Welcome to the new Manager podcast. I'm your host, Kim Nickel. Hello and welcome. I'm glad you're here and I hope you're doing well. Today's episode is on how to lead A-Team through hard times, and this episode is by request. In case you didn't know, you can request episode topics, just write to me. You can either find me on LinkedIn and message me there with your requested podcast topic, or go to my website, kimnickel.com and message me through the contact page there.
Let me know what you'd like some guidance on and I can speak to it here on the show. So today someone had written in to me and asked how to support a team that is reeling from layoffs and dealing with emotions like anger, confusion, and maybe even some survivor's guilt. For context, this person shared that very recently nearly half of the team had been laid off, including their manager.
So now this person has had to step into the manager role kind of unofficially because their manager was let go. They're now dealing with all of these emotions and they don't have a lot of confidence in the upper leadership because the workload hasn't changed. They haven't said, OK, we're letting go of people and now we'll have to rebalance or readjust the work. It's the situation where there are less people and now the workload is the same.
So you'll have to adapt to that. People are in survival mode. There's a feeling of loss in this situation and they were asking for my perspective. So that's what I wanted to share today. That can be such a hard situation and here's where I would start. So first is that when you're a person who cares a lot, then you'll also take on and it'll be really hard to see how much your colleagues are struggling with all of the emotions, with the
anger or the confusion. Sometimes there's even a feeling of betrayal when the, you know, the organization goes through such a big change, there can be a feeling of betrayal like, you know, we trusted leadership to take care of the business so that this shouldn't be happening. Like there's this feeling of, you know, when people are laid off, it's, it's from this place of it's, it wasn't their fault. They didn't do anything wrong. That's not why people get laid
off. So there can be that feeling of betrayal or just, you know, incorporated in with this sadness and with all of the emotions. And so the first thing I want to acknowledge is that emotions are not a problem to be solved. And this can be hard if you are a person who measures your success based on the happiness and contentment of the people around you. For so many of us, we don't even realize that that's one of the
ways we feel successful. But it can be very present and then highlighted when you're in a situation that was not something that you had control over, but something that happened. And when you are now leading A-Team who is having all of this emotion and wondering, Oh my gosh, like, what do I do in the face of all of this? Like how do I fix this or how do I make things better?
So I wanted to acknowledge that if you're a person who cares very deeply about the well-being of others, and if you tend to measure your success based on the contentment and happiness of the people around you, this is also going to be very challenging and tricky for you to navigate.
The more you can become aware of how you operate and how you kind of navigate the world, the easier it will be to address this kind of situation because the goal is not to make everyone happy or to make everyone feel like, you know what, it wasn't, it's not that big a deal, Like we'll be fine. That can actually be very callous and very like not trust building because the emotion that people feel can be a very reasonable and very appropriate response to what's happening.
I think of it a little bit as you want to be able to make space for the emotions. And I'll talk more a bit about what I mean by that. But we make space for the emotions without trying to change them or solve them. And then in our role as a manager of, of a team that's going through that, one of the most supportive or kind of powerful things that you can do is think of yourself as how can I, how can I help to direct or focus or guide people's
attention? So that now given this change, number one, people will be kind of oriented towards working on the right thing and understanding how do we navigate this new landscape. So the emotions need some space and then our attention needs some focus. And those are two things that you can bring into that relationship of working with your team. So let's talk a little bit more about what that all looks like in practice and how you can think about it for yourself.
So first is this step of acknowledging or accepting when we're dealing with something really big, really unexpected, really painful, really enraging, we can simply start by acknowledging, by accepting, by acknowledging, OK, so this is what's happening now. By accepting, there's probably going to be a lot of emotion here. We're not getting into the story of it. We're not, you know, trying to change it or explain it. We're simply naming what is happening.
We're acknowledging what's happening. When we're able to name a thing, it allows us to stop resisting it. And resistance sounds like, I wish this hadn't happened. Why did this happen? Like it helps us to get out of the rumination trying to understand why did this happen? This shouldn't have happened. If if they had done things differently, would things have gone differently? It helps to get us out of that mind spin and into more of this place that can be a little bit
more tender. The acknowledgement of, yeah, this, this hurts or this is confusing or this is frustrating or this is not what we wanted. That feeling of oh, like this feels even even the acknowledgement of it feels so powerless that this is happening and nobody asked us and yet we have to deal with this. This feels unfair. This feels unkind. Acknowledging the emotion is sometimes the most valuable part. We don't have to solve it. We don't have to change it.
