Love, Therapy, and Failure: Building Teams That Can Survive and Thrive In 2022

What do good leaders do when their teams have poured out their efforts and find their glasses empty? How do you steer your team through exhaustion and fatigue and create a space for emotional health? What power do you have as a leader to retain talent with a growth mindset when your team feels like they have nothing left to give?

These are difficult questions I’ve asked myself every day as my former company, and roughly 5 other small-to-mid-sized firms were acquired by a new parent company, and I found myself serving as one of the people tasked with bringing them all together.

As I write this, I know there are members of my team reading this note on LinkedIn as they search for new job opportunities in the best market for workers in American history. I also genuinely believe, that most of them want to stay. The choice, however, isn't always made easy enough, and while internal satisfaction with our team is extremely high, my team members are exhausted.

I know I’m not alone, but the question remains: what do you do about it? The bet I’m placing with my team comes down to a single world: love. So far, we have seen higher employee engagement, greater retention, and increased optimism among team members.

*A note before we get started: I want to emphasize that love is not simply an emotional expression - it is far more complex than that. Love is an individual, social, and political value. It should inform every part of your corporate culture and policy from compensation transparency and equity, to diversity in recruiting and hiring, to performance management practices, and creating a culture of inclusion. This article is specifically about love in the context of self-compassion as a way of re-framing your day-to-day individual and team practices but love should also serve as a guiding principle for addressing and transforming systemic issues within your organization, community, and industry.*

Love? Really?

Love as a concept in the workplace is nothing new. Steve Farber , author of The Radical Leap, wrote a whole book about it called Love Is Just Damn Good Business which I recommend to everyone. In the book, Steve puts forward a powerful idea:

“Do what you love, in the service of people, who love what you do.”

Steve believes, as I do, that love in the workplace is made up of two things: Kindness, and Quality. To that, I would add also explicitly add “Service”. In good times and bad, those two things, Love and Service, have unlocked my own team in ways that have amazed me. They push themselves harder, they work longer, and they take on work that they’re afraid of because they know that if they push through those fears great things wait on the other side. However, that sort of pushing is unsustainable and can lead team members to burn themselves out and for you, as a leader, to find yourself hemorrhaging talent. An acquisition and integration is a multi-year effort, so how do we pace our teams and help them survive and thrive?

We need to invest time, money, and resources into helping our team members learn to love themselves. This will enable them to survive and thrive in 2022.

In my lived experience, this starts with focusing on self-compassion and diving deep into the emotional health of our teams in a way that treats team members with dignity, respect, privacy, and integrity.

This is hard

In a guided meditation on the power of self-compassion, the author and speaker Kristin Neff, suggested something that became a bit of a mantra for me throughout the past year as my company was acquired:

“This is hard. It would be hard for anyone. I’m going to do my best.”

I found myself returning to those words time and again. If you haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing the excruciating stress and anxiety that comes with simultaneously integrating the sales and delivery operations of a half dozen companies during a global pandemic, I might recommend you try to do literally anything else with your career. I, naturally, turned to the business books for help.

Books like Steve's told me that love and passion would get us through. A high-performing team, driven by love and service who actively faces their fears, and is adequately staffed with passionate leaders and team members? According to these books, I am literally living a manager's dream. So, why is my team still so exhausted?

Why is my team so exhausted? It’s because it’s really f***ing hard.

All of it. Caring so much. Working non-stop. Loving your customers. Taking care of your family. Worrying about the world, the country, your health, your kid’s health, your parent’s health, your mortgage. It’s all just so hard. Our people have poured themselves out for us and there is nothing left.

It takes a special type of person to find enjoyment in the kind of total chaos that can come with an acquisition. HBR did not prepare me for this! For most of us, we’re focused on survival. As leaders, we need to develop better strategies for refilling the glass, because there aren’t enough workers out there to just replace the people we burned out. We need to transform our practices in the workplace beyond just that 30 minute bi-weekly yoga-class-over-Microsoft-Teams.

After acknowledging how universally hard this experience is, we need to help our teams place their emotions and pressures in a larger context by also acknowledging that these challenges aren't any easier for other people.

It would be hard for anyone

“This is hard. It would be hard for anyone. I’m going to do my best.”

Consider the power and humanity in acknowledging that this work would be hard for anyone. What our team members need today isn’t more pressure or inspirational quarterly town halls. Teams like mine (and I readily acknowledge not all teams are like mine) are self-motivated and high-functioning, but we're also extremely self-critical. We can be as mean to ourselves as we are loving to our fellow team members.

Creating space and grace to acknowledge that this work is universally hard helps destroy the mythical "smarter, better, braver" person out there who could do this work in their sleep. It dampens the fear that our team members feel each day that they're perhaps one heartbeat away from being discovered for the imposter they think they are.

You can’t, of course, control what your people feel. But you can, and must, create the space and provide them with the tools to understand their feelings and reframe them so they make sense. By doing this, you help them refocus on doing their daily best.

I'm going to do my best

“This is hard. It would be hard for anyone. I’m going to do my best.”

