Hold the Space For Your Team to Feel and Share

After publishing the “Let’s Get Real About Fear” play yesterday we had so much amazing feedback. There are so many different situations out there… so many teams that are silently wrestling with this. The fact that you don’t hear about the internal turmoil as a team leader should worry you. Your urgent job is to create and uphold the space for these hard conversations. The play that we created may help frame the hard talks but it won’t avoid them.

This video continues to speak about holding the space:

Because of the nature of this war, Ukraine-only teams may be faring better in terms of their feelings anchored firmly in their own reality and (hopefully) not working or having to interact with western, safe, colleagues. It is the split reality between the lived atrocity of war with death happening everywhere around and the fact that our support system, the humans we normally work with, are not in the same danger that is the hardest to come to terms with.

The cognitive dissonance needed to take care of everyday tasks while carrying this heavy burden. The “survivor’s guilt” feelings those who have safety may harbour. The feelings of impotency and of being insufficient. The absurdity and unfairness of it all. All of these are valid sentiments for everyone in distributed teams. And they are but a few, there is a constellation more of variations of these. Some may even be good ones. Hope, inspiration, being grateful - they too need a space to be discussed and shared.

We can’t squander the wins of the pandemic and create even more HumanDebt by ignoring this moment where we are first called upon to have humanity in the face of extreme external hardship.