Introduction and Today's Question

[00:00:03] Paul: Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals. 

[00:00:08] Karen: I'm Karen Gimnig.

[00:00:10] Paul: And I'm Paul Tevis. 

[00:00:11] Karen: Each episode we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, can we move on?

Understanding the Emotional Aftermath

[00:00:18] Paul: So what Karen and I are talking about today is the situation in which something that we didn't like happened.

[00:00:26] Paul: A bad thing occurred. There was a decision that got made, that had a result that we didn't like, or we had to make a hard decision as a result of a situation we found ourselves in. A thing has happened. We've made all the decisions around that. We've kind of put that into action. Like all of the logistics and maybe all the cognitive work around this thing have happened.

[00:00:48] Paul: And so there are some people in the group who are ready for whatever is next now. And there are some people in the group who are not, because there's still some lingering emotion. There's some fear or dread or hurt. There's something sort of still in that emotional space around what has happened that's there.

[00:01:11] Paul: And what we find when this happens is there are always gonna be people like that in groups together, and they get really annoyed with one another when this happens. So what we wanna explore today is this notion of how do we know and what can we do in situations like this? How can we acknowledge the feelings, the emotional space around this?

[00:01:34] Paul: And how can we help groups recognize when they are and aren't ready to move on from whatever this bad thing was.

Balancing Positivity and Acknowledgment

[00:01:43] Karen: And I think one of the pieces I really wanna place here is there will be those who have an instinct to say, it's all okay. It's all gonna be fine. We don't have to feel bad about it, like, we're gonna be all right. And you need those people because you need that energy, but you can't only have that energy.

[00:02:02] Karen: And so that positive feeling needs to be balanced with also, as Paul said, the acknowledgement of the hurt, the anger, the pain, the resentments, whatever in there, and the validity of all of that. It's valid to say we've got some good things here and we have some paths forward, and we're excited about that.

[00:02:22] Karen: And it's valid to say, we've been hurt, we're angry, we're sad, we're disappointed. We're all those things. And we'll each have our own cocktail of all of those things. One of the points we wanna make here is that if you go too far into the, it's all gonna be okay, before we have made the decisions that get us to the place where we can look forward.

[00:02:41] Karen: Like if we're still trying to decide how big a layoff to have or how much investment not to return on something, or how we're gonna dismantle a project that we thought we were gonna do, but now we're not. If we're still in the midst of the taking apart of the plan that we had and we haven't yet closed up, whatever those wounds are. We haven't yet cleaned up the mess in whatever way.

[00:03:08] Karen: Then if we lean too hard into the sunny side. Then we're gonna be in trouble because it's gonna feel disingenuous. Like we're gonna be trying to make decisions about the pain without acknowledging the pain. And people are gonna feel like they're not being heard. They're gonna feel like they're not being treated fairly.

[00:03:23] Karen: You're gonna get way more of that resentment. 

Navigating Group Dynamics

[00:03:26] Karen: So I think it's useful to think about, can we move on before we have cleaned up the mess that we're upset about? Probably not very well emotionally. Like, I'm not saying you have to like encourage everybody to be miserable and angry. We don't. But we have to make space for that.

[00:03:43] Karen: We have to have that be okay. We have to pause now and again as, for example, we decide how we're gonna do a layoff to say we didn't wanna do a layoff and nobody deserves to be laid off and this isn't fair and it's not okay and we don't like it and we don't have a choice because if we don't lay anybody off, we're gonna lay everybody off by going out of business.

[00:04:01] Karen: Right? That's not a win. So we need to be able to say those things probably recurringly through the process of making the decisions that get us out of it. Then where we wanna focus on today is, okay, we've handled this stuff, we've decided who to lay off. We've decided how to redo our budget. We've decided which program to cut, whatever the thing is and whatever are all the details that have to be decided about that.

[00:04:23] Karen: Like we've done the logistics thing, we've made the good business decisions to give us a path forward. Like we've done that, but where are we emotionally?

Shifting Focus to Forward Thinking

[00:04:34] Paul: And one of the things that you almost always get, as I said in groups like that, is there are people who sort of naturally have this tendency to go, okay, well that's done now we're onto the next thing. Right? And we'll often latch onto the like, okay, so now what's possible?

[00:04:48] Paul: Like what the new things we can do, like, let's look on the bright side of this, right? And my experience has been that those people really annoy folks who are not like you know, it's the how dare you, how could you possibly be thinking about the future right now when we're still kind of grieving about what's going on here.

