Managing Our Perspective

Recently a friend of mine requested a post about the 'gaze' of upper management that falls on us when we or the teams we lead experience a failure, mistake, or setback. Management rarely feels easy and this aspect of it brings a large share of emotional pressure to our work. This pressure usually increases in proportion to the size of the group we manage. The bigger the group, the likelier the odds of a failure and the greater the chance of that failure being spectacular. Hey, management isn't for everybody.

During a race this spring I crashed twice and I felt pretty shaken up after the second fall. I quickly went from pushing myself too hard to not pushing hard enough. Getting my head back in the race and off of those falls required that I re-focus on my larger goal - winning the race. I had to place everything in the right perspective. The crashes were behind me, the finish line was still a long way off in front of me.

Dealing with the emotional pressure of personal or team failures becomes easier by keeping these setbacks in the right perspective. If we make the job about ourselves, then the failure will be about us. But the job isn't about us, it's mainly about two other things: our customers and the vision guiding the long-term goals of our teams.

Focusing on our customers. There are failures that affect them and failures that don't - we need to tell the difference. My failure to get HR documents delivered on time (while certainly a bad thing) has little bearing on the network uptime of my customers. Our intra-departmental failures generally have a shorter term impact than mistakes affecting our customers and the former should have much smaller emotional impact on us than the latter. Often, it's a disconnect from our customers and a focus on ourselves that erroneously flips the impact around.

Focusing on our vision. Our political mistakes and losses that we experience in management can be rough, but the day to day wins or losses of various battles should only matter in as much as they impact our goals that are two, five or ten years out. I've lost my fair share of arguments, but no matter how personal the disagreements feel or how personal the other person makes them, it's the impact on my team's vision that matters. Again, focusing on the long term takes ourselves (and our bruised egos) out of the equation by putting the failure in the right perspective.

Sometimes our failures directly affect our customers and sometimes they can be quite damaging to our long term goals. I'll save thoughts on that for another post.

Until then, manage well.