Photo by Nout Gons.
This weekend we fell back. We changed our clocks and theoretically got an extra hour of sleep. I say theoretically because time-shifted kids jumping on you at 5am doesn’t feeeeel like extra sleep.
It’s not just the shorter sleep and earlier wake up. It’s getting colder. And darker. This week, the last shreds of a too colourful fall have given way to the nagging chill that will carry us until March. March, if we’re lucky.
Lately, we’re spending a lot of time talking about resilience and change. Let’s call it one part seasonal, one part contextual.
Last week, there was an article about Pattern, the rebirth of the marketing agency that launched Sweetgrass, Haus, and a bunch of other Insta-friendly faves. The whole thing is worth a read and it’s by the author who did the mega-viral piece about millennial burnout last year.
The summary is something we’ve been following for awhile now. And it’s not limited to millennials. This one spans generations. Here it goes:
The kids are not alright. They are tired. Not just a little bit tired. They are to-their-core tired. They are burnt out, unhappy, dropping out, and looking for meaning. And into that need for meaning have rushed a hundred motivational hashtags. And beautiful instagram accounts. And pre-packaged self-care experiences. Many of them polished up and brought to market by the people in that article.
And it isn’t helping. The antidote is the poison. And it’s making people feel worse.
Anne Helen Petersen, the author of the piece, has the right level of skepticism. We should be skeptical about anyone peddling burnout cures right now. But she also comes away half-convinced, and that feels hopeful.
In our own programs, we sometimes ask bosses what it looks like when they’re underwater. One lets the mail pile up. Another stops going to the gym. I do this thing where I read every email in my inbox, decide I can’t deal with it, and mark it unread again. It’s cathartic to watch a group of leaders talk about their own traps. Once you know them, you can spot them.
Then we ask them what gets them back above. Some say music. Or walks in nature. A lot of them talk about making lists. Or “spending time with friends even when I really don’t want to.” Some say quiet.
No one says pre-packaged self-care experiences.
Take care of yourselves out there, friends. Keep warm.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s reading
Can I offer you a credit?
A credit? Like for future service?
Yes. For the next time you do business with us. The man on the other end of the phone was serious. I was certain he was joking. But nope. Totally serious.
I had just told him that we wouldn’t use their service again due to a poor experience. No, no, I don’t think you understand. We can’t use you again. You didn’t do a good job. We were unhappy with the work you did. Why would we buy from you again?
He wanted to fight. Which is a weird response for a vendor on the end of a break up.
But it was the way in which he wanted to fight that stuck out to me. He felt like his company was being cancelled. That they had missed a few key details and that meant we wouldn’t use them again.
And that felt unfair to him. And in ways that felt extremely patronizing, he proceeded to explain that people deserve a second chance. And that not everyone gets everything perfect all the time.
Their errors were major. But the bigger problem was that the way the company handled their screw-ups was sloppy and unprofessional. The idea of signing any new paperwork with them again felt like a bad call. And I said so. The man on the other end of the phone was pissed. The nice part is that it reinforced the decision we’d already made. Time to find a new vendor.
There are at least three different articles in The New York Times alone right now on cancel culture. And there’s a lot of concern about what it means if we’ve built a culture where no one can ever make mistakes, no one can grow, and no one can disagree.
I kept looking for a non-strawman take on cancel culture. Something in the space between “no one can ever disagree” and “I don’t want to buy your faulty shit more than once, credits be damned.”
Enter Shree Padakar’s piece. I’m gonna give her the last word here.
People who benefit from the status quo are leaning on cancel culture, or call-out culture, to duck accountability. Those who roll their eyes and claim “cancel culture” when people protest their choice of speaker focus on the most surface aspects of social pushback — usually tone. How rude, how loud, how uncivil. But they discard the principles of social justice that underpin the pushback.
It’s easier to dismiss others as over-sensitive than to look inward and seek accountability. Easier to deny a problem exists by labelling it fake than to address the difficult task of changing the status quo.
What Johnathan’s reading
Can I tell you, I’m sort of done with the word “snackable”? At least when applied to content. There are so many articles out there with titles like “3 quick tips to eliminate racism” or “You Won’t Believe What This Company Did To Fix Sexism” and they just… make everything worse.
I feel broadly the same about people in the management training space who claim they can cover it all in a lunch-and-learn. Some things take hard, personal work. Some gardens need years of weeding. There’s nothing snackable about that and there shouldn’t be.
So imagine my surprise at this little collection of well-articulated advice:
How the Best Bosses Interrupt Bias on Their Teams
It’s a trick, see. The tools are concrete (“Set up a rotation for office housework”, “Limit referral hiring”) and have clear benefits. It feels pretty snackable. But to be able to implement them, you need to actually do some not-snackable work.
Take their advice to “Define culture fit.” That’s a snackable tip right there. 3 words, and one of them is really short. Yum. But to do that thing, you’d have to sit down with the rest of your team and have a discussion about it. What predicts success in our culture? What gets people promoted here? Do we feel good about that? And how should we interview for that in an effective, consistent way?
A funny thing is: we facilitate that exact conversation in a lot of our programs. “What do we really value? And how do we feel about that? And how would we see it in a candidate?” And can I tell you something? Those conversations are outstanding. When you peel people away from repeating the values poster and get them to engage with it, the stuff they dig out of that garden is really good.
If you have the energy to make things better today, go read that piece. Find a tool that speaks to you, and figure out how to make it real for your team/org/company before the end of the year. There’s still time for some weeding before the snow.
