Marketing intern at the Foundation for Shared Impact (FSI) during the Fall 2024 semester of the Impact Lab Course.*

The post Developing a Resilient Mind for Success: Impact Lab’s World Mental Health Day Workshop appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

The post The Leader as Coach appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

The post How to set up a healthy co-founder relationship appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

I’m best known for being a couples therapist, for giving talks and writing about “romantic” topics, from sex and infidelity to intimacy and loss. At first glance, that may not seem relevant to tech entrepreneurs building the next big startup.

But ultimately, I work with pairs, in all their forms. And while marriages are complicated, business partnerships are even more so. The added pressures of courting investors, managing employees, speaking to the public and meeting the bottom-line add further strain to multilayered dynamics.

Few co-founder relationships survive the pressure  — research shows that 65% of startups fail because of interpersonal tensions within the founding team. That’s why right alongside my therapy practice, I serve as something of a Chief Relationship Officer for companies and startups around the world. When they need to have a difficult conversation or a relationship tune-up in the corner office, they call me, just as a couple in the midst of a marital crisis might.

Over the past few decades, I’ve seen common themes across my clients: We covet authenticity, belonging, trust, empathy and transparency, at the office and at home. We want a partner who will help us become the best version of ourselves, whether we’re building a business or forging a life together. And, for pairs of all types, some days it feels incredibly hard to achieve all of this.

Quality relationships are central to our quality of life and our business success. Yet our relational skills often struggle to keep up with rising expectations. That is why in my new podcast “How’s Work?” I meet with pairs from startups, corporations and family businesses to better understand the invisible forces that shape their connections — and consequently, their conflicts.

In addition to delving into intergenerational challenges, gender roles and remote work, we focus heavily on recurring conflicts and communication failures between co-founders, whether it’s a pair of entrepreneurs dealing with scar tissue from previous “breakups” or spouses trying to steel themselves against the ups and downs of startup life.

In this article, I’ll share some of my favorite techniques for getting to the root of recurring disagreements and tactics for navigating conflict in the heat of the moment.

Of course, not every team has gotten into well-worn grooves of disagreement just yet. If you’re trying to get to know a potential co-founder or are looking to fortify a new partnership from the start, download my guide below. I’ll share questions to ask each other and topics to think about before you team up with a friend or pair up with a perfect stranger.

CO-FOUNDER CONFLICTS: THE COVERT AND THE OVERT

Every relational impasse has covert and overt layers. That’s why when a pair of co-founders is stuck or in crisis, I often ask them to tell me about their last fight. But I’m not actually listening for the specific quarrels — I’m listening for howthey fight and what it is that they trigger in each other. In many ways, the topics they’re fighting over don’t matter. What I’m looking for is the covert: What’s the hidden issue?

What are you really upset about? What does it represent for you? Where else have you experienced this? Questions like these allow us to dive into the bigger, meatier topics, instead of staying trapped in the small, everyday arguments.

Our overt arguments don’t matter as much as the broader themes that are underneath those plotlines. Tune out the noise of what you’re bickering over and dig deeper to find out what’s going on underneath the surface.

The two people in the room are not the only people involved in the conflict. Each of us comes to work with an unofficial relationship resume. We carry the histories of our past work relationships, as well as the ones that we grew up with at home.

If the fight is about who is putting in more effort, that might be rooted in the investor pressuring you for growth, the father demanding results or the successful brother who casts a long shadow. If one of the co-founders is accused of being a “control freak” who wants to be involved in every decision, perhaps it’s because she was screwed over before and is constantly on the lookout for fault in her partner, unable to build trust because she’s projecting the experience of another relationship instead of living in the present one.

When people say you should bring your whole self to work, my response is always this: You already do. But it’s in unconscious ways that you’re not even aware of.

Issues and conflict will arise in every relationship. It’s unavoidable and, in fact, necessary. But the difference is that in healthy relationships, the deeper issue is recognized, and we work to chip away at it, moving from rupture to repair. In unhealthy, strained relationships, the issue is maintained and, as a result, exacerbated over time.

Here are some signs that the quarrels between you and your co-founder may be rooted in deeper, hidden issues:

• You keep having the same old fight. By the time they come to me, most co-founders are embroiled in cut-and-dried, rigid conversations with predictable paths and tired arguments. It’s the same old thing because everybody keeps doing the same thing.
• You think your co-founder is overreacting. Sometimes a co-founder will say something like, “All I said was that I don’t agree with that decision and she totally lost it.” When someone has an intense reaction that doesn’t seem to fit what just happened, it’s a clue that there’s more to this disagreement than what meets the eye.
• You’re not talking about the tough stuff. Repeated avoidance of a specific issue or problem in the company is a huge problem. I’ve seen relationships break down to the point where co-founders are barely communicating. Have you been patching over small cracks instead of making structural repairs to building a stronger foundation? If so, you may need to dig deeper.

WHAT LIES BENEATH: A FRAMEWORK FOR DECONSTRUCTING THE COVERT

When working with co-founding pairs, I often see three categories of hidden issues: power and control, care and closeness, and respect and recognition.

Below, I’ll unpack each of these categories and explain common “symptoms” so you can identify which one might apply to the tensions with your own co-founder. Once we recognize these unseen dynamics, we can learn to pick up the tools that will help us understand them, manage them and get started on the repairs.

A word before we begin: These buckets of hidden issues come from the work of couples therapy researcher Howard Markman. They aren’t cleanly siloed or neatly separated by labels. There’s overlap and issues often seep into each other. Think of these as a general framework to deconstruct your own conflicts.

1. Power and control

Whose priorities matter more? Who gets to make the decisions? Who stays late and grinds harder? Who doesn’t involve the other? Who takes the high-level meetings? The theme of “power and control” is about money, status and who has the final word — and it’s a big driver of conflict between co-founders.

Here are some scenarios I’ve run into while working with co-founders that illustrate deeper conflicts of power and control:

• A co-founder complains about how her counterpart hoards information or makes decisions unilaterally. When a power struggle boils up, who gets to make the decision is more important than the decision itself.
• One of the partners harbors ambivalence about the company’s success, which usually involves threatening to leave, or taking on secret side gigs that show he’s not “all in.”
• Technical and non-technical co-founders argue over who is more essential to the company. Whether it’s the engineer building the product or the sales and marketing whiz running the business, these discussions about who’s working harder or adding more value often boil down to a question of who needs who more. “I can do this without you, but you can’t do this without me” attitudes often pervade fights that fit into this category.

Blame and defense are the language of power and control. Instead of validating the other’s point of view, you become locked in a struggle where you don’t want to give the other person a leg up. It’s a constant all-or-nothing — accusations fly, and sentences start with “You’re wrong” or “You did this.” One person puts the other down in order to elevate themselves, maintaining their power and cementing their control.

Quick tip for defusing it:

The key is to notice and remove this belligerent language that escalates the conflict. Don’t start with how the other person is wrong, or even phrases such as “I feel that you…” because in practice, the word “that” generally leads to an assumption or a statement about the nature of the other person — and not a kind one.

To defuse a conflict rooted in power and control, start with your own reaction and make a statement that addresses the essential dynamic rather than the details.

Instead, speak about your own experience: “I feel sidelined” or even, “You ignored what I said and you went around my back.” “I do all the work and you make all the decisions.” It may not be pleasant, but by pointing out the power imbalance directly, both parties can sit with their perspective and work to resolve it rather than letting it escalate.

Esther Perel, psychotherapist, bestselling author, TED Speaker and podcast host Getty Images / Amy E. Price

2. Care and closeness

Do you have my back? Are we in this together? Conflicts rooted in care and closeness always come back to broken trust, the “I thought I could count on you” kind of statements. When trust is broken, it shatters all of our assumptions about the relationship and our value in it.

I often ask co-founders this telling question: “What hurts you more? The fact that they did it in the first place — or that they did it without you?” The former is an issue of power, the latter is an issue of care and closeness.

If disagreements or tensions with your co-founder resemble any of the following anecdotes, you’re dealing with a hidden care and closeness issue:

• In a company with multiple co-founders, one founder feels rejected or excluded.
• One of the founders takes meetings on her own, even though her business partner wanted to be there.
• A founder feels like his input isn’t valued in the decision-making process.
• One co-founder levels accusations that the other is selfish.
• A co-founder fears that he will be edged out, that his fellow founder will hire someone else to replace him.