[00:05:05] Paul: And most of the work of groups in this point is how do we stay together when some of us still need to grieve and to process and to do that, when others don't. Because if we're all in the same place about it, it's actually pretty easy. Like it's, there's no real conflict that happens there.

[00:05:24] Paul: It's when we're at different places along that spectrum, which is almost all the time. And I think that then because that happens, people are then even more concerned about, well, we can't continue to stay where we are. We can't continue to process this. It's just gonna tear the group apart. So we have to move on.

[00:05:44] Paul: The frame that I like to think about this with is that it's not about moving on from this hurt, right? It's about moving through. It's about figuring out what do we both individually and as groups need to do to process this because we're gonna carry things with us. The important point is to not stay where we are.

[00:06:05] Paul: Right. To stay anchored. It's like the thing we sometimes talk about with venting and gossip, right? That can be really useful when it's clearing that it allows us to sort of vomit out whatever the thing is, and then be able to go, okay, So now that I've got that out of my system, here's what I actually wanna do.

[00:06:19] Paul: There's a difference between that and rumination, which is just continuing to rehash the same story over and over again, and I'm stuck in it. I think it's the same thing with this kind of negative feeling that until we have an opportunity to process it. To move through it. We can stay stuck there, but also there are ways that seem like we're processing it, that also are just keeping us anchored there.

[00:06:43] Paul: So one of the things I'm always kind of watching when I'm with a group like this is, is the group stuck, right? Are they continue to stay in that sort of, the space between is all clogged up with the differences of how people are processing this and experiencing it.

[00:06:58] Paul: And are the things that the group is doing, helping to move them through, and to get to the point where we now can work on things together again.

The Role of Language in Transition

[00:07:08] Karen: So I think one thing that's really important in terms of helping a group move through is to name, we haven't changed our mind that we're mad about this, right? We haven't changed our mind that this is a bad thing and we hate it, and we are shifting our full group conversations to a forward looking stance.

[00:07:30] Karen: Very often in these situations you've spent many months working on like in the case of a layoff, you probably tried lots of other things to get the budget sorted out, and then you tried to figure out if there was a way to do a smaller layoff. And then you tried, like you've been in this kind of churning space for a while, and it's time to say, we're done churning.

[00:07:51] Karen: We've made the decision, we've gotten to the point. And now we have a path forward. So it's that holding the two together. I think that's really important. Like it's not that we aren't sad, it's not that we aren't disappointed or angry. If this was done to us by someone treating us badly, that that can all still be true.

[00:08:09] Karen: We are not denying any of that. And we are choosing as a group in our whole group meetings to shift our energy towards the place that we as a group want to go. Which almost always requires a more positive outlook and a more like, people aren't gonna invest their emotional energy or their money or whatever it is.

[00:08:27] Karen: We need them to invest to get a project to move forward. They're not gonna do that if everybody's being glum and angry. So we need to say, as a group, we're naming, this is our moment. We've made our decisions, we've walked through that dark space. It took us a long time. We put a lot of effort into it.

[00:08:43] Karen: And the reward that we get for that is today. That we have closed that door in terms of having to deal with it. In terms of the logistics, and it doesn't mean that the feelings go away, and if you're one of the people who's still really feeling them, that's okay.

[00:09:00] Paul: I think that it is important to acknowledge that we can have complex feelings about things. We often think that, well, we've gotta either be moving forward or being angry and glum and sad that we can't do both. Right? And kind of the point is that like we can actually say, I really don't like that we got to this place, right?

[00:09:20] Paul: And given that we're here, here's what we're gonna do now. Being able to hold both of those. Because I think that, often, that anger, that negative feeling, whatever that is, right? That's about things that, as you've pointed out, are in the past. At this point, we cannot change them. We can acknowledge that we don't feel good about them, and I think that's actually important to do.

[00:09:44] Paul: One of the things that happens oftentimes when people want to move on is, you know, they try to just plaster over all of that with positivity. And that sort of dismissal of the feeling, doesn't help people to move through. One of the things I have seen that works really well is kind of what you're pointing to is, you know, when you've got someone who's in a position of authority, you know, a leader, a boss, a facilitator. That sort of thing.

[00:10:08] Paul: For them to actually genuinely display that they have these feelings that are very much in line with the rest of the group. And at the same time also saying that we are now going to continue with our business. We're gonna do this thing. I think that when people see a model of how to do both. That actually helps them because now in some ways it can give them permission to say like, oh, okay, I can still not like that this thing happened and be part of whatever is coming next in the future.

