The “Let’s Be Real About Fear” Play

Following on from yesterday’s article about the Zelensky lesson, today’s video goes deeper into the fact that we must be intensely conscious of how our teams are feeling during these times.

In this video we speak about the level of cognitive dissonance that would be required to ignore how we feel when atrocities happen around us and we live under a real threat of WWIII, and that it is simply unmanageable on a bedrock of exhaustion, burnout and low morale.

Most of us either know people directly affected in our personal lives or work with them. The proximity to the tragedy while feeling simultaneously guilty for not being in the eye of the storm ourselves, afraid for our own livelihood and the overwhelming feeling of impotence it brings about in all of us, are not easy feelings to deal with and we oughtn't deal with them in isolation.

This war is now not only very public, live and shocking but comes after an extended period where everyone’s cortisol (stress hormone) levels have been through the roof in the context of the pandemic, so if it was ever a time for compassionate leadership and empathy, the time is now.

Some of us are in even harder situations as members of their teams or parts of their extended teams are in the Ukraine right now. Physically under attack. Many of the teams we work with are trying to do the best they can to keep them reassured and obviously give them extensive leaves of absence but there are tech teams in the Ukraine that want to keep working. They cling to the sense of normalcy it may bring so they should not be ostracised and deprived of that. Obviously, each of these situations is intensely personal and we don't claim that we have the answers but we insist you ask the open-hearted questions.