Truth 61. Crap happens

Unless you work for a waste management company, not much money gets made cleaning up the past. The real profits come in creating better ways of enjoying the future. That’s the fun part, and fortunately, that’s what most of us get paid for. But, as a manager, you’re also paid for hanging in there—and inspiring your employees to stay on the team—when things don’t go quite as you had expected.

Terrible things happen in business, even on an average day. Key clients go belly-up. An eleventh-hour investor loses his focus on your starving business because of a family emergency. Your main competitor steals your publicity thunder with a new product announcement that makes your latest offering look like last year’s shoe style. These things happen. Your employees are naturally demoralized, and they’re wondering, “What’s the use of trying?” You can see it in their eyes.

For the moment, at any rate, your employees are feeling that maybe they’re not the masters of their destiny after all. In the 1970s, psychologist Aaron Beck identified three interpretations of what happened that feed this feeling and lead straight to depression. They reflect a person’s way of making sense of what just happened in terms of negative things he thinks about himself, the future, and the world in general: “I’m worthless,” “the future is hopeless,” and “this just goes to show there’s never any point.”

You have to hang on to your own optimism for dear life.

When your business has hit a rough patch, this is your time to really show what you have as an engaging manager. You have to hang on to your own optimism for dear life. And you now have to back up your positive outlook with a powerful resiliency toolkit:

• Return control to your team. Help team members find a way to reconnect what they do to making some kind of difference in the world. A group project that makes an immediately visible difference will start to return them to their own sense of empowerment. This is not an elective. They can choose the project itself, but no one gets to sit this one out.

• Return a sense of purpose to your team. The fun of going after a potential win is always compelling. But even if the win is lost, there is still an underlying value or mission that hasn’t changed. As a group, discuss the reasons why you embarked on this adventure in the first place. And restore a team commitment to the core meaning behind all the work you’re doing.

• Review your marketplace and its needs. Your people are being paid to be change agents, but failure might have put them into a temporary existential shrug. Let them say, “Well, I guess that’s just the way it is,” only once, so they can get it out of their system. Then put them back on the job to understanding what their customers continue to need but still aren’t getting.

• Keep things in perspective. You’ve had better days, to be sure, and your team has as well. But we’ve all had far worse days in recent years, personally, economically, and nationally.

• Hang on to your own self-esteem. The failure may have been your stupid idea in the first place. And now you’re questioning your own abilities to make prudent decisions and wise business choices. Cut yourself a break. If you’re not pushing your own personal boundaries as a leader, you’re not letting your people know that it’s okay for them to take calculated risks for the sake of your organization. Some work, some don’t. That’s life.

If you’re not pushing your own personal boundaries as a leader, you’re not letting your people know that it’s okay for them to take calculated risks.

Apologize to your team, if appropriate. Explore together what the team learned (good and bad) as a result of this misadventure. Acknowledge your group for their heroic dedication to the goal, and personally thank the individuals for their contributions to the effort. Be specific, one employee at a time.

Then get on with the next project. The future is waiting. The world deserves it. And you’re up to the challenge.