talk your people through your own emotional processing of hard things

This is a way you teach your people to think like a leader does. Often in challenging moments, or in the face of bad facts, your people will want to find safety with a return to the status quo ante. Let’s get back to the way things used to be. Negative feelings or big feelings of any kind can block that path.

Folks who are new to your team, your market, or their role may not have a calibrated sense, yet, of where the facts in front of you sit on a Lemony Snicket sort of spectrum from regular ups and downs to mistakes & misfortune to tragic loss to existential threat.

Responsible, earnest teammates may be wondering, “Should I be freaking out right now?” They will look to you for an answer to that question. This is a case where it’s best to give them your honest answer and call your shot as you do so.

If you yourself are freaking out about what has transpired, wait before you put yourself and your emotions on stage. The story your people likely need from you is one that a) acknowledges, openly, what is challenging in the facts at hand b) affirms the experience of feelings in response to those facts and, critically, c) illustrates a path beyond the facts and the feelings to what you will do next.

You’ll be better able to deliver that story once you have arrived at c) yourself. Unless your building is literally on fire, there should be at least some space for you to get there. 

This is one of those cases, like your underlying ontology, where you will be conveying a story to your people whether you want to do so or not. Smart, good-hearted, earnest people, the kind you want on the squad, will be reading you. If you force them to read subtext alone, instead of giving them crisp text, your message may get quite garbled or lost altogether.

Instead, make good use of your influence. Take the pen and tell them that you’re doing so. Tell them what you make of what has happened, how you experience(d) it emotionally, and what you are now doing in light of the facts and mission you have. 

When you have assembled a Diverse Group of People Trying to Do Something that Matters, you will encounter difficulties. Something that Matters can only be accomplished through confrontation with those difficulties. You do a service to your people when you help them sort the trivial from the trying from the traumatic and offer them a model of responsibly navigating each. 

A tried and true professional feels things honestly and then does things diligently. Show them what that looks like.

-Eric