As we barrel head-long into 2023, I am carrying with me two lessons from the 1980s.
1) Growing pains are not fun, but they can be a good thing.
Not the growing pains associated with children’s physical development, but the growing pains that can be associated with personal growth across the lifespan.
When confronted with an “opportunity for improvement” in an area of personal interaction or impact, often our natural inclination is to get defensive and look for others to blame. In doing so, we risk missing an excellent opportunity for greater personal insight and personal or professional growth.
I recently had occasion to reflect on a professional growth “opportunity” brought to my attention back in the late 1980s that felt nothing like opportunity at the time. It was painful for me then to learn that an entire division of the company for which I worked requested that they no longer be assigned to work on my projects. Ouch.
The problem? Me. And my communication style. What I thought was a shared commitment to excellence was experienced by the team as exacting standards. What I thought was efficient and effective communication was experienced by them as abrupt.
As painful as that conversation was, I continue to be grateful for the team’s candor. They set me on a path of personal reflection and leadership development with a heavy focus on mentorship and seeking continuous feedback loops to ensure that not just projects succeed, but also that the people working on the projects flourish.
While I would have said then that people mattered more than projects, my actions at the time spoke much more loudly than my words. Which brings me to lesson #2.
2) Kind words have great power.
A colleague stopped by my office last week. Popping her head into my office to ask a pressing question, I ceased working on the task at hand and greeted her with a sincere, “It’s so good to see you!” To which her countenance changed from focused intensity to soft delight. “Thank you. You just made my day,” was her reply. I do not know what was pulling her mood down that day, but a simple and sincere expression of delight at seeing her changed her experience and her countenance.
Later that day on a zoom meeting, a community collaborator expressed frustration with herself at what she perceived to be her lack of progress in leading an effort. With just a few sentences of me verbally reframing the progress made to date under her leadership, she too said, “You just made my day!”
Both of those spontaneous verbal acts of kindness cost me nothing. They were sincere expressions of positivity born out of decades of becoming aware of the power of speaking positively with sincerity and kindness.
One of these colleagues circled back to me the next day to say again how much the kind words meant to her and uplifted her day. My co-workers from the 1980s deserve the credit. They helped me to learn the power of a kind word and the benefits of growing pains. Those are lessons I take seriously even now 35 years later and know there’s always room for more growth.
As I looked back this week at pictures of my team from the 1980s, I am grateful to continue to count members of that team as friends. They taught me a great deal. We went on to work well together, win awards for excellence in the field and, more importantly, help each other flourish in the process.
Looking at the picture of the 1980s group reminded me of another lesson from the eighties. Big hair is not a good look on a petite 5-foot 2-inch frame. What was I thinking?