In a Season 1 episode of “How’s Work?” I meet with a pair of co-founders grappling with this last situation. They became friends in college and built a successful communications company together. Now, over a decade later, they’re barely speaking to each other. In our session, we got to the heart of their impasse when one of them offered up this statement: “When I was running the show and you were kind of secondary, I included you in everything. And now that it’s your turn at the helm, instead of valuing our friendship, you’re trying to inch me out.”

This line was incredibly powerful — many of the co-founders I’ve worked with have described that exact same sensation and fear to me. This is care and closeness in a nutshell.

Esther Perel’s new podcast debuted in November 2019 as a Spotify exclusive. It will be available on other platforms starting in February 2020.

Quick tip for defusing it:

I find the most useful thing to do when you’re dealing with issues of care and closeness is to practice the basic steps of reflective listening: Acknowledge, validate and empathize. Start by acknowledging that what the other person said makes sense. Reflect back, don’t rebut. And if you’re ready to go further, empathize by sharing that you wouldn’t like to feel that way either.

We often bang our drum over and over about something that upsets us and, typically, the other person will tell you why your point is invalid. But if you own what they’re complaining about by saying, “I know I do this,” then you take it out of their hands. They don’t have to keep standing there waving their flag and insisting that they’re right. And once you take responsibility for your role, other people can begin to talk about what they bring to the dynamic.

Co-founders fight about care and closeness because they want to feel that they matter. A simple “I can see where you’re coming from” can be deeply validating.

3. Respect and recognition

Conflicts rooted in respect and recognition can frequently be traced back to questions of integrity and self-worth: Are you taking all the credit? Do I matter? Do you see how hard I work and how much I do? Are my contributions being valued?

Here are some symptoms that respect and recognition issues may be playing out in your co-founder relationship:

• One of the co-founders routinely takes credit for team efforts.
• When it comes time for budget planning one co-founder routinely questions the need for projects and staff overseen by the other, or implies they could be cut with minimal business impact.
• A co-founder never gives praise, only hands out criticism.
• When the splashy press coverage of the company gets written up, one co-founder gets all the attention while the others are barely mentioned.

With co-founders, often one person becomes a de facto CEO, serving as the face of the company. Sometimes it’s taken in stride because the other co-founder and executives are perfectly happy to take on other important roles. But sometimes there’s resentment brewing behind the scenes. This is because respect and recognition have a lot to do with symbolism.

I recently worked with a design firm where the CEO did a big interview and photoshoot, posing under the company logo. His two co-founders were furious and saw it as a complete betrayal. While they understood that the CEO’s role is to generate press, they felt the photoshoot sent the wrong message to the world — as if they had been erased from existence.

Conflicts rooted in respect and recognition deal with our self-worth — and that’s why they sting.

Quick tip for defusing it:

If you’ve identified respect and recognition as the source of conflict on the founding team, the party that is taking the credit often needs to initiate the reset. This means taking every opportunity you can to dispel the myth of the lone genius. Every time you say, “I’ve done” in an interview or speech, consider these options instead:

• With the help of my colleagues
• My work sits on the shoulders of others’ work

When your co-founder levels an accusation that’s rooted in an issue of respect and recognition, pause and see if you can recognize the validity of their reaction. A simple “I see why you took it this way” can go quite far. An even bigger step? Admitting to hogging the megaphone and taking the credit or undervaluing their contributions.

Founders will sometimes say things like “I didn’t mean to do that,” but frankly, it’s b.s. Maybe the credit taker doesn’t mean to make the team feel bad — but they do mean to put themselves in the spotlight. Owning your piece, and taking steps to see how it impacts your co-founders, is critical to stopping the cycle of disrespect and devaluation.

Esther Perel speaking on a panel on at WSJ’s Future of Everything Festival.WSJ / Production Manager

IMPROVING OVERT CONFLICT MANAGEMENT: SIX PRACTICAL TIPS FOR CLEANING UP YOUR FIGHTS

With these deeper issues identified and out in the open, you’ll still find yourself facing conflict on occasion — and when we disagree or try to give negative feedback, we often resort to our very worst impulses. This tendency puts us at risk of turning small spats into full-on warfare.

For the everyday battles, here are six practical tips for navigating conflict in a healthier way — and defusing it where possible:

1. Pay attention to what’s working. To break out of a negative mindset — constantly looking for faults and flaws — start keeping a daily list of all the positive things your co-founder does. What do they do for the company that you appreciate? What can you be thankful for? What would you be unable to accomplish without them? Elevate what they’re getting right, instead of focusing on what they’re getting wrong or what’s annoying you. Make this list for a full week,

2. Don’t throw the kitchen sink at it. Piling on every complaint is a typical — but not at all useful — approach to dealing with conflict. It’s how your co-founder showing up late for a meeting can escalate into a yelling match on how they aren’t pulling their weight. It’s the idea that when a fight starts, I’ll throw in everything I’ve been holding against you. By the end we’ll have no idea what we’re actually fighting about anymore. Instead, when you have a problem, deal with that problem only. Don’t start talking about the last three years of everything you’ve been through. Focus on fixing one issue at a time.

3. Avoid character assassination. A close relative of negative attribution theory: If I do something wrong, it’s circumstantial and tied to a situation. But if my co-founder does the same, I peg it to their character and what it says about them as a person. For example: If I’m running late it’s because I got stuck in traffic. If they arrive late, they’re not invested enough in the company and don’t prioritize our relationship. Skip these types of fights by thinking about temporary and circumstantial explanations for your co-founder’s behavior as you do for your own, as often as you can.

4. Figure out if you fight, flight or freeze. We all handle conflict differently. Some folks are explosive and lash out, while others retreat inward and withdraw. There’s often a contrast between the pursuer and the distancer. What makes it more difficult it that the one who is attacking intensifies the withdrawal of the other person and vice versa. This is the idea that the more quiet and tight-lipped you become, the more the other person is going to ratchet it up and get mad because you haven’t said a word in 10 minutes. To put it another way, if you build a bigger wall, that may make your co-founder bring out a bigger bazooka to knock it down. Understand your respective conflict management styles and have a conversation about them before the next skirmish breaks out so you can better co-regulate.

5. Stop talking in categoricals. Statements such as “You always” or “You never” should be stripped out of your vocabulary. We have a tendency to confuse our experiences and feelings with facts. You present the accusation as a fact, but it’s really just an expression of your experience. The other person will be at the ready to refute with one contrary example, just to prove you’re missing the mark. Instead, say, “You probably don’t, but in this moment it feels like you do this all the time.”

6. Start the 10 second shot clock. Howard Markman’s Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP) research highlights that when people are in conflict, they don’t listen to more than 10 seconds of someone’s argument before they start building their rebuttal. You could rattle off an entire list of issues of which there’s a dozen complaints that are perfectly acceptable. But your co-founder will push back on the one thing that they can disagree with, invalidating everything else you said. Instead, try to keep it short. Then pause. Then ask them to reflect back to you what you just said.

COMING TOGETHER TO MAKE A BUSINESS AND MAKE MEANING

As HR pro Netta Nahum says, in today’s workplace we’re not seeking “what we’re going to do next,” but rather we’re looking for “who we’re going to be next.” Getting the co-founder relationship right is about ensuring your company thrives — and it’s also interwoven with your sense of meaning and identity.

So when you look at Q1 priorities, fundraising strategies, key projects and new hires, pause for a moment to think about the relationship you’ve established with each other. In the hectic pace of the everyday, it may seem hard to carve out dedicated time to focus on relationships. But conflict is what happens when the relationship has been exasperated to the extreme — if you and your co-founder want to protect what you’re building, don’t avoid tough topics or wait until tensions boil over.

The health of the co-founder relationship is the KPI that no one seems to be tracking, even though it’s inextricably tied to company performance.

To get proactive, look for ways to build the positive and chip away at the core issues. Avoid devolving into a debate over which one doesn’t need the other and instead focus on how you complement one another. Some of the things you see will be positive, and others will give you insights into how you need to change your own behavior to improve the dynamic. Remember that the very same traits which annoy you now were likely once traits that you were drawn to and look for ways you can begin changing the dynamics that no longer serve you.

