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Today marks 9 full months of telework for me, my company, and much of America. It’s cliché, but March 13 seems like a million years ago and also just yesterday. And with several months of the worst of the pandemic still in front of us, it’s time to level up as leaders. But I don’t mean reading another leadership book or listening to another podcast.

I’ve heard colleagues and leaders say that they know that the ongoing pandemic isolation, stress of managing Zoom-schooling, financial challenges, and health care concerns are affecting their employees’ and team members’ mental health. Yet at the same time, they don’t know how to bring up these sensitive and personal topics in a professional setting. As a psychologist, I’m probably more comfortable talking about suffering being part of the human condition than your average businessperson. But I have a radical idea of what it is that your team members may need – and it’s not for you to tell them how to clinically manage their pandemic-induced depression.

Your team members need you to let down your guard and just be you. Not the you who has carefully cultivated a professional persona over the years. But the you who just can’t get up the energy to decorate for the holidays this year even though you know you “should,” the you who is really bummed that you haven’t gotten to have a proper girls’ night out in close to a year, the you who had no idea that you could take this few showers each month and still attend professional work meetings on camera. In my opinion, it’s ok to share some of those details even in a professional setting like a team meeting – the rules are different this year (and I personally hope they stay that way).

Be authentic. Be you. I think the biggest gift we can give our team members right now is to show them that they are not alone. I recently shared in an email to my team that my husband had been hospitalized briefly with COVID last month (he’s 98% recovered now, thank heavens). I mostly wanted to do it as a public service announcement to encourage them all to stay strong with their mask-wearing and social distancing as pandemic fatigue continues to set in, as well as to recommend that they all have a working thermometer and pulse-ox gizmo at home. But the cool thing was that it also stimulated a number of backchannel emails and even phone calls from staff that I don’t usually hear from on a personal level. By sharing myself and my life and being willing to disclose a few personal but appropriate details, it made it ok for my team to share a little more with me. I hope that went a little way toward helping people feel less alone at a time where we are all more isolated than ever.

Yes, you should know what online mental health resources your company provides; yes, you should be ready to tell someone how to access the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) in your system; yes, you should have the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline/Veterans Crisis Line number (1-800-273-8255) programmed into your phone in case you ever need it. But more than that, maybe just try to have a couple of authentic conversations this week where you let your guard down and let your team know that things aren’t perfect for you either. You can be grateful for what you have and grieve what you are missing at the same time. And if they talk, listen. Sometimes you can even ask if they are just needing to vent or if they are asking for your help in problem-solving. A lot of times, a nonjudgmental ear that is willing to hear about the inanity of managing word problems for a Zoom-schooled kindergartner while spilling coffee directly into the work laptop and managing challenging client demands at the same time can go a long way.

Have the courage to be authentic and to open up and show your humanity. For my team’s holiday gathering this year, since we’re not going to have the traditional holiday party, I asked them if they’d like my husband (a talented professional chef) to give them a live cooking lesson over Webex. I got a resoundingly higher response rate to that offer compared to the number of my team members that I normally see at the corporate holiday party! There might even be some of them who are just curious to see what my messy kitchen looks like, and that’s ok. My husband will probably say something goofy where I will cringe, and that’s ok, too. I’m even inviting both my boss and my mother-in-law to join the videoconference for a little added unpredictability!

And you know what? At the end of that 90 minutes, even if something happens that embarrasses me, we will have had a real, shared experience as humans, not just as coworkers. I don’t know about you, but that’s what I need these days – more genuine connection in this time of mandated distance. I don’t have the energy to have a curated exterior right now – fortunately, I think that my colleagues and team members just need me to be me.

#leadership #pandemicleadership #flexibleleadership #authenticity #authenticleadership

After yet another not particularly rewarding Saturday during a pandemic, my writing fingers were itching to express myself in some way. I decided I wanted to write a blog but couldn’t settle on the topic. So, I asked one of my good friends to remind me of something that I frequently say, so that I could use that as inspiration. Her response:

“The thing that comes to me immediately is ‘just do the next right thing.’”

She’s right. That is something I say in lots of different situations. With her, it’s often when she’s feeling overwhelmed and can’t see her way out of the situation she’s in. When it seems like she’s made too many mistakes. Or things are too much of a mess to ever get better. Or maybe they even seem absolutely hopeless.

“Just do the next right thing.”

It really is a handy little tool, and one I’m pretty sure I got from Kelly Wilson (as I have many of my best lessons). Is life overwhelming? Can’t see the way out? It can be a little much at those times to contemplate the grand scheme of “what do my values tell me to do right now?” Because in my world, your personal values are what defines what the right thing to do is. Instead, what if you considered what is the absolute smallest thing you can do right now? What can you do that at least will stop the situation from getting worse?

“Just do the next right thing.”

Sometimes, there’s a concrete thing to do. Be kind to a stranger. Put down the bag of tortilla chips. Apologize. Take out the trash. Or in my case, a lot of the time, keep your mouth shut when you feel like you have a comment that is just dying to be made. Remember that there are some things that once they are done, they cannot be undone. So, unless you’re pretty sure your next move is the “right” thing, you can also try doing nothing for a moment.