[00:10:43] Paul: I think that oftentimes it feels like we have to choose between one or the other. And when we see modeled that it's possible to do both, that can help us to move through, 'cause that can start to help us get us unstuck.

[00:10:58] Karen: And I'll say along with that, we don't have to choose one or the other overall, but I think we do in our momentary moment to moment decisions choose which way we're gonna land. So for example, we're gonna choose the language that we're using to talk about it. So if we're talking about a layoff, we can talk about how many people are gone and how many people we laid off and what percentages went away, right?

[00:11:20] Karen: Or we can talk about, this is the staff we have, we now have three people in human resources, and we have, you know, whatever the numbers are. This is the resource that we have. And we can choose which language, we can choose the language of loss, or we can choose the language of what we have, of opportunity, of positive, of credit.

[00:11:38] Karen: I think that for me, I'm very thoughtful when I'm facilitating. That if the energy of the group and the work of the group is, how are we gonna deal with the loss, then I stay in the language of the loss. But at the moment that we need to make that switch and be in the forward looking because we're no longer making decisions about the loss, we're making decisions about going forward.

[00:11:59] Karen: Then we wanna use language that's about what's true going forward that doesn't constantly point us back towards the pain of the past.

[00:12:07] Paul: And I think one of the things that you have to do as a leader or facilitator, right, working with a group like that, you're always using your discernment about have we reached that moment where the group is gonna follow, if I go that way, right? Where if I start moving in, if I'm saying this is the moment, I need to be kind of sure that it actually is not for me, but for the group.

[00:12:31] Paul: And that there is a real skill to that, right? Of being able to read the room and say like, now feels like the time. And I will often do that kind of, I wouldn't say tentatively, but like I'll probe. I'll see how do people react when I start to use that forward looking language? When I start to talk about what's coming next, how are people reacting and responding to that?

[00:12:55] Paul: Because if they're, you know, if I'm getting head nods or I'm getting like, you know, I was thinking that too. Like if I'm getting a, like, from part of the group, then I can tell, okay, some folks are ready, right. To start to make that shift. But sometimes I think that corporate leaders fall into this all the time.

[00:13:11] Paul: They go immediately to that language of what comes next and forward. And to many of the people who are not ready to go there yet, it feels like erasure of what has happened. And that's where you have to, you really have to sense like, how is this playing? Like is this working? Is the group still processing, is the group with you or are you out by yourself.

[00:13:33] Paul: Because you know you are not actually as affected by this. So I think using that language can be a good way to start to sense. Are we moving through here? It can help them, but you also have to be ready to ratchet it back if you were wrong about whether or not the group is moving through. 

[00:13:51] Karen: Yeah, and I think one of the versions of that. Because as we've said, it's unlikely to be the case that nobody's ready to move through, but it's also very likely to be the case that somebody's not ready to move through. So I think there are a number of versions of, you know, naming you know, saying out loud, I am shifting too forward looking language.

[00:14:12] Karen: It's not because I've forgotten that this has been painful or don't care. It's because for this meeting, for what we're trying to do as we're beginning to make decisions going forward, we wanna be in that forward looking space. If you are still struggling with feeling like it's all unjust or needing to talk through it or those kinds of things, we have ways to do that.

[00:14:30] Karen: So it may be my door is open and you gotta convince them that this is genuinely the case, if you're the leader or the boss, if you're a facilitator coming in, that might be different. Or we're gonna have another meeting that's entirely about processing feelings and maybe it would've been clever to do that first and then do the more pivot meeting.

[00:14:48] Karen: So the more you can read your group about that, that's good. So that it could be a good idea to do a, we're just processing feelings meeting. You can do a group scream like, okay, we know we all have feelings about this. Everybody just scream. It's great on Zoom you can mute and scream and everybody gets to scream and you don't have to actually like cover your ears.

[00:15:06] Karen: But there are ways to do that kind of, we're gonna have a momentary group expression of it to just really loudly acknowledge it. And then be able to shift, okay, to the forward thinking. So some version or feel free to have those conversations one-on-one. I know you still need to have them.

[00:15:23] Karen: I'm not saying you can't have the conversations. But I'm asking in this space, can we shift to forward language, forward thinking. Most of the time folks can go along with that. I mean, if I have wildly misread where they are and there's a bunch of stuff that actually isn't settled yet, when I thought it was like, then I may have to like be okay, this meeting's not about that anymore.