But simply naming it and acknowledging it and saying, yeah, it totally makes sense, all of those different emotions. Yeah, I can. I can absolutely see why, why that all might be there and even the survivor's guilt. So when you lose colleagues to a layoff, you might feel really bad that they got laid off. And there might be a part of you that feels relieved that you still have your job.
And that can also feel really hard if someone is going through something difficult and you're feeling like, Oh my gosh, I'm glad it wasn't me. But now I feel so bad. So even just acknowledging there might be a lot of emotions. That totally makes sense. And then in your role as the leader of, you know, of the team or the, your role as the kind of de facto manager. Now, how can you help shape what
this means? So something I like to remind my clients, and I'll remind you now, is that information and data is not meaning information and data requires us to give it meaning, to help convey or to interpret.
What does this mean? And I sometimes think of this in in kind of a very simple way, like if you've ever spent time with a little kid and when the kid, you know, falls or maybe there's a really loud sound and they look to the trusted adult to find out, how should I be feeling about this right now? Should I be upset about this? Is this a big deal? I'm not really sure. This thing just happened. I'm not sure how I should respond.
And so they look to the trusted adult and then take their cues from that. And it's kind of the same like as humans, we, we kind of triangulate meaning especially when we're in a kind of collective relationship, when something happens, we often want to talk with someone about it to help us understand how should I be feeling about this? You know, like, what does this, what does this mean? And really for all of us on the inside, we're always wondering,
what does this mean for me? What does this mean for me, for the work that I'll be doing for my day-to-day? Like, I don't know what to do with this. What does this mean? And so when you anticipate that people will be wondering, OK, so we've had this layoff and now we're at half staff compared to how many people we had before, what does this mean? And they will look to you, they will look to each other, they will look to someone to help understand and make sense what is the meaning?
What happens now? And so begin to think, what can you do to help them understand what the meaning will be? And you might not have all the information, things might not be completely clear, but even if you can say, OK, so this is what happened and for now, this is what it means for us. Or in the near term, for the next 10 days, here's what that
means. If you can help to give that perspective and meaning, that will help to ground people, to give people a sense of direction, to bring some clarity, especially around things like, you know, relationships and communications. When people leave and they hadn't planned on it, there will be lots of questions about the work hand off the relationship
transitions. So even if you can start to create some focus and clarity around, OK, so now that these people have left, here's what that means in terms of how we're going to transition those relationships, or here's what this means in terms of getting a sense of where all the different projects are. That can be a very simple but helpful thing because it helps to provide guidance through the internal feeling of chaos, which is things are out of control.
I don't know what's going on when you're able to say this is what this means right now. You know, even if it's like this is what this means, what this means is we've got a lot of uncertainty over here. And so here is what we're going to be doing in order to re evaluate what priorities are and how the work is gonna happen. And also, if you've ever heard me talk about strategic failure, I'll see if I can find the
episode of of that. But strategic failure is where you intentionally decide this is not going to happen. And here's why. It's because this other priority thing needs to happen. Instead. You can plan for failure and you do that strategically as opposed to by accident or by reaction. And then when you plan it, you can also plan the communications around it. So it becomes something that you do have more control over,
right? Like we're intending that this is not going to work and these are the reasons why. And like now we're going forward. So think about that as well. This idea of what this means might include these things are now not going to happen. We are going to fail here, but it's OK because we know exactly why. And here are the things that will matter instead, or here are the priorities. Now, this is this is what this change means for our priorities.
Related to that is, as the manager who's thrust into this role for your team, can you get a picture of the new landscape? This might be including, you know, creating a tool or some kind of place to help organize what the landscape is. I'm envisioning, you know, like a grid.
You know, if you can make some kind of organizing grid or some people use different tools to organize projects, whatever is kind of your equivalent of let's put everything on a on a whiteboard, you know, sticky notes on a whiteboard. So we can start to organize and get a visual map where we can see what is happening and when and who needs to be attached to what. Like we need to get a new picture of the landscape because the landscape has now changed.
That now helps to also reduce that feeling of chaos and reactivity and gives us a little bit more sense of direction. I'm thinking too, you know, I live in California and we have earthquakes here. And when I was in high school many, many years ago, there was this huge earthquake. It was the Loma Prieta earthquake. And there was quite a lot of destruction in town. And, you know, as a result of this earthquake.
And when things are in chaos and shaken up and everyone's like, what the heck just happened like that? What was that was not what we expected. It's kind of the same thing like the first, the first step is, you know, like, are you, are you OK? OK, things are super intense. We now need to get a sense of the landscape. We need to, you know, to take a look at what, what are we actually dealing with now?
