Zena Everett's Blog, page 2

How to support an upset colleague

Hi Zena,  Members of my team have been shouted at by angry customers recently.  It’s nothing they’ve done wrong; these people just seem to think they can take out their bad mood on us.  We are well trained, but some people have been upset over it.   I’ve given them advice on how to rise above it, but it doesn’t seem to help 
‘Thanks to AC in the insurance industry for this email.  It seems to be an increasingly angry world.  Last week I was sworn at when doing a voluntary shift on a helpline. It was far more vicious than the standard effing and jeffing I’ve become accustomed to.  My local bookshop owner told me someone let rip to her staff over a trivial delayed order.

Research by Professor Christine Porath at Georgetown University found that 98% of us experience ‘incivility’ at work to some degree.  This can be micro aggressions like snide emails, disrespectful conversations, or full-on threats of violence. 
 
We can shrug it off, up to a point. The stress bucket model explains our different levels of tolerance.  We all carry different loads of stress at different times. An event that we find very stressful might not even register on someone else’s radar.  However, resilience fluctuates depending on what else is going on in our lives. If we are struggling with family or relationship problems, financial worries or illness, one seemingly minor work stressor can tip us over the edge.  The World Health Organisation reports that one in seven children between the ages of ten to nineteen experiences a mental health disorder.  Their normally resilient parents won’t have many reserves left to deal with arseholes at work.  Managers need to be sensitive to these vulnerabilities under pressure and not be surprised by an uncharacteristic reaction when people are less thick-skinned than usual.

Name the feeling to tame the feeling

When we are upset by something, it helps enormously to say so: to be asked how we are feeling and to have those feelings acknowledged.  That’s what I needed last week.  I didn’t need advice or a debrief, I just needed what I got: someone to ask how I was and to speak to them about how the call made me feel.  My feelings were validated, I was listened to.  It only took a couple of minutes. I processed it, then got back on the phone.  

Think about your last bad day. Did you want to talk about it and get it off your chest? Or did you want someone to tell you how they would have handled it better?  Most likely you wanted someone to ask how you were and allow you to talk about how you felt.  You didn’t want advice and AC, if someone hasn’t taken your advice, I’m afraid it’s probably because they didn’t want it.  

Here’s some thoughts on how to be more supportive:

1. Get to know the person behind the mask

How well do you know your team – the real people behind the professional work face?  What’s really going on in their lives?  Who might bring this stuff home with them and allow it to fester?   We are messy humans, not robots. We bring our past experiences to work and these shape our current relationships and behaviour.  

I don’t mean that we should Share Our Truth Authentically. We just need to find a little time to get to know each other better. What are the events in people’s backstory or private life that might cause their emotional response to bad behaviour?  
 
People vary in their attitude to authority figures for example. An aggressive person can bring up uncomfortable memories.  Someone with a more secure base may find it easier to shake off an unpleasant encounter and move on.  Don’t make assumptions. They aren’t you. Spend more pockets of time with them when you can.  Gradually build up a picture of the whole person, so you can empathise with them and understand their perspective better.

Listen to how they feel and don’t try to fix them.
You and I are paid to solve business problems, but emotional problems don’t need fixing. The upset person wants an empathetic ear, not a solution.  Your 2025 mantra is: feel it, don’t fix it.
 
When your system goes down, you need a solution. You don’t need to discuss how you feel about it. When you have a people or emotional problem, you absolutely want to unpack it and discuss how it makes you feel.  Perhaps not immediately, personally I like to retreat to a cave for a bit, but once you’ve had time to recharge. 

Listening properly is hard, it’s much easier to dole out advice. Crazy busyness has crowded out proper conversations. 

Here’s some listening tips:
 
Do:
Aim to validate their feelings and make them feel heard.
Tell them that you’ve noticed what happened and ask them how they are feeling.
Get them to open up by using coaching skills: the reflecting, clarifying and summarising skills on the listening wheel.
Arrange to talk later if you can’t give them your undivided attention now.
Get comfortable with silence. There is no need to fill the gap.
Offer advice only if it would be negligent not to. 

Don’t:
Expect them to trust you if you’ve never really listened to them before.  They’ll think you are just ticking boxes. 
Overstep their boundaries by digging for emotions that they don’t want to talk about.  They are under no obligation to share their thoughts with you.
Dispute their version of events, like gushing ‘that’s ridiculous, of course you are amazing at what you do’.  You’ll just annoy them, so hold back.   Challenge a negative mindset gently, with facts: ‘how many times have you done the same task with excellent feedback?’
 Bring it back to you.  ‘You think you’ve got problems?!  Let me tell you what I have to deal with’. 