[00:15:40] Karen: This meeting is now about the mess that I still have. But a good bit of the time, particularly if you're fairly attentive to the group and you've had a series of meetings and you've been in a process together. You can get away with saying, yep, we know we're all upset. We're gonna take a minute to acknowledge that in some way or another.

[00:15:57] Karen: And then if we need more, we'll get there. There are these other paths, but this meeting is about the forward thinking and we're gonna use the forward looking language and have that more positive tone.

[00:16:08] Paul: The other thing I'll add to that, because what we're really talking about here is, you know, we've got this collection of individuals who are together as some sort of group, right? There's this thing that showed up in the space between all of them that's causing, you know, tension and difficulty and things like that.

[00:16:23] Paul: And now we're really talking about how do we move that collective into the future. And, you know, where do we choose to spend the group's time in meetings. 

Individual Needs vs. Group Needs

[00:16:31] Paul: I think the other piece that goes along with that is to ask people individually, what do you need to do in order to be able to move through this rather than taking responsibility for fulfilling all their processing needs.

[00:16:48] Paul: Because as we point out, like there are times when you do need to do that because there's enough of the group that needs to do it and they need to do it together. There needs to be this feeling of like, I'm not the only person that has these concerns, feels this way, this thing like that.

[00:17:01] Paul: That's really useful for the group in order to move through it together. But there are also gonna be some people for whom, like, whatever this was, it brings up something for them that's from something in their past. Right? It reminds them, it rhymes with something they've experienced before. And no one else is experiencing that, right?

[00:17:18] Paul: That's something that they need. That's not what the group needs. And being able to turn to individuals within the group and say, well, what would be useful for you in order to be able to move on that you might do on your own, that we don't need to spend, that we're not gonna do as a whole group. And this is also a thing that shows up in corporate settings where it's like, look, I know that you're still really upset about this thing.

[00:17:40] Paul: You know, you haven't really process move through this. Is there something that's gonna help you do that? Or do you need to leave the group? Because we are actually moving forward. We are moving on and putting people sort of at individual choice about that. And that happens all the time in organizations where it's like, you know, there was this layoff and this thing happened and I'm still really upset about it and I realize it's because this is a sign that this is no longer the company that I thought I joined.

[00:18:06] Paul: You know, 12 years ago, and it turns out it's not the same company you joined 12 years ago, and this is the wake up call for me that I'm not gonna move on from this. I'm gonna move on by moving on from the company. 

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

[00:18:18] Karen: So we started with can we move on? And we're mostly saying we wanna frame this largely as moving through probably if we're just trying to move on, we're missing some pieces and we're gonna leave some folks behind. So we wanna be moving through and we wanna be looking at, have we done what we need to do to be ready to move through, to shift from living in and dealing with the mess that we have.

[00:18:41] Karen: Two, we've cleaned up the mess and we're ready for a more sunny, more positive onward path. And if we are at that point in terms of the cognitive work, how do we help folks make the emotional shift? Because just because we've done the cognitive logistical work to deal with the mess doesn't mean that the anger and disappointment and sadness and frustration and all of that stuff that came with the mess has necessarily moved.

[00:19:10] Karen: And so we're saying that it's really useful to acknowledge that, to say it makes sense to still feel these things. It makes sense that you did feel them. I have felt them. We have all felt them. And that there's a space for that. You can come talk to me privately. We can have a meeting that we're gonna talk about, that we're gonna take a moment of this meeting to express that in some way. Some kind of way to say that, yep, those feelings are there, they're real, and they're not necessarily gone.

[00:19:35] Karen: And also, as a group collective in our large group meetings in this space, we're not gonna try and focus on those anymore because what we need is the energy and enthusiasm and excitement and all of that. That comes with forward motion. That comes with framing the language toward the future that comes with reframing to the place that we are now.

[00:19:58] Karen: That isn't dwelling in a past we can't change but is using the language and framing that gets us into the space where we are changing things and we are making things go ahead. And so if we can balance all of that and not do the dismissive thing of saying, no, it's all great, and not doing the stuck thing of saying, oh, it's so awful, but kind of hold.

[00:20:18] Karen: It has been awful. We have reason to feel that way. And we have a future that is not awful, and that's where we're going. That's the place that leaders, facilitators wanna be in these kinds of situations so that the group can in fact move through at the right time and go on to a positive future.

[00:20:38] Paul: Well, that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

[00:20:42] Karen: And I'm Karen Gimnig, and this has been Employing Differences.