Things have changed. The sooner we can get a picture of that, the sooner we can begin to approach it in a way that will be mindful and grounded and intentional. One of the big questions will be around communication. Who needs to be communicated to about this change and what they can expect in terms of, you know, who's who's now managing this relationship? Who should they reach out to instead? What kind of response time frame
should they expect? It might be something as simple as creating an auto responder for the folks who were let go. And the e-mail that goes out says it doesn't, you know, this person is no longer here. Please give us time before, you know, we're able to figure out who's going to respond next or have an e-mail that says, you know, point to this person
instead. But have some way to capture those relationships and do it in a procedural kind of operations Y way, because that will then just create a little bit more containment and structure around it. And then the next is to come back to appreciation. And appreciation is good on a couple of levels. One is that it helps us to see the best in each other even when facing hard times. Appreciation can be as simple as, I know this is a really hard time that we're going through.
And I really appreciate what you bring to the team, or I really appreciate the way I see you helping. I really appreciate the patience that you've been having. Or I really appreciate your openness and honesty. I'm glad that you came to me directly and told me how you were feeling. Thank you for that.
Appreciation is a way of acknowledging someone both for their strengths, for their honesty and the to the extent that we can bring attention back to those qualities, that will also help us when we move through fear and change.
One of the things that in my own career I've liked to keep in my mind when I'm managing and working with people, even if it's not a formal manager relationship, is thinking of this, thought of we work well together, we're here to do good work together, we can make this good. This is hard, but we've done hard things before. It's hard, but we are humans and we are resilient. Having some kind of intentional, it's almost like an intentional
background thought. It will inform then the way that you communicate and it will help others to begin to see things too. That sense of, you know, we value getting things right. We do our best even under challenging circumstances. There's a lot of things we're not in control of, but as long as we're here, we're going to do
what we can to make this good. It might not be how we would like it to be ideally, but that's the situation we're dealing with, and we're going to do our utmost to get through this. That kind of appreciation can help us both with the emotions and with the focus. You know, it's hard being a human, and when we deal with these situations at work, that's when the best part of being a
human comes out. You know, the tenderness, the emotion, the caring, the how do we deal with challenge, all of that is part of it. And from the perspective of being a manager, I really see this as right. This is This is why we need those skills of working with emotions, managing and directing attention, thinking in terms of different timelines and the landscape.
When you have the vision, then part of that job is to help invite people to it so that they can also reorient and feel connected and know what to focus on and when. And then for yourself, as the manager, you want to also give yourself space to feel and have your emotions. Often when people are looking to you for guidance through a tough time, it can feel like a lot of pressure.
You want to give yourself the grace to also be a human and to call in whatever support you also will need in order to get through this in a sustainable way. We don't want you to, you know, get burned out or to feel like you have to absorb or mask. For the people that are looking to you, so whatever support you can call in for your mental health, for your emotional health, for your physical health, make sure that you feel invited and willing to do that.
Just because you are the leader and it can be a very isolating role at times, it doesn't mean that you are alone or that you are supposed to do things alone. It's actually really important that you also tap into and receive support from others. And if those people are not available to you at work, then have a counselor, a therapist, a coach, a thought partner. You know, good friends and family are also great, but sometimes it's hard because you know, they they have their own
opinions. And one of the things that can be so helpful is to have a space that is just designed for you to come in and say, OK, this is what's heavy on my heart. This is what's taking up my mental space. And I'm having a hard time, you know, kind of dealing with this and receiving support. Coaches are great for that. Counselors and therapists are great for that. And also just being outside and being with nature or spending time with pets. Pets are great because they're
so loving and supportive. And they don't have, they're not giving you any advice. There's no, there's, it's all, it's all unconditional love from our pets. So that is what I wanted to leave with you. You know, managing people is not always an easy thing to do. And when you find yourself in a situation where the team is hurting and going through a hard time, that really calls us to rise into perhaps a role that you hadn't anticipated and maybe
not even wanted. But there are ways to approach it that can be effective and helpful, not just for you, but for the team that you want to support as well. So thank you so much for listening. If you want to work with me one-on-one, have one-on-one support, then book some time for us to talk. Go into the show notes and book a consult with me. If you want to know about my upcoming group program and how to work in more of a collective space, then get on the mailing
list. You'll find a link for that in the show notes as well. All right, have a really great week and I will talk to you next time. When you're more effective at work, you're happier in your life. And when you're happier in your life, you're more effective at work. I can help. Go to my website, kimnickel.com and sign up for a coaching consult. It can get better.