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How to blow the doors off 2025

What will you do differently next year?  I was taught that it is trite to start an article with ‘in these volatile, unpredictable and challenging times,’ but in this case, I’ll make an exception.  All we can control is where we focus our time and energy, and our behaviour too of course.

My clients are straddling new and old worlds as they battle to reclaim their attention.  Exhausted by the brain fog that comes with overuse of tech, they are ditching Tik Tok in favour of long form journalism.  They are playing around with Microsoft Copilot and Chat GPT to make their lives easier, whilst reviving old school time management rules like first things first and doing one thing at once and doing it well.

Two themes stood out from recent Crazy Busy events:

  Aggressive Simplification

People are fed up with being time poor, with every moment scheduled and no time for themselves. They want to simplify their lives to remove distractions and have fewer choices.  That includes deleting apps, clearing out clutter in all aspects of their lives from clothes to low value projects, and setting stronger boundaries around time-sucks like meetings without decisions.  They need their business to be nimble and responsive: gritty, not stuck in the mud.

A reminder of the Warren Buffet quote on how successful people differ from everyone else because they say no more often:

They say no to opportunities and things that don’t excite them, speak to their values or further their mission in life.  They say no to spending time with uninspiring, critical, or negative people who drag them down.  They say no to overworking and neglecting self-care and family.  They recognise that everything else suffers if they can’t take care of themselves.

What do you need to be more ruthless about?

Being Accountable

Once they’ve committed, people want to go all in on what matters to them.  They intend to excel in their roles, whether that’s their professional job description or the personal roles they fulfil – parent, partner, friend, family, or community member. 

Being accountable means being forward-focused: not just getting tasks done but following something through to completion even when it’s not technically your responsibility.  It means owning your mistakes and apologising if you need to.  It is giving and receiving feedback and having your team’s back.  It might mean looking out for a colleague who seems off form and needs someone to talk to.   It’s managing your mood and showing up consistently.  It’s owning your part of the problem, not blaming everyone else when things go wrong: not the customers, the system, the CEO, the government, the teachers, your parents, or anyone else.

How will you blow the doors off 2025?

Here’s a simple exercise to decide what to say no to next year and what is worthy of a whole-hearted ‘hell yes’.   

What was important to you this year but you didn’t spend enough time on it? What were the consequences of this?What did you spend too much time on, that added little or no value to your life?Can you swop the two?

One final question:
 If you believed in yourself, what would you prioritise in 2025?

That’s it from me this year. Thanks so much for reading my articles, working with me and pushing me to keep coming up with fresh ideas. 

Badly Behaved People, will be out in time for Christmas, to buy or order at your local bookshop or on Amazon.  It’s real-life case studies from my coaching practise, featuring 15 common problem personalities and how to handle them.  You might even recognise some of them.

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The thirty stage interview process and other mind-numbing bureaucracy

Senior candidates at one global tech company have to undergo a thirty stage process before a hiring decision is made.  This is a classic example of  productivity drag: the sludge in the system that gets in the way of getting things done.  It’s what I call crazy busyness.   

Here are some symptoms of productivity drag.  Do you recognise any of them?

1. Too much going on. 
There always seems to be new projects, but complex systemic problems are kicked down the road because there’s no appetite to tackle them until they turn into a crisis.  If routine requests aren’t marked as urgent they often get ignored.  

2.  Too many people in the tent.  
There are too many egos and opinions and no sense of common purpose.  It’s hard to pin anyone down for a decision.   Output falls between the cracks because of a lack of role clarity and accountability. The wheels still turn but everyone is in the weeds. No one seems to be scanning the horizon for risks or opportunities.  

3.  Too many communication channels.

People try to fit their work into small slices of time between messages, meetings and other interruptions.  Essential planning happens in the early mornings or late evenings. It seems indulgent – or impossible – to do it during the working day.

4.  Too many people problems.
Managers don’t have time to develop people or even communicate properly with them.  The ‘people stuff’ is a distraction from their real job. Apart from formulaic one to ones, they don’t really talk to their teams.  This leads to obvious problems, internally and externally with customers. They lose people worth keeping.  

