These Non-Robots Are Stressing Me Out!
This week, COVID came thundering through the Moore household like DeAndre Jordan on an alley-oop.
While COVID scored on everyone in our house, I was the guy who got dunked on the most. Thankfully, everyone’s doing well. My wife never tested positive, lending credence to her claim of having a superior immune system. I’ll never hear the end of this.
I’ve been thinking about how communal the experience with this latest variant is. A good share of the people I’ve talked with about our situation have also experienced COVID in the last few weeks. In fact, not more than 5 minutes before Erin told me our kids had tested positive, I was emailing with a client who was in the middle of quarantine.
I was also thinking about communal experiences because of a comment a client made to me—which was essentially, “I thought I was better at this leadership stuff.”
I responded that every leader I’ve seen and worked with is struggling on some dimension of leadership, and it’s often the same challenges. .
Most of us are trying to work more effectively with our boss. Just in the past week, I’ve had three conversations where that was the topic, and the people involved were in different sectors, at different-sized companies, and they are different ages.
For most of us, there are too many things to do, and not enough people to do them. In fact, I think this is the natural state of organizations. The momentum is usually in the direction of more.
Most of us have an employee who isn’t performing. And because most of us aren’t jerks and because there are always more things to do, it’s a hard situation to manage.
Most of us live in a society and work for organizations that are built around constant judgment. Because of that, save for the egomaniacs among us, there is always some doubt about whether we measure up.
The communal experience even extends to leaders’ lives outside of work.
Most of our kids behave like idiots on a regular basis. My kids are young, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from those with older kids, it’s that their idiocy just moves topics. Today it’s using the potty. Tomorrow it’s their career choices.
What these all come down to: The non-robots around me aren’t perfectly designed to give me what I want, at the exact time I want it, and it’s stressing me out.
The bad news? Because all of this stuff is related to working with human beings, it never quite ends.
The good news? If we’re struggling with it, we’re probably pretty normal.