By the time most pairs come to see me, they’re experts in what’s wrong with their co-founder — and they want me to fix it. But if you feel like something isn’t working in your co-founder dynamic, before you dig into the list of things you want to change about the other, I suggest:

• First, think about what they’re taking off your plate. The only reason that you can constantly think about growth or product is because you have another person who’s handling all of the stuff that you’re not thinking about. If they didn’t worry about these things, then they would be on your plate too. Have you ever thanked your co-founder for taking on the work outside of your role?
• Second, if you still think they need to do less of X, see where you’re feeding into the dynamic by doing Y. If you want them to take fewer risks, you have to take a step back and give them the space to evaluate the risk for themselves. If you want them to step up, you need to take on less.

The truth is that we co-create each other. Relationships are feedback loops. And a person isn’t just who they are. That same person paired up with somebody else may act entirely different.

If this all seems like a lot of bite off alone, ask yourselves whether a coach or a therapist could come in handy. You and your co-founder have a board of advisors that helps you think through fundraising tactics, resource management decisions and strategic pivots. Why not add an advisor who can also help you stay connected to one another and the company? Seek out a third-party who can hold you accountable and keep your foot on the pedal when change feels tough.

Relationships aren’t static. They ebb and flow, cycling through harmony, disharmony and repair. There are always breaks and strains in the form of conflict, but there are also ways to mend those cracks. As you seek improvements in your relationship, you’ll see that how you treat each other as founders ripples out into the rest of the company and seeps into the culture.

You’ll begin to give your team better cues on how to fight, how to respect each other, how to get along and how to manage the inherent tensions that come with complementarity. And that is where improving the co-founder relationship starts to bolster the bottom line.

Want more of Esther’s wisdom for building healthy co-founder relationships? Download her bonus guide below:

The post How to Fix the Co-Founder Fights You’re Sick of Having — Lessons from Couples Therapist Esther Perel | First Round Review appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

Dish it out wisely.

Management moguls are obsessed with telling you to give more feedback. It will save your startup. Make you a great manager. Earn you millions. Hell, they promise, it’ll resuscitate your marriage and your sex life, too. But will it?

Feedback fanatics aren’t crazy. A lack of frequent, helpful feedback is among the top reasons people quit their jobs. Studies show that more communicative, honest cultures drive increased productivity, innovation, and employee satisfaction.

Feedback helps us see our inevitable blind spots, and optimize our performance. As Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, famously stated, “You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know.”

Become a member to keep reading this story and unlock unlimited access to all of Quartz.

The post How to give feedback effectively: A guide for managers — Quartz at Work appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

Stay in touch.

Making remote work an option is an investment that can pay off for employers and employees alike. Companies that embrace telecommuters can recruit the best talent without geographic constraints. Employees who have the opportunity to work from home or another remote location are, according to studies, happier, more productive, and more loyal to their organization. No wonder remote work is on the rise. In 2016, 43% of workers in the US reported working remotely at least some of the time. The share of people doing at least 80% of their job outside the main office rose to 31%, from 24% in 2012.

Remote workers don’t have to be managed very differently than counterparts who come into the office daily. By keeping communications and expectations consistent, managers of geographically diverse teams can build relationships that bridge the distance.

Set clear expectations

The post How to manage employees who work from home — Quartz at Work appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

We’ve made our coronavirus coverage free for all readers. To get all of HBR’s content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alert newsletter.

As the coronavirus pandemic escalates and disruptions to business-as-usual continue, managers are grappling with the unknown. You don’t know when your employees will be able to return to the office or how different things will be when they do. Regardless, you need to be in constant communication with your team. What information — and how much of it — should you share with your reports about the health of your organization? How can you be candid about the possibility of pay-cuts and layoffs without demoralizing your team? And, during this period of uncertainty, how can you offer assurance without giving people false hope?

What the Experts Say

The Covid-19 pandemic is an unprecedented event in modern history. And yet, according to Paul Argenti, Professor of Corporate Communication at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, the experience of managing through it is not necessarily unique. Similar to other crises, such as 9/11 and the global financial downturn, workers feel scared and worried. “Uncertainty triggers fear,” he says. “People are freaking out and wondering, ‘What does this mean for my company, my job, and my future?’” Your role as a manager is to “project confidence and strength.” Even though the situation is fast-moving and you don’t have perfect information, you need to be honest about what you know, says Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. “Task one is transparency,” she says. Explain to your team, “here’s what we do know, here’s what we don’t know, and this is what we are doing to close that gap.” Your second task is to “articulate a sense of possibility and hope.” Accomplishing both of these tasks, however, is no easy feat. Here are recommendations for communicating with your employees during this uncertain time.

Steel yourself

Before you utter or write a word to your team, you need to understand the challenge that lies before you, Argenti explains. Essentially, “you’re teaching people how to succeed in a crisis,” he says. “This is the ultimate test of your leadership and an opportunity for you to show your employees what you’re made of.” Summon your courage. As a frontline manager, your goal is to be “the person [your workers] turn to” for guidance and direction. The right mindset is critical, says Edmonson. Channel your inner “platoon leader,” and prepare as you would for battle. She recommends sticking to your routines as much as you can. Eat well, exercise, and try to get plenty of sleep. “Put on your own oxygen mask first,” she adds.

Make a plan

Next you need a strategy for how and when you will communicate with your team about the situation as it’s evolving. When your organization is in crisis, you need to “communicate early and often,” Argenti says. “The ostrich with its head-in-the-sand approach doesn’t work here.” Your team needs to know what to expect in terms of when and how frequently they’ll receive information from you as well as from your company’s leadership. He suggests doing periodic small meetings and one-and-ones to understand your individual team members’ most pressing issues. Ideally your organization has created a central “[coordinated clearinghouse](https://hbr.org/2020/03/communicating-through-the-coronavirus-crisis?)” where employees can pose questions, says Edmonson. Encourage your employees to use this resource so that the information provided directly addresses their concerns.

Navigate your conversations with care

Consider your audience. Think about your employees’ perspective, says Argenti. “Look at the situation from their shoes and think about what you yourself would want to hear.” You’d most likely want reassurance that “eventually this is going to end,” of course, but more importantly, you’d like to believe that leadership “isn’t hoarding information” or waiting for the other shoe to drop. Allay their fears as much as you can.

Be humble. The fact is, “none of us has a great deal of clarity for what lies ahead,” says Edmonson. So, you need to admit what you don’t know. Let’s say, for instance, an employee asks you whether there will be layoffs, and while you’ve been told that’s up for discussion, you aren’t sure whether they will happen and you don’t how deep they’ll go. Argenti recommends saying something like: “I wish I could tell you exactly what is going to happen. We’re giving you updates as soon as we know them.”

Don’t sugarcoat. You may be tempted to gloss over news that won’t be well received. The desire to alleviate your team’s anxiety is understandable; but, cautions Edmonson, it does no one any favors. “When you sugarcoat, you come across as a liar or someone who’s out of touch,” she says. If, for instance, management has decided to cut pay, but hasn’t landed on a precise number, don’t pretend it’s not happening even if you can’t give specifics. Besides, all of the facts of the situation will become apparent over time and softening hard truths can backfire. “When the truth comes out in dribs and drabs, it [doesn’t] build trust.”

Be responsible. No matter what, if you haven’t gotten the greenlight to share information about layoffs or pay-cuts, you cannot say anything. “You can’t even hint,” says Argenti. “You have a responsibility to the company” to “toe the party line.” Even when an employee asks you a direct question, you cannot say: “I am not supposed to tell you this, but…” The best thing to do, says Edmonson, “is to maintain your compassion while explicitly acknowledging the high level of uncertainty that currently exists.” She recommends saying, “All of us wish we were not in this situation, but we are, and we must work together to do our best amidst the uncertainty, challenge, and chaos that this crisis has brought.”

Try to be consistent. Communicating openly with your team becomes more complex when or if your immediate boss or upper management is responding to the crisis in a way you disagree with. “Wrestling with that challenge is tricky,” says Argenti. He recommends that, “as best you can, make it sound like you’re telling the same truth, but you just have a slightly different spin on it.” Say, for instance, your boss lays out a remote work policy that requires all employees to be online from 9am-6pm. But you believe in giving employees more autonomy in how and when they work. You might spell out the policy and add that during this stressful time you trust your workers to use their best judgement. “Find a place where you can agree and respectfully disagree,” he says.