Work with ease in 2025
If you are bogged down with sluggish operations like this you’ll lose the race against your more nimble competitors. 

 
Removing productivity drag is the vital bridge between strategy and execution.  It doesn’t matter how  talented your team is.  
Research shows that in corporate life we waste at least 25% of our time fighting drag. That’s more than a lost day per person per week, in a time when resources are already under pressure.

Here’s the stages.
 
1. Book me for early 2025 to talk to your leaders and teams about weeding out productivity drag and crazy busyness.  Spot it, label it, fix it.  I’ll provide copies of The Crazy Busy Cure.  
 
2. Then get a crack team together to identify everything that gets in the way of getting things done.  Don’t do a survey, talk to people.  Ideally do their tasks with them to understand the issues. Map out the glitches and schedule time to fix them.

3.  Put working with ease at the centre of your culture.  Reward valuable work, not busy work.  Don’t let the sludge build back up.   At the end of every project or completion of work ask how you can work together more efficiently next time. Train managers to smooth the workflow. 
 
Feel free to share this email.  If anyone says that they’ll circle back to you on it another time, that’s crazy busyness right there.

Zena Everett
International Speaker, Author, Leadership Team Coach

See my talks and programmes here: www.zenaeverett.com 
Animations: YouTube
Start a conversation: zena@zenaeverett.com
Let’s talk:  +44 7968 424650

How badly do you need a Crazy Busy session ? Try my quiz and watch my animation on prioritisation.

Christmas is coming

Email me to get a 40% discount on orders of ten copies or more of my award winning second book, The Crazy Busy Cure. It is also available on Amazon or to order from your local bookshop and on your Spotify and Audible subscriptions.  

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Tech firms are cancelling meetings and you should too

Last year Shopify cancelled all meetings with more than two people.  Their workforce of over 11,600 employees was fully remote. 12,000 calendar events were deleted at one stroke.  Wednesdays became totally meeting-free.  In research shared with Worklife, time spent in meetings dropped by 33% per employee. There was a 25% increase in completed projects.  The business became ‘more operationally excellent and faster’.

Asana conducted a ‘meeting doomsday exercise’, asking employees to identify meetings that lacked value.  Most 30-minute meetings were converted to 15 minutes, some weekly meetings shifted to every other week or month and others were deleted entirely.  That meant each person was saving an average of 11 hours a month, about 3.5 workweeks per year.

Meanwhile other organisations meet and message as if it was still the middle of the Covid crisis.  Since February 2020 people are in three times more Microsoft teams meetings and calls per week – a 192% increase.  They now have more meetings in a day than they previously had in a whole week.  Ironically, Microsoft’s own research has found that 68% of employees struggle to keep up with the pace of work.   No guesses why.

The average worker spends about 37% of their time at work in meetings or coordinating them. Then there’s all the Teams messages on top. Have you done the maths?  It’s impossible to think in 30-minute chunks between meetings. People end up triaging their inbox, adding to the 360 billion emails that are sent globally every single day.

The tech companies are fully aware of the dangers of the attention economy and the damage caused by their products.  In the same way that tech executives don’t let their own children have smart phones, they control their employees’ reliance on communication technology.

Slack for example has a no-meeting Focus Friday policy and Maker Weeks, when teams cancel recurring internal meetings and focus on creating, coding, planning, writing.  They found a tipping point that more than two hours of meetings a day lowered productivity.  Owl Labs, who sell video conferencing devices, don’t have meetings on Fridays.  Meetings during the rest of the week are monitored carefully and prioritised around teams’ work patterns.

Is it time for your Meeting Doomsday exercise?

No one has a company mission to sit in meetings all day.  Yet at every Crazy Busy session I run, people say that meeting overload is the main inhibitor to productivity: aimless, repetitive internal meetings that suck up time and literally do their heads in. ‘How can I block out time for focused work when I haven’t got any space in my calendar?’ I get asked.

They tell me that lack of time for pre-meeting preparation means they often need another meeting to make a decision. They can’t organise that meeting for weeks, sometimes months, ahead because everyone’s calendar is busy.  No wonder we have productivity problems.  Just because meeting technology is available to us, we don’t have to be suckered into using it mindlessly.  It’s too easy to invite everyone into a meeting.  Unnecessary collaboration is a big factor in productivity drag – crazy busyness.

Take the plunge and make a cultural change.  Go back to your  purpose.  Audit your meetings, cut back where you can, and train people to chair the rest effectively.

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