“Just do the next right thing.”

And when the whole world seems like a giant mess, and it’s hard to imagine how we will come out on the other side with more peace, and more kindness, and more justice… and it’s hard to see how our own small efforts can change anything… what if everyone made an effort to just do the next right thing? Some of those things will be small. Some will be huge. Many will involve taking a risk, being vulnerable. And, I do believe that they all add up. So, I’m going to press post now on this blog and go figure out what my next right thing is. Join me?

The fictional concept of work-life balance is crashing down around us right now. My friend Kelly Wilson has been arguing for ages that the idea that we have one personal life and one work life and somehow we need to bring them into some semblance of balance is arbitrary and not helpful; we are each one whole human being who works and who also has personal relationships and activities. For those of us who usually work in offices wearing professional attire and are now teleworking from home during the pandemic, that illusion of “distinct lives” that need to be brought into balance is no longer possible.

I feel extremely fortunate to be able to continue to work from home during the pandemic, and my household is generally self-sufficient while I work from the back bedroom with two cats who are very happy that I’m sitting still. But this pandemic event is like no other teleworking situation we’ve ever experienced. With schools and daycare centers closed for the foreseeable future, millions of parents are faced with the experience of still being expected to work a full time job WHILE caring for their families — not broken up into different periods during the day, but at the exact same time.

In some work settings, I know that family members don’t even come up in conversation, and it’s generally taboo and unprofessional to have your children making noise in the background of a conference call. Because of that whole work life vs. personal life thing. We generally have to pretend that the personal life doesn’t exist during the workday, because we’re afraid that somehow will make us seem less professional. But we are all whole human beings, trying to figure out this new moment in time together. Everyone is in the same boat, and even the most hard-nosed bosses are having to acknowledge that if they want their employees to continue to work, there’s going to have to be more flexibility than usual.

This is affecting all of us who are now on extended telework status, and not just because our yoga pants are getting a lot more use during the workday than usual. When you’re working from your bedroom, how do you know when the end of the workday is? It can be even harder to transition out of work mode when you literally never leave your office, and your computer is across the room from you as soon as you open your eyes in the morning. And when your partner is home but is not teleworking, it can be hard for them to understand that just because you’re 10 feet away during the day doesn’t mean that you can just chat at any given moment.

But my experience so far is that this is the hardest for parents of toddlers and small children who can’t just entertain themselves during the day without focused adult attention. Here’s an email I got from my friend Caroline Rooney the other day:

Clarke just rang a literal cow bell while I was presenting to senior leaders on a conference call.

One of the senior leaders: “I think someone has an open mic.”

Caroline: “Apologies, that is coming from my office. Please refer to slide 4…”

How many millions of cowbell-type examples have been playing out every day for the past few weeks? This is not the embarrassing exception to professional life right now — this is the rule. This is professional life during the pandemic. We are being faced with this new reality of acknowledging that we have one life rather than the illusion of multiple separate lives. And it’s really stressful for lots of people right now. We’ve been taught to hide our personal lives during work, and people now feel that they can’t curate the necessary professional persona anymore.

What if those of us who are leaders and supervisors take this opportunity to create a more humane and compassionate work environment that doesn’t make our employees feel like they need to keep their personal selves artificially separated from their professional selves? What if we helped humanize ourselves in the process?

This week, I had a conference call with two of my super conscientious team members, who are also both mothers with two toddlers each at home right now. They asked for a meeting to let me know that they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to meet upcoming deliverable deadlines, and we were in the middle of brainstorming what other resources we needed to bring on board to support the team. I hope that I was demonstrating by my words and tone of voice that I cared about their situation, that I appreciated that they were being proactive about this, and that I would support them however I can.

Ironically, as we were in the middle of this conversation, my 17-year-old appeared at my bedroom door with a worried look on her face. She generally does her own thing when she can hear I’m on a conference call, but this moment was different. This time, she stuck her head around the corner and asked where our thermometer was. Any other time, I probably would have told her I’d come help her in 20 minutes when I was done with my phone call. But in the middle of a pandemic, when your teenager comes to you asking for a thermometer, there’s only one priority in that moment.

So, I told my team members that I needed to put them on hold for a few minutes, without apology or explanation. Fortunately, the temperature reading was perfectly normal, and we talked about how the symptoms sounded more like seasonal allergies and where the allergy medicine was. I got back on the call three minutes later and explained why I had to put them on hold. I have to hope that my modeling of how to prioritize what’s important on that call was even more reassuring than my platitudes a few minutes before about how I would do my best to support them in being both mothers and professionals at the same time.

As my friend Caroline (mother of the budding cowbell artist) said today, “It’s not everyday that you get the opportunity to be both a ‘bad’ employee and parent simultaneously.” But right now is that day. Right now is when we can be genuine and acknowledge our shared reality that we all only have one life, not multiple separate lives. I hope we can take the opportunity to humanize our workplaces for the better, both for now and long after this pandemic fades in our memories.

More cowbell.