Seek to inspire

Rise to the occasion of the moment. “Affirm the capabilities of your team” and use rousing language to encourage everyone to work together, says Edmonson. She recommends saying something like, “I believe in each and every one of your capabilities — and I believe even more so in our joint capabilities. We can do this together.” Admit “what you are up against” and acknowledge that there will be hard times ahead. But also “convey a sense of strength in terms of bearing what we’re going to have to bear.” Express your “hope that you will all get through this crisis” and “you believe in the long-term future” of your organization, says Argenti. “Be as enthusiastic as you can be,” under the circumstances. Your tone should be “not too positive and not too negative,” he adds.

Offer support

Finally, it’s important to make a special effort to understand your team members’ individual worries and stresses. “You can’t manage other people’s emotions; all you can do is minimize the fear they have,” says Argenti. Because most employees are working remotely, you can’t rely on hallway conversations to take their emotional temperature. “There aren’t enough Zoom meetings in the world to make up for” what’s lost when your team isn’t physically together. Check in with your team on a regular basis to get a handle on “where people stand.” Listen carefully to what people are asking and saying. Most people need to hear they’re going to be ok, says Argenti. Give “every reassurance you can.”

Principles to Remember

Do

• Understand the leadership challenge you face — you’re teaching people how to succeed in a crisis.
• Consider your employees’ perspective and think about what you would want to hear if you were in their shoes.
• Encourage your team through rousing, inspiring language. Your message is, “We can do this together.”

Don’t

• Trade in speculation. Be honest and truthful about the facts on the ground.
• Sugarcoat the situation. Otherwise, you’ll come across as a liar or someone who’s out of touch.
• Ignore the personal touch. Meet with your team members one-and-one and in small groups and offer support.

Advice in Practice

Case Study #1: Be open and honest, but admit what you don’t knowEugenie Fanning, VP of People at SquareFoot, the New York-based commercial real estate startup, says that during these difficult times, she is trying “to be as honest and transparent” as she can be with her team. But at the same time, she admits that she doesn’t know what the future holds. “This is unknown to me, too,” she says. “It’s okay not to have all the answers.”

Due to the effects of the coronavirus outbreak on business operations, the company has had to make some hard choices. Early on in the crisis, the company’s CEO, Jonathan Wasserstrum, announced that the company had trimmed marketing and travel expenses and that SquareFoot’s 10-person leadership team (which includes Eugenie) would take a reduction in salary. A couple of weeks later, he announced that SquareFoot would implement company-wide pay cuts.

“He was transparent about where we were cutting from the budget, and how much we were cutting,” she says. “But people were concerned about the possibility of layoffs and many managers were fielding questions after the fact. I wanted to help make sure that messaging was consistent across the board.”

To that end, Eugenie has had frequent one-on-one calls with her reports as well as other people managers throughout the company. She is straightforward and confident. “I say, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I can tell you that layoffs are not in the discussion at all right now,” she says. “The goal is to keep our team intact and come out of this in the best possible position.”

She is also candid. “These are uncharted waters. Three or months down the line, we will reassess. But knock on wood, we will be more back in the swing of things by then.”

She says that since she had already built trusting, solid relationships with the company’s employees, the message is well received. Even apart from the uncertainty of the global pandemic, her career in startups has helped her gain perspective. “I’ve been laid off and I’ve laid people off,” she says. “In startups, you have to roll with the punches. But I understand that for people who are just starting out, there is still worry.”

Usually the company holds bi-weekly all-hands meetings where employees can anonymously submit questions to the CEO and COO; but now these meetings are done on a weekly basis and involve more middle managers.

Importantly, she says, she is coaching company leaders to make sure that their tone conveys positivity and strength. “The message isn’t just, ‘This is how we’re getting through this.’ But, ‘Here are the things we are doing to make sure we come out of this in a strong position.’”

She is also trying to strike a confident tone herself by making a special effort to highlight the company’s recent successes. “I am trying to communicate the wins that we’re having,” she says. “I want to show the teams that what they’re doing matters.”

Case Study #2: Think about your audience and convey positivity and strengthAndres Lares, the Managing Partner at Shapiro Negotiations Institute, the Baltimore-based training and consulting company, says that once the business risks of Covid-19 became evident, he and his two partners sat down together to discuss how they would talk to their team about the company’s situation.

“We talked about our own personal experiences of the financial crash in ’08,” he says. “And we thought about [the current health pandemic] from the perspective of our employees. What would people be thinking about? What might they be afraid of? What are they anxious about?”

Based on this conversation, Andres came up with several guiding principles for how they would communicate with their team. Their goal was to be empathetic and sensitive to their employees’ concerns, while empowering middle managers to step us as leaders within the company.

First, they decided they would communicate more often than usual. “Every Monday we meet with everyone on the team, and I meet with a core group of managers one-on-one twice a week,” he says. “It’s time-consuming, but it’s been very helpful. It gives people a platform to share concerns and helps us craft plans with our managers to employ across our company.”

These one-on-one conversations have become invaluable. “At a time when people are feeling uncertain and it’s hard to see light at end of the tunnel, it’s important to feel that what you hear from leadership is the truth,” he says. “We want to make sure we’re always clear and give our management team a level of ownership and responsibility to move the company in the direction we believe we need to go.”

Third, they wanted to instill confidence in their management workforce to feel comfortable and committed to the message from leadership before relaying it to their fellow employees. “We instruct our managers to be empathetic and transparent with their teams and to not be shy in leading them in the direction we all agree is best. This provides a certain degree of unity across the entire company, something that is essential in a time of crisis.”

Employees have been working remotely for weeks now and so far, Andres and his partners have not had to make any changes to their workforce. “We have not laid off a single person at the company or made salary adjustments,” he says. “We have considered, and we will continue to consider it. But it is not going to happen soon. The worst that will happen over the next few weeks is that there will be a reduction in pay.”

Andres is being open with employees about the company’s financial situation. Business has taken a hit. But he has filed paperwork with the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program, and he is hopeful that they can continue to keep people on. “There may have to be tough conversations, but we are not there yet,” he says. “I’ve seen people heave a sigh of relief [when they hear that.]”

Importantly, Andres is reassuring his team and sending a strong message that everyone is “in this together.”

Andres says he’s immensely gratified by what his team has accomplished in the past month. “Our team is working harder and more productively than ever,” he says. “The proudest moments have come from seeing others in the organization step-up as leaders and take on tasks that wouldn’t usually be their responsibility.”

If our free content helps you to contend with these challenges, please consider subscribing to HBR. A subscription purchase is the best way to support the creation of these resources.

The post How to Talk to Your Team When the Future Is Uncertain appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

Versions of this scene have been playing out across the world over the past few months as Covid-19 cases rise and economies shut down. Founders, executives, managers, and employees have seen how fragile everything they’ve built has become — almost overnight. One evening back in March, my husband said to me, “I’m so scared, but I can’t let all the people who depend on me see that.” He had been on hours of Zoom calls, trying to convince his staff and colleagues that they would get through the crisis. He was supposed to be the face of calm, but he was terrified.

How can you lead with authority and strength when you feel anxious? How can you inspire and motivate others when your mind and heart are racing? And if you hide the fear in an attempt to be leaderlike, where does it go?

Anxiety, of course, has a purpose. It protects us from harm. Psychologist Rollo May first wrote in 1977: “We are no longer prey to tigers and mastodons but to damage to our self-esteem, ostracism by our group, or the threat of losing out in the competitive struggle. The form of anxiety has changed, but the experience remains relatively the same.” In other words, even though humans today aren’t chased by predators, we are chased by uncertainty about the health of our loved ones, whether we’ll have a job next week or next year, whether our company will go bankrupt — worries that provoke the same neurological and physical responses.

According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, “Stress is a response to a threat in a situation. Anxiety is a reaction to the stress.” Anxiety is fear of what might happen in the future. Sometimes that fear is rational and sometimes not. And sometimes it’s about something that will happen in three minutes (stepping onto a stage to make a presentation, for example) or in 30 years (having enough money to retire).

In the United States, anxiety is the most common mental illness, affecting more than 40 million adults each year. Data from the National Institute of Mental Health has indicated that about 30% of Americans experience clinical anxiety at some point in their lives. Globally, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an estimated 284 million people had an anxiety disorder as of 2017, making it the most prevalent mental disorder worldwide. And recent workplace data from Mind Share Partners, SAP, and Qualtrics suggests it’s widespread on the job: Nearly 37% of workplace respondents reported symptoms of anxiety in the past year. These numbers will only increase in the wake of the pandemic.

