A Great Transition
I'm Moving!
I am going through that overwhelming and discombobulating yet exciting process of picking up all my worldly goods, putting them in boxes, and transporting them 14 miles down the road to a new home to unpack and put them all away again. The complexity of this exercise is multiplied because I am combining households with my partner for the first time. So our individual ideas about where things belong aren’t necessarily valid, and we are having many conversations about how daily life will flow in our new space. This means sharing our personal preferences, ideas, and priorities so that we can decide together how to make this our home.
Now to be sure, this is a joyful process and I am totally delighted about this transition from “my” home in Gig Harbor to “our” new home in Tacoma. We realize our privilege knowing each day so many people around the world are forced from their homes due to war or famine or oppression. So we are grateful.
And, while thankful and happy, everything is still completely disrupted with very little where it needs to be, as we each carry on with work and life while physically tired and mentally frazzled.
Your Great Transition
As I stood in the kitchen contemplating towers of boxes, sensing the overwhelm, and craving order, I realized this experience was a lot like what the leaders and team members we work with are describing about their work right now. They feel disrupted, overwhelmed, chaotic, disconnected, and frustrated, and yet still somehow they are finding ways to function and produce results.
People describe feeling exhausted and longing for some kind of normalcy knowing things will never be the way they were ever again. People tell us they don’t know how all the pieces of work and life fit together now.
Everywhere people are trying to understand and adapt to new customer and team member expectations, wondering how to assemble all that is true now into a coherent, effective way of working.
We wonder…
How can we orient, integrate and build trust with new team members we will rarely if ever see face to face? How should we use our physical space, if we have it and are being asked to use it? How do we create fairness in these decisions across the organization, giving autonomy to managers but being sure all managers are respectfully engaging their teams? How will we coordinate and communicate now? What should we do on those days when we are in the office together? Can we avoid sitting in virtual meetings with others who are home after we’ve driven into the office?
And, can we avoid recreating the workplace mistakes of the past? Can we design an approach to work that doesn't expect so many people to pretend to be someone they are not? Can we make work more equitable? Can our new practices be better for the planet? What good might we create out of distributed work? And what skills, mindsets, conversations, and agreements, are necessary to actually succeed at this?
It’s All in Boxes
So many boxes to unpack.
Everything we thought we knew about work has been boxed up and moved from 2019 to 2022, and now here we are in a new “place” standing in a pile of boxes trying to carry on and wondering where the coffee pot is. Some of our old stuff won’t fit in this new place. Some of it broke in the move. Some of it is out of date and the styles don’t match the new decor: “That’s so 2019!” Some things need to be regrouped, or put in different rooms, or refinished. And it’s all going to feel weird and unfamiliar for a while. We will be certain the sofa should go over there by the window just as it was in our other place, and the towels should go in that closet, but we may discover this is all wrong. It’s going to require living in this new place for a while to figure it out.
Embrace the Neutral Zone
All this moving, this transition from what was to what will be next is awkward and tiring, but it also holds tremendous potential. Transitions guru, William Bridges, in his seminal books Transitions, The Way of Transition, and Managing Transitions, coins what he called the Neutral Zone. This is the place between the Ending of What Used to Be and the New Beginning of What Will Be. The Neutral Zone is a place of potential, creativity, possibility, and innovation. He encouraged people not to miss the benefits of the Neutral Zone in grief over the Endings and eagerness to get on with the New Beginnings.
I can feel that now as I’m moving into this new home, even with the chaos and lack of proper caffeine. And I can feel it as we are working with leaders and teams too. A new kind of work is waiting to be created. The potential is right here. In the last two years, many have tasted the possibilities of a different kind of life and work experience, one that is not dehumanizing, disrespectful, or dismissive. Instead, we are ready to take the best of what we’ve learned and our newfound values and combine those elements into a new way of working that is good for people, society, families, and communities.
Inspiration to Lead Forward to Work
In that spirit, I share here my series on Leading Forward to Work. Written a year ago, it is more timely than ever and lays out a solid process for seizing the potential of this transition within the reality of what’s true now in a distinctly caring way. That is surely better than giving up and existing out of packed boxes or trying to fit the old furniture in the new house just like it was!
Here’s the series:
Design Your Culture Apollo 13 Style
Our Loving Responsibility to Communicate
Navigating Your Team’s Great Transitions
These posts don’t offer formulaic answers. If anyone says to you, “Here is what you MUST do. This is one right way.” Smile, say thanks but no thanks, and send them on their way. The truth is there is no one answer to these questions. Remote work is both terrible for some and amazing for others. Hybrid work for some teams seems impossible to coordinate, while others have cracked the code. Some organizations should never require everyone to return to the office, and others need the coordination and face-to-face customer service that in-person work supports. Yes, all these are true, and all apply to some teams.
The question is, what are YOUR team’s collective needs? And what are the many ways you might decide to meet those specific needs within the circle of your purpose?
We know human beings are too complex for one-size-fits-all answers, so why do we try to pigeonhole human systems to be? They can’t be because they are entirely made up of these complex human beings. Your organization has a specific set of considerations and your own uniquely skilled, creative, and dedicated team of people ready to create a better future.
Principles to Guide You
Some principles can guide this process, drawn from my experience moving:
Keep listening to each other and discovering needs, values, and gifts. The conversations my partner and I are having are rooted in respect and care. We each want to know what the other thinks and needs. We know we will be happier if the other is happy too. We are discovering each other’s hidden skills too. He has a knack for optimizing closets and creatively adapting space. I have a gift for assembling our individual items to create a space that we each find personal and welcoming. We are discovering and playing to our strengths but doing that by proceeding with care.
At the intersection of our needs, values, gifts, our purpose and real-world constraints are creative solutions. Find these by having the courage and openness to lay it all out there and see what emerges. We have a real budget. We value things like working from home, cooking, entertaining friends, and watching the Sounders, but we don’t really care about automobile projects or practicing putting. So we will make choices for what to do with our space and skills based on our unique collection of priorities and constraints. Your team should too.
Don’t make assumptions about what is needed or possible. No one person has all this knowledge or all the ideas. That’s why my partner and I need each other; that’s why you need your whole team.
Choose some solutions, try them out, learn what works, and adjust as you go. Solve the problems that are most crucial today. Right now for us, that means setting up outdoor spaces for cooking and relaxing while giving no energy to how we will decorate the house for the holidays in December. So your team’s organizational choices and priorities will shift as the context you operate in continually changes.
Human-Centered Transition
With its emphasis on relationships and collaboration, this Leading Forward to Work process is not a quick fix. But it is realistic and truthful about what will bring you through this transition and to a new normal with humanity at the center of your work.
After all, we believe the Greatest Transition we could make in our workplaces would be to put people and the planet we depend on as top priorities. The ideas for how to do that are all around us, in the creativity and inspiration that will come when together we unpack our boxes, talk together, and then decide how to live and work together in this new time.
Now, it’s time for me to go find the coffee maker!
Please reach out to talk about bringing this Leading Forward to Work process to your team: renee@makeworkmorehuman.com