In his incredible book The Four Agreements , author and speaker Don Miguel Ruiz talks about the idea of doing your best. When you're sick, you do your sick best. When a team member is out you do your "team member is out best," and when your acquisition is weighing you down, you do your "acquisition best." Our best is a moving target and we need to help our team members understand this reality, and forgive themselves. The cost of allowing them to try to do their healthy best when they're sick outweighs the actual return.

This one is really hard to put into practice, and my team members have challenged me to be specific. One concrete action we took was pausing the concept of SLAs. Before the acquisition we were stable and well-positioned to hold our performance as a team accountable to certain performance ranges. In 2022, however, we took on the volumes of five other companies and so much of what we knew about our capabilities is in the process of being re-baselined. Until that happens, our team members can't be allowed to burn themselves out. So, we switched from an SLA-based approach to an "estimated wait time" approach. If the wait time for servicing a particular project gets too high, we'll redirect resources towards it, but our internal customers have been very supportive and understanding. We want to return to SLAs but it's more important for us to retain the team and acknowledging that the definition of "our best" will need to be flexible until we're stable.

Start Today - 9 Ways to Practice Love at Work

Love as an essential business function won't change your culture overnight, but there are steps you can take immediately that will lay the foundation for future success.

1.????Repeat the mantra “This is hard. It would be hard for anyone. I’m/We’re going to do my/our best.” every day, in every meeting. Even when your team starts teasing you about it, don’t stop.

2.????Fail Better. One of the single biggest things we’ve done on our team is implement a value of “Fail Better” and the response has been incredible. Our value reads: “We believe failure is our greatest, and most revealing, teacher. We encourage experimentation, escalation, and failure, and we learn from failure the first time. We operate with a bias toward action. We interrogate failure to understand it, and seek to minimize its impact on others, without seeking to engineer it out entirely.” I have literally had people on my team cry in gratitude for encouraging a culture of Fail Better because it frees them to take bigger swings in the interest of loving and serving others. And if they fail? Well, that’s the point! Thank them for it, learn the lesson, move on!

3.????Refresh your weekly team meeting by de-emphasizing productivity and re-emphasizing self-care. Self-compassion starts by slowing the week down and talking. On my team we call this the “Breathing Hour” – it opens with some brief announcements but then it is pretty free-form and team members and managers are free to talk about their stresses (thorns), their victories (roses), and to decompress. I think of it as an oasis in the team’s week. To be honest, the first 5 minutes are always weird but once you give each other permission to be human beings and not little automatons, you will feel revitalized. This isn't a perfect fit for all teams but for self-motivated, high-functioning teams it's terrific.

4.????Talk about your values constantly. If your values aren’t guiding the decisions that enable your team to love themselves, then change your values. They’re not doing you any good! At every opportunity put the decision you’re making in the context of a team or corporate value - do this in as many meetings, e-mails, or 1-1s as you can. It's also a great way to remind people that the company actually has values!

5.????Take time off. Time away from work is rejuvenating and can often reveal inefficient processes that are preventing your people from practicing self-care. Your people also need to see you taking time off. Set a PTO goal for your team members and for yourself. This is especially important if your team has a discretionary or “unlimited” PTO policy which can subversively cause team members to take less PTO than they otherwise would.

6.????Go to, and talk about, therapy. Research your company’s covered offerings for behavioral health services, and give team members permission to take therapy appointments during the day. Go to therapy yourself. Talk about it. Encourage them. I hope to write a post about this in the future but removing the stigma around seeking mental health services will lead to greater business results. Never underestimate the trauma your team members have been living with every day due to bad managers in the past. All of these traumas add up and the cost is inestimable. Be brave. Go to therapy.

7.????Cancel and decline meetings. Give your team permission to cancel and decline meetings. Don’t think this goes without saying. So many of our problems are caused by cultures where nothing can get done without a meeting, and consequently team members feel they have no choice but to burn themselves out in service of the greater good. This needs to stop. Teach your team members to decline and cancel meetings with a high level of integrity, and watch work actually get done.

8.????Express gratitude. I mean, duh. Be specific and don’t go over the top but at every turn express gratitude. This is one of the best ways to make your team members feel seen – especially when they are performing acts of service not strictly required of them.

9.????Turn down the pressure. The emotional weight of a “pressure cooker” working environment will destroy your team. Keep placing projects, operations, and tasks in a larger perspective. Rarely will the fate of the entire company rest on one person’s shoulders, and if it does, you’re either a very small organization, or you have built a house of cards that needs to be completely transformed. Help your people be kind to themselves by reminding them that we’re all responsible for success.

Do what you love, in the service of people, who love what you do

We’re never going to be able to retain every talented person on our teams. There are too many factors beyond our individual control as leaders. What I know, though, is that by taking steps to create an emotionally healthy workspace founded on love, we can create a community of individuals who love themselves as much as they love those they serve.

When Steve says "Do what you love, in the service of people, who love what you do" I have learned that this means that as leaders we are using our talents in the service of team members who love what we do as leaders. Team members treated with love, respect, grace, and dignity who can operate in an environment free of fear's persistent hum will always pay it forward to their customers, their co-workers, their families, and their communities.

Today, tomorrow, or as soon as you’re ready, be brave. Choose love for your team, and help them access their inner reserves to help them love themselves.