The good news for those of us who have managed anxiety for a long time is that we were made for this moment. Data shows that anxious people process threats differently, using regions of the brain responsible for action. We react quickly in the face of danger. We may also be more comfortable with uncomfortable feelings. When channeled thoughtfully, anxiety can motivate us to make our teams more resourceful, productive, and creative. It can break down barriers and create new bonds.

So anxiety isn’t useless. In an economic crisis, the anxiety that keeps us up at night may help us fathom a solution to keeping our businesses open. But left unchecked, anxiety distracts us, zaps our energy, and drives us to make poor decisions. Anxiety is a powerful enemy, so we must make it our partner.

Whether you have a diagnosed anxiety disorder or are having your first dance with this intense emotion, you can still be an effective leader. But I’ll be blunt: If you don’t look your anxiety in the face at some point, it will take you down. This isn’t easy, but doing it will change your life and your ability to lead others for the better.

So today, in this especially anxious moment, let’s begin. The first stage is learning to identify your anxiety: how it manifests itself and how it feels. The second stage is taking action to manage it both day-to-day and in challenging moments. The third stage entails making smart decisions and leading others in anxious times. Finally, the fourth stage involves building a support infrastructure to help you manage your anxiety over the long term.

Acknowledging and Accepting Your Emotions

A common coping mechanism for leaders is to push through stress, fatigue, and fear. But that’s succeeding in spite of your emotions, when it’s far better to thrive because of your emotions. You have to learn to accept your anxiety — even though this may seem uncomfortable or counterintuitive.

Angela Neal-Barnett, an award-winning psychologist, expert on anxiety among African Americans, and author of Soothe Your Nerves, is a firm believer in being honest with yourself. When you name a feeling — by saying to yourself “I’m anxious” — you can begin to address it. You can learn how anxiety informs your behavior and your decisions and what causes it to surge, which will equip you to manage it.

No one has to hear you say it. This is for you. Take the time to wallow in your thoughts. Let yourself experience the discomfort of fear and anxiety. Play out worst-case scenarios in your head. Allow your imagination to go wild with catastrophe. Cry. Grieve. But don’t turn away. As Alice Boyes, a former clinical psychologist and author of The Anxiety Toolkit, says: The more you try to control your anxiety, the more it fights back.

Decades of research on emotional intelligence have shown that people who understand their own feelings have higher job satisfaction, stronger job performance, and better relationships; are [more innovative](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282072988_Emotional_Intelligence_and_Entrepreneurs‘_innovativeness_towards_Entrepreneurial_Success_A_Preliminary_Study); and can synthesize diverse opinions and lessen conflict. And all those things make people better leaders.

If the word “anxiety” feels wrong to you, label it whatever you like. Call it “unease” or “temporary uncertainty” or even give it a silly name. I think of my own anxiety as a separate character who travels with me. She doesn’t have a name or a face, but I know when she’s present.

The leadership coach and CEO of Reboot, Jerry Colonna, says that the best way to deal with uncomfortable feelings is to welcome them in. Think of your thoughts and emotions as trains coming in and out of a station, he advises. Watch them arrive and depart without attachment. Imagine saying, “Hello, anxiety. See you later, fear.” This technique actually will help you build distance from the negative feelings in your mind.

Sometimes it may be impossible to get rid of your anxiety, which can feel frustrating. Rebecca Harley, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, emphasizes, “The goal is not to magically make things perfect. The goal is to learn to surf the waves of distress successfully. Give yourself credit even if things don’t feel all the way better.”

Once you’ve labeled your anxiety, you can start pinpointing when it appears and why. Harley helped me learn to do this. When you feel anxious, take note of your physical reactions — what she calls the “early warning system” that anxiety might be taking over.

Your triggers might be small. You might notice a stomach flip and a spark of dread when you see someone’s name pop up in your in-box. Or they might be bigger. When unemployment numbers skyrocket, you might feel nauseous and unable to focus even though you still have a job.

When an interaction or a situation sets you off, examine why. You might be hesitant to delve into issues from your childhood, but “unresolved business” from your past, as Colonna puts it, is very much present in — and relevant to — how you lead. He notes it can be a relief to truly understand how your old wounds inform your present behavior. When I realized that my near-constant worry about going broke stemmed more from my childhood than from my current financial situation, I was finally able to proactively manage my money, after years of avoiding it and piling up debt. I broke a damaging pattern.

It’s also good to understand how you react when triggered. I call these anxiety “tells.” Social worker and therapist Carolyn Glass suggests asking yourself, “How did I respond to that anxiety in that moment? And were those behaviors helpful or not? Did those behaviors fuel or alleviate my anxiety?” Glass says that writing down your fears will help you examine them. Keeping a journal of your anxiety — when it happens, what triggers it, and how you reacted — is a great way to develop self-awareness. Your tells may not always be negative behaviors, though; for instance, many of us find ourselves connecting with friends and family more during stressful times. When I’m very anxious, I cook and freeze meals!

Many successful leaders react to anxiety by working harder, holding themselves and others to an impossibly high standard, or trying to control things that are beyond their power. For them, it’s hard to imagine not fussing over every project and detail in their work lives, not taking responsibility for everything or always giving their all. “People respond to anxiety by trying to be more perfect and more in control,” Boyes says. “They not only have a Plan B but Plans C, D, and E.” In many societies those behaviors are rewarded. We think of it as a “good work ethic,” but often perfectionism and overwork only cause further anxiety — in yourself and others.

Imagine a CEO who is terrified by the economic news surrounding Covid-19. He jumps into the problem in the way that’s worked for him in the past: making detailed projections on all aspects of the business. He buries himself in these charts while constantly consuming news about the crisis. Some of his team might wonder what he’s up to or feel unsettled by his visible yet unspoken panic. Are the charts he furiously creates accurate? Who knows! But the deep dive into worst-case scenario planning gives him the illusion of control.

Your tells may also be physical. Anxiety can manifest itself as tightness in the chest, shallow breathing, clenched jaw muscles, frozen shoulders, gastrointestinal symptoms, skin breakouts, appetite changes, and radical shifts in energy. When I recently had a panic attack, for example, I was convinced it was heart failure — even though I’d had panic attacks before.

To help you identify the ways anxiety may be physically affecting you, try this two-part exercise:

First, sit upright in a chair. Put your feet flat on the floor, and your hands on your lap. Keep your chin neutral. Note which part of the body you can immediately feel. Then, with your eyes closed, scan through the following:

• Your head
• Your jaw
• Your neck cords
• Your shoulders
• Your wrists and forearms
• Your chest
• Your upper back
• Your lower back
• Your stomach
• Your hips
• Your hamstrings and rear
• Your calves, ankles, and feet

Note which ones feel tight, and to gain some relief, breathe into the areas of tightness or pain.

You can also pay attention to what’s happening with your body at different points during the workday, when specific events occur, or when you make certain decisions:

• How do you feel at 9 AM, noon, and 3 and 6 PM? Does your body change over the course of the day?
• If you get stressed, does a particular part of your body react?
• How often do you rely on a drink, drug, muscle relaxant, or over-the-counter pain relief over the week?
• Does your body feel different after you exercise? Do your shoulders feel lighter?
• How does your body feel on the weekend or when you’re doing something you enjoy?

Sort out the probable from the possible

Once you understand your triggers and tells, you can start developing a new relationship with your anxiety.

Remember, some anxiety is rational and helpful. In an economic downturn it makes sense for a leader to feel anxious. You might have to lay people off. Your business might fail. But you might find that you get stuck in a negative thought loop that prevents you from moving forward; you start obsessing. Boyes points out that some leaders get so focused on the worst-case scenario and overwhelmed by scary possibilities that they become frozen.

So how do you avoid being stuck? Here I turn to advice from Colonna: “Differentiate what’s possible from what’s probable. It is possible that everyone I love will die of a pandemic and I will lose everything I hold dear. But it’s not probable that everything that we love and hold dear will disappear.” Try to distinguish your worst fears from what is likely to happen. This will help calm you and give you space to move forward. So when a catastrophic thought comes into your head, such as “My partner and I are both going to lose our jobs” or “I’m definitely going to get sick,” remember that you’re an unreliable narrator when you’re anxious. Check in with someone else you trust and ask for that person’s help in telling what is likely to unfold from what is a long shot.

