Jagged Edge Podcast featuring Pascale Brady
You can be very good at your job and still dread Monday morning. You can have the title, the team and the salary you spent twenty years working toward, and still lie awake at 3 a.m. wondering what on earth you’re doing there. Most leaders I work with never say this at work, because at work you’re supposed to hold it together for everyone else (you know, a bit like the 4-year old in daycare), except that nobody hands the leader a break.
Some leaders call me because they’ve just been promoted and are scared stiff of the new job. Others call because they can’t stand the old one anymore: they snap at everyone, sleep badly, bite their nails for the first time in their lives, and keep asking themselves why they haven’t left yet. From the outside the two situations can look alike, but the first is a stretch and the second is a signal that something needs to change. A good part of my conversation with Yogi Patel on her podcast was about how to tell which one leaders are living in, and what they can do next.
When someone tells me they’re done and about to resign, my first strategy is usually to “hold their horses.” Sleep on it, talk to someone, write it down. Then treat it like any other business problem: what is working, what isn’t, and which of your values are no longer being honored. We also talked about private logic, the glasses each of us puts on as a small child and never takes off, which convince some of the smartest leaders I know that they’re not good enough, or that speaking up is dangerous.
Where I live, the road home goes through the woods, and after every storm there are branches all over it. Most people drive around them. Some stop their car and move the branches. Contribution at work is the same: you can keep driving around what isn’t working, or you can get out and try to clear it. Sometimes it won’t budge, and then you have a real choice to make about whether you stay.
We also talked about courage, which hardly ever feels like courage while you’re going through the tough patches.
