Better to Forgive than to Forget

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Some recent research found that forgiveness affects perception of difficulty even during physical performance. Jay and I have been discussing how forgiveness might also affect the workplace.

The research found that just thinking about a time you didn’t forgive someone increased the perception of a hill’s steepness and decreased your ability to jump. At first glance neither seems related to any advantage for forgiveness in work or personal relationships. But let us suggest some possibilities.

Imagine your reaction if a team member, one more time, doesn’t follow through on an assignment or avoids thinking for themself and asks you a series of obvious and frustrating questions. You’ve been here before and your irritation level spikes. If you’re jumping ahead and thinking that we’re going to ask you to forgive the team member, well that may help, but actually the idea we’ve been thinking about may be even more important to you.

In the situation above, your response may not have been very measured and thus probably doesn’t decrease the odds you will do any better next time. Let’s face it, you blew it and now that you’ve calmed down you’re blaming yourself. Our question is, would it help to forgive yourself?

Many of our executive clients admonish themselves for “stupid” mistakes or misjudgments. They’ve read lots of advice to “put it behind you” or “let it go” but it’s possible that you might create better future solutions and stronger working relationships if you forgive rather than to try to forget. The perception of the magnitude of the effort it would take to train team members and build more effective management approaches—the hill you have to climb—might seem less daunting if you started with a bit more understanding i.e. forgiving yourself.

Once self-recrimination is tempered by or resolved with self-forgiveness, it seems reasonable to expect that we might free up our focus, creativity and energy. Tasks, including repairing our mentoring role with team members, may look less formidable.

Have you practiced a process that acknowledges, forgives and lets you get on with the task? This is where the mental game comes to the front. How quickly can you forgive your own missteps and begin to work on a different solution and repair the relationship you injured?

One hint is to focus forward with coaching prompts like :

“Well I won’t do that again!”
“That was a learning experience.”
“I lost my focus on that move.”
“What would I do differently next time?”

All of which lead to better future results than blaming and staying stuck regretting the experience.

Superior management skills and results come from practicing emotional control and getting more proficient at the basics of support and influence.

Incremental Changes Build to Success

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Doing all or nothing often feels easier than making minor adjustments. An all or nothing approach takes fewer on-going decisions than a moderate approach. But the huge investment of time and energy can put enormous pressure on us, which may not be feasible given other responsibilities. Then the excuses come—“I’d do all if I only had more time, better employees, a bigger budget, but I don’t, so I’ll do nothing.”

Smaller steps are not as exciting and may not feel like they’re worth the effort. Try setting a goal that feels worth investing in, but only pushes your schedule and commitments a small amount—enough to notice an improvement but well within your realistic capabilities.

Here’s an example of a moderate approach to change the way you train your employees or regulate your work schedule. A client of ours was trying to prepare her team for a major restructuring that would require a number of current team members to begin working more independently. She came to us asking how she could get them to begin making the decisions that she currently did.

She understood that she needed to stop answering their questions and encourage them to find answers by themselves. But she was worried that they would think it strange and even hostile if she simply refused to answer their questions one day.

“How do I explain the change?”

“How often do you answer their questions now?” Jay asked.

“They really aren’t required to think about all the ramifications of most questions so it’s faster if I just answer them and they can get back to work.”

“You need to consider potential future responsibilities when you’re training and working with current line-level team members. Start ongoing, incremental training by challenging them to think in order to prepare them for future responsibilities. In addition, you will have a system to recognize potential leaders. Be transparent about your training intent and regularly ask for suggested answers, which you can then evaluate with the team member.  Now, in your current situation, be transparent about your intent to encourage them to quickly develop answers on their own, but don’t leave them frustrated with no answer.

How about telling them, ‘I want you to begin to come to me with both questions and your best answers. We will spend a minute talking about your thinking. Most of the time I will then expect you to go ahead and implement the answer you think works the best.  I know you will make some mistakes, but I trust you to push questions back to me, if you think it might cause serious harm to a client or the business. There may well be an increase in your stress at the beginning, but I’ll stand with you and we will take this a step at a time.’”

She tried it and reported that one team member was flying solo within three days—a competence she would have recognized, if she had been asking for answers all along. Another team member experienced a great deal of anxiety about shouldering the responsibility even though her answers were solid. Again, even though this person rose to the challenge, the transition would have gone more smoothly with a longer ramp-up time. The third team member was great at follow through but poor at strategically thinking through the ramifications of complex answers. An incremental approach over time would have also identified this fundamental weakness and not wasted precious transition time trying to train-up a poor management candidate.

Transitions and change don’t tend to happen in one fell swoop. The first step is most often a small one—a trial, an experiment, a taste of something different. Trying things in small steps also allows lots of room for innovation and for learning what is effective. Small steps leave room for corrective action.

Don’t expect to implement a change with maximum effect and minimum time investment by simply flying into it whole hog. We can help you plan how to integrate change into your team interactions with the least disruption to your work flow and the most benefit. Contact us for more information and a strategic planning session.