Back in early March, when the stock market first slumped and people’s fears about Covid-19 spiked, one of my biggest clients canceled work with my small business. I quickly convinced myself that our company was doomed, that it would be only a matter of months before we had to close up shop. “We’ll never survive this,” I kept telling myself. But then I consulted my business partner — a more reliable narrator than I — and she suggested we readjust our forecast, which we did. Now we’re projecting that we’ll lose half our revenue for the year. This is probable and upsetting, but it’s far different from going out of business completely.

Focusing on what’s probable also takes flexibility — the future won’t be what you thought, and that hurts. When my preschooler really wants to keep coloring, but it’s time for dinner, I ask her, “Please be flexible. You can color later, I promise.” I’m now trying to do what I’ve taught my kids for years: to handle the disappointment of things not going the way I expected or wanted. These disappointments are real, and sometimes the changes are grave. Acknowledge the grief and anger you feel (at least to yourself) and then make adjustments, identifying the aspects of your vision that may still work, and focus on what’s probable.

Taking Action to Manage Your Anxiety

Once you make your way through these three steps, you can start to manage your anxiety daily in ways that allow you to grow as a leader and be more resourceful and productive.

The following tactics can help ground you.

Many faith traditions teach us to accept what we cannot control, without preoccupation or panic. But in the middle of an anxiety attack at work, you probably don’t have time for philosophy. So here’s what to do when things feel completely off the rails.

Structure your time. A solid body of research shows that improved “time management disposition” — meaning your attitude toward how you organize and value your time — has a positive impact on mental health. And it’s especially crucial when you’re gripped by anxiety.

First thing in the morning, create a to-do list and a detailed schedule for your day. I like to do it while having my coffee. You might use 30-minute increments to spell out when you’ll shower, take a lunch break, make a phone call, or tackle that report that needs to get done. This is what many experts call “timeboxing.” While you’re at it, try to avoid what cognitive behavioral therapy terms “cognitive distortions.” These are the catastrophic thoughts, self-judgments, and all-or-nothing ideas that often accompany anxiety.

Be careful not to overschedule or overestimate your productivity; instead focus on the critical work and leave time to take care of yourself.

Take small, meaningful actions. During the first few weeks of the coronavirus shutdown, traffic dropped drastically where I live. The local department of public works took that time to repaint all the crosswalks. For a week, roads were halfway blocked off as DPW crews painted. It wasn’t a big deal because our normally bustling town was quiet. And each time I slowed down to drive past one of the crews, I smiled because it struck me: This is their small, meaningful action.

When you feel anxious, an immediate task can easily become overwhelming. Take running a cash flow analysis for your business. When you open up the accounting software, your mind might go to a dark place, and all of a sudden a month’s worth of figures have spiraled into the business tanking and your losing your home. To break that mental spiral, take a small, meaningful action. If running a cash flow projection terrifies you, organize some receipts or clean up some file folders until the panic subsides.

In general, focus on the near term whenever you can. You may not be able to tell your employees what will happen next year — or even three months from now. You can’t promise everything will be OK. But you can help your people be safe this week. Focus on that, and then deal with the big questions when you feel calmer or when you can get input from trusted colleagues. Sometimes you have to turn off the future for a little while and just manage through the present.

Develop techniques for situations you can’t control

Of course, it’s not always possible to turn off the future. What if your board needs those cash flow projections in the next 30 minutes and you’re in a downward spiral? Here you’ll want to have tools that help you calm down quickly so that you can get your job done.

Find a mindfulness technique that eases your acute anxiety. Neurologist Victor Frankl famously said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” This is mindfulness in a nutshell. Even if you are high on anxiety and short on time, you can claim the space in between.

There are lots of ways to do this; the key is to find what’s most effective for you. One option is to focus on your breathing. Belly breaths are a classic technique. Others prefer what’s called “the 4-7-8 method.” Either is simple to memorize and subtle enough to do at your desk. When you deliberately slow your breath, it sends a message to your brain to calm down, and your brain then sends the message to your body so that many of the physical symptoms of anxiety — such as increased heart rate and higher blood pressure — decrease.

You can also shift your attention. Glass says this technique is “great for someone who doesn’t want to meditate but gets maladaptively anxious and cannot focus on anything else.” Focus first on your anxiety, and then slowly turn your attention to something tangible, something you hold in your hand, like a book. By concentrating on an object in the present moment, you can turn the volume of your worry down until it’s background noise.

If I’m full of anxious energy and unable to sit still, or if quiet breathing exercises don’t work, I like to loudly blast a favorite song and dance for five minutes. Some people like to sing instead. Experiment with what works for you and then keep that tactic in your back pocket for when you need it.

Compartmentalize or postpone your worry. Sometimes I talk out loud to my anxiety, saying, “Sorry, I’m going to deal with you after I finish my work.” You may want to write the worry down and save it for a specific time — maybe later that day or your next session with your therapist.

In times of crisis you may actually find that things that worried you in the past fade into the background. The urgency of what’s happening in the moment takes over. To stop your anxiety from sneaking into the foreground, you might tell it, “You can stay where you are. I’m part of the solution here, and I need to get this task done.”

Make a connection. Connecting with others can break the negative thought loop that often accompanies anxiety. Instead of focusing on yourself, you turn your attention outward. When I asked my friend and colleague Cheryl Contee, the CEO and cofounder of the digital agency Do Big Things, how she was staying motivated during the crisis, she said that she was trying to “be a good neighbor,” something she learned from her grandfather, William G. Contee, who has a park dedicated to him in his Baltimore neighborhood. “Being a good neighbor is surprisingly simple — it’s just about connecting on the human level,” she told me. “Do you say hello to your neighbors? Have you asked how they’re doing or if they need anything?”

Contee also connects digitally with people in her field, who support one another and contribute to causes they care about. At her company she and her colleagues are leaning into talking about their feelings and families, doing a lot of checking about how to balance homeschooling with work. “We’re all veteran virtual knowledge workers, but having kids around and being responsible for their education is a new challenge we’re facing together,” she said.

In your own life, think about performing a quick, generous act. You might check in on a former colleague via text message. Or ask a family member how you might help. When I’m feeling anxious, I sometimes go to LinkedIn and “like” articles written by my colleagues or write up an endorsement of their work. This gets me out of my head and focused on something more positive.

Finally, if anxiety is persistent and hampering your days, you might consider consulting a therapist or mental health professional. Talking to someone trained in helping others manage anxiety may give you additional coping mechanisms to address debilitating symptoms.

Limiting Anxiety’s Impact on Your Leadership

Once you have a better sense of how you experience anxiety and how you can manage it daily, it’s time to turn to how it affects your leadership and management abilities.

Anxiety can impair our judgment. It can cause us to focus on the wrong things, distort the facts, or rush to conclusions. Ideally, we could postpone critical decisions until we’re in a better frame of mind, but that’s not always possible.

In anxious times it’s important to proactively set yourself up to make good choices. Much as you do when separating the possible from the probable, start by acknowledging that your emotions can make you an unreliable narrator and that you will likely be prone to negative thoughts. Let’s say you’re prepping for a speech and the last time you spoke to a group of a similar size, you felt that you bombed. You may even have a long-held belief that you’re a terrible public speaker because a middle school recitation drew snickers. Ask yourself: Are you being objective? If you’re not sure, check whether your memory is correct, perhaps by asking a colleague who was in the room for feedback.

Of course, you need to ask the right people. Boyes suggests you find a trusted adviser with a decision-making style that differs from your own. If you’re impulsive, consult someone who is methodical and conservative, for example.

Ultimately, every leader should develop a team of “real talk” peers: people who will provide their unvarnished opinions. You can fill this role for others, too. You can still offer them clarity and insight even if you’re an unreliable narrator of your own experience.

One of the most dangerous aspects of anxiety is that it’s contagious, and leaders set the tone. Daniel Goleman, the renowned psychologist and author of Emotional Intelligence, calls this “neural Wi-Fi,” in which humans pick up on others’ unspoken feelings.

