Thanks everyone who subscribed to this newsletter after I posted about it on IG yesterday! A few of you dropped me notes about the challenges you're facing at work right now, and they mostly riffed on similar themes. I’m still thinking about how I can explore them in a more discussion-driven format, rather than just me sharing my thoughts.
But for now, I hope you enjoy Issue #1.
A while ago, I was with a few colleagues soliciting feedback about a workflow I’d just introduced. The questions were coming hard and fast, and I was trying to piece together an explanation when the tone that a few of them started taking began to really exasperate me.
If you’ve been in this sort of situation, you know what it feels like.
For me, it’s a feeling that starts in my chest, and rises like a sort of fizzy sensation, buzzing through parts of my face before reaching my head, where I start to feel my brain tightening, like it’s being squeezed very slowly by a hydraulic press.
It’s not a great feeling, but that morning, I was able to survive all of this by falling back on a practised line of internal questioning:
What is more important right now, being right or knowing what the problem is so we can solve it? What am I feeling right now? Personally attacked, misunderstood, frustrated at our lack of progress … ?
Am I leaning towards action that would help me feel better about myself, or that would actually solve the problem? Do I need to fix this right now, or can I commit to tangible steps that would take us in the right direction?
Obviously I don’t always get to ask myself all of these questions, and I often don’t have the answers to them either. There are also other questions that I try to work with sometimes, depending on the situation.
But doing some version of this has been immensely helpful in creating the space I need to get my bearings; to kind of sidestep that feeling of being overwhelmed so I don’t end up making decisions that are 100% emotional, or that prioritise my need to feel like I’m in control.
Needless to say, it wasn’t always like this. And in many ways I’m still working on making this process of introspection a more natural response in any potentially stressful situation at work.
I began thinking about all this recently when I started reading Maria Konnikova's The Biggest Bluff, which details her journey from being a complete poker novice to competing in the World Series of Poker (WSOP). With Poker Hall of Famer Erik Seidel as her mentor, she travels to cities like Las Vegas and Monaco, encountering a whole cast of quirky characters along the way.
One of them is a man who goes by the online handle LuckyChewy (real name Andrew Lichtenberger).
Konnikova finds out that unlike many of the other players she’s met, Chewy’s deep sense of spirituality is central to how he understands both life and poker. Of course, he’s also vegan and a very serious practitioner of both yoga and tai chi. Heck, he even wrote a book called Yoga of Poker.
I couldn’t really care less about any of this, but then I got to the part where he talks about why any of this matters.
“There is a flow to poker, to the way that the events unfold,” he says.
He goes on to explain:
“I sort of look at it in a macro sense similar to tai chi. It’s all about the movement of energy. Take even simple boxing. If I jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, jab and do no blocking, I’m going to get taken out. Someone’s going to kick me or something. You have to be tactful in your movements, strike when it’s right to strike, block when it’s right to block, move when it’s right to move.”
To do this, he says, it’s not enough to just watch your own energy. “You have to keep track of the entire table. The energy flows between players.”
This ‘flow’ that Chewy describes can sound like a lot of fluffy nonsense, but when I first read this it resonated in a way that few things have because it echoed so much of how I’ve been trying to manage myself better at work.
Going back to that interaction I described at the start, it could very well have descended into the sort of situation where I was playing pure attack or defence. Where instead of listening and processing, I focused on correcting what my team thought, or even deflected, making it about whether they were being accountable for their own responsibilities.
This is the sort of thing that can leave people feeling unheard and frustrated.
But more than that, I’ve learnt that the most profound consequence of taking this approach is that you convince yourself the problems don’t exist.
This is where ‘flow’ has become for me such a powerful concept. If I know that I don’t want to just run away from the problems, then what’s the alternative?
After all, receiving negative feedback is hard. In No Rules Rules, INSEAD Business School professor Erin Meyer describes how receiving bad news about your work can trigger feelings of self-doubt, frustration, and vulnerability:
“Your brain responds to negative feedback with the same fight-or-flight reactions of a physical threat, releasing hormones into the bloodstream, quickening reaction time, and heightening emotions.”
Applying Chewy’s tai chi analogy, however, the alternative to a pure attack or defence strategy might possibly look like this:
Instead of going, “Actually I disagree because reason 1, 2, and 3 …” I might say, “Actually you have a point, and this is what we’re doing, but also this is where we’re having challenges … What do you think is a good approach … What about … ” and so on, directing questions, acknowledging different points of view, being aware of what’s needed in that moment, etc.
The first approach creates tension, but the second creates ‘flow’ because this is where you begin to see the opportunities to build on each other’s perspectives, finding ways to move in the same direction. Rather than defending, refuting, and rejecting, I try to find little ‘ins’; ways to establish context and understanding, while also committing to action. None of which could happen if I’m just focused on striking or blocking.
My main challenge as a manager has always been that I take it upon myself to solve every problem. Part of it comes from a sense of personal responsibility—I own a small amount of equity in my company, and therefore I really don’t want to drop my baby on its head.
But lurking beneath this are also other impulses: the desire to feel useful, to be needed, to validate my worth as a human being.
So while I do a decent job of listening, my blind spot has always been the fact my thinking was often rooted in the same question: “What can I do to solve this problem?”
Being in this kind of problem-solving mode is not ‘flow’. It considers only one possible response: me offering a solution. Which is not ideal because as managers we want to empower our teams to have autonomy.
As a result, in many cases I might have been addressing the needs of the individual, but I wasn’t doing so in a way that was consistent across the organisation. This would eventually lead to other problems down the road.
The question I should have been asking instead was, “Why does this problem exist in the first place?”
This would have been ‘flow’—understanding in the moment that the right move is to perhaps take a step to the side, angling for a different view in order to understand what’s really going on, and figuring out how to align all the different elements at stake.
Essentially, it’s about positioning myself for a range of possible outcomes; knowing that there’s a very good chance that meetings and conversations won’t go the way I expect them to, and being able in the moment to respond in the most effective way.
Something to think about
When was the last time you felt like you had no control over a situation? What were you trying to accomplish in that moment?
How could you have created space for yourself to identify small yet significant ways to move things in a different direction?