Staying Positive
One of the hardest things to do is stay positive in the face of bad news.
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One of the hardest things to do is to stay positive in the face of bad news. You lose a big customer. A competitor announces a huge win. Your best employee quits. It can be hard to see the positive when you are faced with such a big negative.
It’s even worse when you’re a leader. Your team looks to you for hope in the face of bad news, and you know their eyes are on you. At the same time that you are struggling to stay positive, the weight of carrying others weighs on you. It’s tough.
It happens to all of us.
The key to staying positive is realizing that it’s not a binary decision. You don’t need to choose to be either happy or sad, there are plenty of degrees in the middle. You can be sad about a bad event, but still happy about how everything else is going. You can be optimistic about the future even if you are pessimistic about tomorrow. In fact, most of the time we are a blend of all of these things.
So, what do you say to your team? Here’s a simple formula:
Acknowledge the bad. Pretending like bad things aren’t bad things won’t work. Acknowledge when bad things happen, and acknowledge that they hurt. It’s okay to admit when you are sad about an employee leaving, or when you’re frustrated about losing a big customer. Your team already feels those things, and acknowledging that you do too validates those feelings.
Put it in context. It’s easy to fixate on the bad things and lose sight of the bigger picture. Put the bad things in context to remind everyone to have a wider view. We lost a big customer, but we have added 20 new customers this year! An employee is leaving, but they did great work and we’re going to be hiring 10 more this quarter. Position the bad with the good.
Inspire. If there are reasons to be positive, you should make a habit of reminding your team about them. Everyone wants to be inspired, especially after bad news. Give them reasons to be excited, reasons to be motivated. While there might be short term bad news, there are still huge opportunities available.
This isn’t a formula for convincing your team to be positive, it’s a formula for you to communicate with them in a way that helps. You should not just tell them these things, but share the formula! Tell them why you are telling them these things. Treat them like adults, and they will trust you more.
Bad things happen all the time, so you will find yourself using this formula a lot. Consistency is a good thing, as using it often will train your team to think about events this way. That’s good, it means you are giving them tools that will help them throughout their career!
People say that being positive is a choice, and that you choose how to react to the things that happen. I’m not sure about that, when bad things happen the negativity comes naturally. What we can choose is how to handle that negativity, acknowledging it and then putting it into context. Pretending otherwise might do more damage than good.
It’s not a question of whether bad things will happen, or a shortage of reasons to be pessimistic. The real question is whether there are reasons to be optimistic!
Let’s focus on those.
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