If you’re not admitting that you’re anxious but instead emitting irritability or distraction, you’re not doing your staff any favors. But how can you be honest with your people in a way that doesn’t strike fear in them? What degree of emotion is appropriate to express?

Ultimately, how much you disclose is a personal decision. As an owner of a business and the host of a podcast about anxiety and mental health, I tend to be an open book. But I know that most leaders don’t share their demons. Few feel comfortable starting a staff meeting with “Wow, I’m anxious today.”

But self-aware leaders know when it’s appropriate to be vulnerable. And here’s the thing: Your staff needs you to be transparent and honest about anxiety and mental health, especially when the future of your company and their livelihoods are uncertain.

Amelia Ransom, the senior director of engagement and diversity at Avalara, says that she wants her leaders to admit when they’re not doing OK, because it affirms her experience. “It makes me feel normal if someone I respect and trust admits they aren’t all right. I think, ‘Thank you for being human,’ and I want to follow that person.” Ransom recounts a powerful moment when a senior executive in her company brought the staff together on a videoconference and said, “I can’t tell you, ‘You got this.’ What I can do is hold space for us to be together right now, to talk and figure some things out.”

Admitting “I’m anxious today” or “I didn’t sleep well” lets everyone else in the room breathe a little easier. (“Phew, it’s not my fault he is so tense.”) And remember, you don’t have to share details; just share the state you’re in.

The social psychologist Amy Cuddy tells us we need leaders who exhibit both warmth and strength. “Most leaders today tend to emphasize their strength, competence, and credentials in the workplace, but that is exactly the wrong approach,” she writes. “Leaders who project strength before establishing trust run the risk of eliciting fear, and along with it a host of dysfunctional behaviors.” Nothing establishes trust more effectively than the emotional connection fostered through empathy and shared humanity. This is why being open about your own anxiety can be so powerful. It builds trust when you can ask teammates, “How are you?” and they don’t feel as if they have to lie or put on a happy face, because they know you feel the strain, too.

This doesn’t mean that you fall into a puddle of tears during a videoconference, of course, or visibly lose control. And while your workers might want to know that you’re closely monitoring cash flow to make sure bills get paid, they don’t need to know that your anxiety is deeply rooted in your parents’ money troubles during your childhood. It’s possible to model taking care of your mental health without making people lose confidence in your competence.

Imagine you’re in an anxiety spiral from reading news about Covid-19, but you need to lead a staff meeting in 10 minutes. You could open the meeting by saying, “Obviously, the news is getting more upsetting by the minute, but I want us to put that aside for the next half hour while we go through this call.” Or you could be even more vulnerable and share that you’re working to contain your scary thoughts by giving yourself what Glass calls a “worry hour,” when you allow yourself to indulge your biggest concerns before putting them away again and forging on.

If you want to encourage people to share but don’t want the conversation to slip into an anxiety fest, you can use a red-yellow-green exercise. (Here are some tips from Reboot.) Team members individually indicate where their moods are that day with one of the three colors, and they can expand on why if they wish. This allows people to share if they feel comfortable doing so and gives you useful information about the emotions of the group. You can then adjust your communication style and messaging accordingly.

And remember, while being positive is important to prevent emotional contagion, you don’t want to give anyone false hope. If you get tough questions like “Is my job safe?” or “Will we be in business in six months?” it’s not your job to divine the future. No one has a crystal ball, and so you can say what you know to be true in this moment and affirm the importance of working together and focusing on what each person can control.

Building a Support System

The final step in leading through anxiety is making sure you have ongoing support. This means not only surrounding yourself with the right people but also developing routines that help you deal with bouts of anxiety and lay the groundwork for maintaining your mental health.

Schedule, structure, and scenario plan

When you have anxiety, you need to be intentional about what your days look like, as I discussed earlier. The methods are basic: making lists, prioritizing, and breaking work into manageable chunks. Chop tasks that make you extremely anxious into bearable pieces. I learned this trick from my own psychiatrist, Carol Birnbaum.

Also use the detective work you did about your triggers to prepare for situations or events you know will cause you anxiety. If public speaking stresses you out, make sure you leave plenty of time to rehearse presentations. If you’re afraid of flying, mentally rehearse a business trip from “I’m going to pack” to “I’m going to order a cab and call my friend while I’m on my way to the airport” to “I’ll buy M&M’s when I get there because they make me happy.” And finally, once on the plane: “I’m going to take a Xanax, do a calming meditation, and survive.”

I get anxious when I’m working far from home and haven’t heard from my nanny or husband. I worry something bad has happened and get distracted from what I’m supposed to be doing. To counter this I ask my husband or the babysitter to text me with an update every three hours. That way I don’t pester them when they might be driving with the kids in the car, for example. And knowing that they will keep me updated allows me to sink into my work.

Know who your “safe team” is

Since you want to spare your employees the messy details of your anxiety, you need a place for those emotions to go. Make sure you have a “safe team” of people to whom you can confess scary thoughts. They can include a therapist, a coach, a mentor, a spouse or partner, and friends. It could be an intimate group of fellow leaders, online or off-line, who commit to sharing in confidence and making space for one another’s difficult emotions.

I don’t need to belabor this point. You know what self-care means for you, whether it’s sleep, exercise, hobbies, massage, spending time alone, or being with people you love. The point is, take it seriously, as if your doctor had written you a prescription for it. It’s neither frivolous nor optional for you as a leader. And aspects of it you feel comfortable sharing can benefit your team: When you model good practices, others feel permission to take care of themselves, too. This could be as simple as letting people know that you don’t take your phone upstairs when you head to bed, that you’re taking an hour during the workday to exercise, or that you’re limiting exposure to news or Twitter.

Putting in place the support infrastructure to manage your anxiety will help you ride out setbacks and tough times. It’s a strategy for long-term success and sustainability as a leader. It means you’ll have better workdays, both when things are status quo and during transitions and tough times.

Ultimately, anxiety comes with the job of being a leader. The process of managing it can make you stronger, more empathetic, and more effective. It just might be bumpy along the way. So remember to treat yourself with compassion. Recognize that you’re doing the best you can, that your emotions are normal, and that the healthiest thing you can do is to allow yourself to experience them.

Far too many of us think it’s taboo to talk about mental health at work. I know many leaders who don’t feel as if they can walk into a staff meeting and say, “I’m anxious today.”

Why not? And why not now? These are not normal times, and acknowledging a universal emotion can help people understand that what they’re feeling is OK.

We’re in desperate need of better models of leadership, especially when society tells us that anxiety and depression are weaknesses. The data bears this out: A 2019 Mind Share Partners report found that 86% of U.S. job seekers thought it was important for an employer’s culture to support mental health, but only 37% of employees saw their company leaders as advocates for mental health at work.

This time of crisis — in which those of us with a history of anxiety may be experiencing it acutely while others may be feeling it intensely for the first time — is an opportunity to change that perception.

You can play a role in telling a different story.The Big Idea.

The post Leading Through Anxiety appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

The post The DO Lectures – Fundamentals Of Team appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

(Illustration by iStock/LuckyTD)

Each year, the organization I lead administers an employee experience survey to hundreds of Jewish nonprofit organizations. Last year, Leading Edge was finally big enough to receive results from our own survey, as we had grown to a team of six FTEs. The team was excited to fill out the survey that we had designed for our partner organizations. Finally, we could taste our own cooking!

Once all responses were in, I logged onto the platform and excitedly waited for the survey results to load. But as the numbers populated, I grew concerned and then, eventually, discouraged. We performed well on most of the factors that contribute to a great workplace culture—passion for our mission, pride in working at our organization, effective internal communications, and even a high net promoter score—but there was one glaring exception: Nearly half of our staff reported that they felt a lack of psychological safety at work. These employees shared that they did not feel comfortable “providing job-related feedback to [their] colleagues” nor did they feel comfortable “sharing potentially unpopular opinions” at work. In short, some of our team members did not feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work.

Oh wow, I thought. I am such a hypocrite. How is this possible? Our organization’s mission is to help build the leadership pipeline of Jewish nonprofit organizations. And we know that talented professionals want to spend their days in environments that enable them to thrive and that psychological safety—a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for raising issues in the workplace or for making mistakes—is a crucial ingredient of a great workplace. Yet we were falling short on this fundamental indicator of organizational success.

