Navigating Trust Issues in a Post-Pandemic World
Every so often, someone does something that compels me to send a message. Actually, let's try that opener again, unfiltered.
Every so often, someone does something that makes me want to get REAL TRULY PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE. I'm talking about serving up of a giant plate of SHEBLAM or a public service announcement about how DOWNRIGHT TOXIC some people’s adult children are.
I had one of those moments recently, though I won’t go into the details. But trust me, I’d love nothing more than to send the hard-core facts out to 1000 people. To put it simply, it involved me, someone I miscalculated, and me being told off, all while the other person was completely mistaken about the facts and emotionally charged for reasons only who knows. Where she should have taken a breath, she instead took a shot, and therefore parked the "what happens next" situation on my doorstep. Which was fantastic, as always. I had three options open before me in that half-second, and they went like this:
Dig REAL deep and respond with the dignity and ethics that would keep me in my values (i.e. the high road, which was not highly appetizing but was the “high” road nonetheless).
Insult her right back, breaking her wings in an equivalent way. No guilt required cause she freaking started it (i.e the “same” road as her).
Hurl any one of the five insults I instantly had at my disposal and REDUCE her. Between you and me, I had better verbal sparring abilities than her and the only chance she had of NOT being sufficiently reduced was something she was too obtuse to see (i.e. The low road, obviously, and my opportunity to take the basement lower. I didn’t take it. But I could have, just sayin’).
Alright. Having got my real feelings out of the way, let's be professionals about this. I’ve noticed something: we've become more skeptical and less trusting of each other. Call it the pandemic, or me being born in the wrong generation, or a hundred other possibilities, but as we enter the post-pandemic era, workplaces, families and people are facing a new reality: everything is different, and most of us are having trust issues after all this. I feel like all I ever talk about in coaching these days is trust, how nobody has any of it anymore, and how we all…have, well, trust issues. It’s muddying everything. Relationships are challenged. Mental health issues are exacerbated. Belonging is a luxury that few of us feel with all things being remote, and so for most, the work culture is…a bit of a dumpster fire these days.
Responding to Crisis
In response to this, leaders are having to wade through waters where they have very little experience. While organizations understand their core business and technical skills, precious few leaders have the skillset to know how trust is built well, or how to do the delicate work of people development. How do you create a policy that helps people align better? What exactly is the training program for increasing psychological safety at work? Not many leaders know. And you know who else doesn't know? That dimwit from the low road that I mentioned earlier. (Sorry, I'm not over it yet.)
What I’m Excited About
Amidst all of this, I feel excited about something. Over the last 5 years, I’ve been on rooftops talking about how workplaces need to get just as good at developing people as they are at driving results. As Robert Hooijberg and Michael Watkins wrote in an article in MITSloan, leaders must become multi-modal into the next era and be able to bring a strong coaching presence. From the most senior position to the lowest, we all need a regular diet of stopping to think, reflect, and pick the best next steps in our roles. That gap between thinking and reflecting is a giant one for most of us and we don’t have nearly enough of it in our lives. Well, here at Red Maple, we call that coaching. A moment of attention given from another soul, one in which you slow down and do some quiet thought and calculating. It—coaching—has a role in every important domain you can think of these days, from mental wellbeing to teamwork, work-from-home challenges, burnout, productivity, and most of all…trust.
The Impact of Good Coaching
Good coaching is a gamechanger, and I think the window to our vision has opened and we’re jumping through it. That’s why Red Maple’s Leadership Coaching Canada Transformational Leadership Coaching program is designed to develop high-impact coaches with the essential mindsets, skills and a supportive community they need to coach well. The world needs more well-coached, high-impact people. And so, even though our default is to tighten controls and behave solely out of the collective anxiety we've all experienced, maybe we can just, well, not do that. Maybe we can take the road that is a little higher.