My mind rebelled. This must be wrong. Inclusiveness is a strength of mine. I pride myself on being highly intuitive, making people feel comfortable, and having a positive attitude. I believe in servant leadership, and I go out of my way to be appreciative and kind with my staff. How could some of my team not feel comfortable speaking up, asking for help, and sharing unpopular opinions at work?

I sat down with my coach for a gut check. We reviewed areas where I felt the work my team was doing was going well and where I felt we had room for growth. We then reflected on my role in both categories—the strengths and the growth areas. The process my coach led me through is subjective, but it was clarifying how, as my coach probed, I could quickly point to areas where the team was in sync and cranking and areas where there was more friction.

Through this introspection, I came to realize that what I thought was my strength was in fact holding my team back. In trying to promote a positive culture, I was inhibiting an honest wrestling with ideas, which was hindering innovation and promoting some staff discontent. My staff had become hesitant to share feedback, deliver bad news, or express critical opinions about other people’s ideas—even if those ideas would make our work better.

As I went through this reflection process, I came to see that something else was suppressing free expression: high expectations. Leading Edge is a young, fast-growing organization; we feel that we should be a model for other nonprofits. As a result, I set the bar extremely high, which means when the organization makes a mistake, it is difficult to hide our frustration and distress. I realized that this created an atmosphere where bearers of bad news felt they would be subtly punished.

Why The Best Teams Make the Most Mistakes

The results of the survey had stung, but I knew that learning from it would make our team better. After diving into the academic origins of psychological safety, I began to make changes to my management in the hopes of building a workplace that would be both supportive and accountable.

In the late 1990s, Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson was studying high-performing medical teams when she discovered something surprising: The most cohesive hospital teams reported making the most medical errors. When she dug a little deeper, she realized that the better teams weren’t really more accident-prone: They were more able and willing to talk about their mistakes, which of course was key to their high-performance (you can’t learn from a mistake unless you acknowledge it). This insight formed the basis of Edmondson’s influential 1999 paper, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.”

Psychological safety is “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,” Edmondson wrote in the study. “It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.” Edmondson’s research has been validated in a variety of settings. When Google, for example, ran a big-data project to understand what drove their most high-performing teams, they found that, more than anything else, psychological safety was critical to making a team work.

Tyrannical managers can inhibit psychological safety with a rigid, “don’t-come-to-me-with-problems, come-to-me-with-solutions” approach, and we have some bullies in the Jewish nonprofit community, to be sure. But because faith-based and ethno-cultural nonprofits often form a tight-knit community, there is often a social price for workplace incivility, and you’re less likely to be a jerk to an employee if you know that you’re going to see them in synagogue on the weekend. What’s more, because the nonprofit sector typically attracts leaders who want to build community, they tend to be educators at heart, with a predisposition for compassion and empathy. But while these qualities are important for fostering psychological safety in teams—after all, how can you bring your whole self to work if you don’t feel your team-leader will be empathetic?—they’re not sufficient.

When it comes to psychological safety, pushovers can be as bad as bullies. In fostering a courteous workplace, a manager can forget the importance of encouraging open discussion and free expression. Our Employee Experience Survey—completed by nearly 20,000 employees at more than 230 Jewish nonprofits over the last four years—found that while almost nine out of 10 respondents felt they were treated with respect by their managers, and that their managers genuinely cared about their well-being, only 60 percent of respondents said they received meaningful feedback on their performance (16 percent below the US benchmark from other similar surveys performed by Culture Amp). What might seem like a contradiction—that respondents liked their managers, but they also reported that their managers weren’t helping them get better at their jobs—makes sense when you realize that what is missing from many nonprofit workplaces isn’t civility but accountability.

Getting Beyond Great Job!

At Leading Edge, the problem of my own making was not being in the habit of offering constructive feedback, both positive and negative. Instead of building a feedback muscle, I tried to embody a positive attitude while being intolerant of mistakes, which made it difficult for feedback to occur. The solution, I came to realize, was that we needed to start modeling the behavior we wanted to see: We needed to practice reflecting on mistakes and giving critical feedback.

This is harder than it sounds. Delivering feedback in a way that sticks and leads to a change in behavior is difficult. People aren’t hard-wired to learn from their mistakes, especially when those mistakes have to be pointed out to them. In a recently published paper, Wharton post-doc Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach, a University of Chicago professor, gave study participants a series of extremely difficult trivia questions, each with two possible answers. Half the group then received feedback on what they’d gotten right while the others were corrected on their wrong answers. Follow-up tests revealed that, while participants given success feedback were able to answer those questions correctly again, those given failure feedback learned much less, often nothing at all. Failure feedback undermines learning, the authors found, “because it wounds the ego, which causes people to tune out.”

As this ingenious research suggests, the key to fostering an environment where criticism is welcomed and well-received is to somehow get the ego out of the equation. I see four ways to do this.

• The leader goes first. Ed Catmull, the long-time leader at Pixar, often likes to start group sessions by saying “Here’s the mistake I made.” This encourages reciprocation and takes some of the stigma out of the failure.
• Normalize failure by explaining it as a natural part of innovation. Catmull often reminds his staff that “early on, all of our movies suck,” to make the point that the creative process is innately iterative and relies on feedback to improve.
• Remove the sting from failure feedback by routinizing it. Delivering and receiving feedback is a muscle and you can make it stronger by working it out. More to the point, when feedback becomes routine, the sting to the ego will begin to dull. Just as gym-goers become habituated to the discomfort of working out, sharing feedback becomes a habit, a normal part of the day.
• Get employees to recognize their own mistakes. As one works on the feedback muscle, employees learn to see when they make mistakes and can point out their own way to move forward. By asking reflective questions about a situation (for example: “How do you think that meeting went?”), leaders can help employees review their own performance, rather than having a leader or manager point it out to them. This owning of the process can be powerful and helps get the ego out of the way.

I now try to ask for feedback from my team on a regular basis. When doing so, I try to follow best practices, remembering that feedback is a “gift”: It needs to be received as well as given. According to Harvard Business Review, feedback is most effective when it is shared frequently and in context; it aims to achieve a specific outcome; it is realistic in its expectations; it shows respect for the recipient; it is a two-way conversation; it is expressed as a point of view, rather than an absolute truth; and it assumes an opportunity for follow-up.

I also try to be aware of three complications in fostering psychological safety:

1. The first is that across sectors, including the Jewish nonprofit sector, research shows that women are generally less comfortable speaking up in the workplace. Women often worry about how they will be perceived, while men tend to be more secure in revealing what is on their minds. When giving personalized feedback to my team, I am mindful of this dynamic, for which the work of Iris Bohnet has been particularly useful.
2. The second complication is that there is tremendous variance between how people respond to feedback. Some people love learning from mistakes, others are more resistant, and still others personalize their mistakes to the point of paralysis (as in, “I couldn’t do this right, therefore I can’t do anything right.”). Baggage and scar tissue from previous managers may manifest in unexpected ways. In a previous role, one of my employees balked when I asked for their opinion on a policy decision, as if it was a trap. We will end up doing whatever the boss wants anyway,their thinking ran, So what’s the point of weighing in? In another previous role, one of my employees was so used to being micromanaged that they worried about the trust and affirmation that I gave to them. No one size fits all, so I now try to personalize my approach to each person.
3. The third complication is that as I write this, the world continues to struggle with the COVID-19 global pandemic, which has upended our lives both at work and at home and introduced enormous detriments to employees’ feelings of psychological safety. The most important drivers of these feelings are things far beyond my control. But the current situation gives me all the more reason to control the things I can and keep my team’s psychological safety at the top of my mind when influencing their working lives during this crisis.

Failing Forward

Like any change process, my progress has not been linear. Some weeks it feels like two steps forward and two steps back. Occasionally, I’ll find myself wincing when my team makes a mistake; then I’ll overcorrect and adopt my equally repressive “everything-is-awesome” routine. But again, I try to model the right behavior by reflecting on my mistakes, learning from them (hopefully), and working to improve.

Are my interventions working? I won’t know for sure until we repeat our staff survey next year. That’s the thing about psychological safety: without it, you are flying blind. If psychological safety remains a problem, I’ll be the last person to know, because none of my team will feel confident telling me. I am optimistic though. And if it turns out I still am not getting this right, I will go back to the drawing board and keep at it.

The post How a Lack of Negative Criticism Can Make NGO Employees Feel Unsafe appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.