🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️
🤯 A somewhat less cheerful but oh-so-important topic to cover in #HackingAcademia: dealing with Difficult Situations!
I’m always happy when I’m learning, and as I’ve stepped up in leadership responsibilities these last few years especially, a natural consequence has been having to deal with an increased number of challenging professional situations.
It’s been a tough learning curve – much harder than technical research or giving a talk in many ways – with plenty of missteps along the way. But, as I reflected when writing some position statements recently, realized I feel much more comfortable in dealing with difficult situations compared to even a few years ago.
This video outlines a few key concepts I think are important, and what I would have liked to have told my younger self say around 5 years ago…
Key concepts covered include:
đź’ˇ how much easier it is to navigate a difficult situation the SECOND and subsequent time – some expectation of what might be coming, and what you might do about it, makes a huuuuuuuuuugeeee difference. The first time often really just suuuuccccksss – not much getting around it, although you can compensate somewhat by borrowing from other’s experience.
đź’ˇ self-preservation: especially for extended affairs, you need to protect your health and psychological safety enough to sustain a reasonable response – you do no-one any favours if you burn out, and one rash decision or comment can unwind months of hard work in some situations.
đź’ˇ perfect is the enemy of the good – and is often just not possible. You can’t perfect dealing with bad situations: what you can aspire to is being effective in finding what is probably one of the better paths forward (you may be able to confirm, later, that you took the right path, but you may also just never know for sure).
đź’ˇ support networks are amazing, come in multiple forms – but take time to build. If you invest in building your trusted relationships – including helping others in their crisis times, they will be so helpful in times of dealing with crisis yourself!
đź’ˇ whilst I think some people get to a stage where they can reasonably say they perfected a certain skillset, I don’t think (maybe crisis managers might say differently) you ever feel like you’ve perfected dealing with difficult situations. But if you can become broadly effective, without it completely derailing your sanity or mental health, that’s a great capability asset for your career.
If you couldn’t already tell, I’m gearing up for a number of #HackingAcademia mentoring talks and workshops over the coming months around Australia, and working on adding some new materials I’ve wanted to cover for a while now.
challenge #difficult #difficultconversations #adversity #careers #academia #research #problems #PhD
Full Video Notes
As I was preparing some CV material for a range of awards and job applications, I was struck by the fact that I can now confidently say that I am infinitely more experienced at dealing with difficult situations than I was even just a few years ago. I was reflecting a little bit on why that is, and some of the key things that have made it much easier to deal with very stressful, very difficult situations. I wanted to share a few key insights, at least from my personal perspective, on what has really made a big difference for me.
For the scope of this video, I should clarify that when I say difficult situations, I’m talking just about professionally difficult situations. Obviously, there are an infinite range of personal challenges that you go through in your lives. That’s out of scope for this particular video. I also don’t mean traditional stereotypical problems like getting your grant rejected, getting your paper rejected, or missing out on funding. Those are significant problems, but I’m more talking about the other challenges you’ll deal with: difficult HR situations, disputes, difficult political situations, difficult PR situations, people having screwed up and the onflow consequences, and all those other sorts of things that you increasingly have to deal with, especially as you start assuming more senior leadership positions.
Often, although it doesn’t really matter for the topic of this video, you’re dealing with problems or situations that aren’t really your fault directly, or are only very tenuously connected to you at all. Nevertheless, you are responsible and have an interest in trying to resolve the situation as best you can.
So, the first and most important point by far, at least in my personal experience, is that it is so much easier to deal with a problematic or difficult situation the second time than the first time. The first time you go through a new, novel, stressful experience, dealing with something you haven’t had to deal with before, it can be incredibly confronting and stressful, in large part because you don’t necessarily feel like you know what you need to do. The second time onwards, there’s a huge difference.
While no situation is exactly the same, you will generally have a rough idea of what happened the last time, and you have some inkling of what to expect as this next situation plays out. If you’ve gone through this multiple times before, it’s even better because you not only have an idea of what to expect, but you have an idea from your personal experience of the possible variety of ways in which a situation can unfold. All of that is immensely helpful.
Any specific situation will not be exactly the same as a prior one, so you need to be careful in assuming that everything you did or thought last time will perfectly apply. Nevertheless, having prior experience is a huge advantage. If you don’t have prior experience—and I’ll talk about this a little bit later in the video—you need to talk to people who do have prior experience. Of course, their prior experience won’t be exactly the same situation, but they will be very valuable in sharing, anonymously and appropriately, some of their experiences with dealing with similar situations.
The second critical thing that I’ve observed, at least personally but also seeing a lot of other people deal with these challenging situations, is that your personal health, psychological safety, and reserve capacity are critical. No matter how clever, smart, experienced, or empathetic you are, if you run out of that—if you burn out—then you are going to catastrophically screw up the situation, or at least run a very high risk of doing so.
You really have to pay extra attention to your boundaries, to being aware of how exhausted you are—emotionally exhausted, not just physically tired—and really zealously protect yourself from getting too depleted. You are helping no one if you are at the end of your tether, completely frazzled, and incapable of making any sort of reasonable, balanced judgement.
You also have to protect and be aware of your personal emotional reserves and energy as you go through one of these processes, especially as they can sometimes run over many months and be very spiky and bursty. Even though you might have the energy to deal with it at the beginning, you need to be able to sustain an adequate level of capacity throughout the whole affair.
People who are high achievers or work in a perfectionist field need to remember that some of these challenging situations arise after a lot of the damage has already been done. There are no perfect solutions, and perhaps no solutions that are even close to perfect. In those situations, what you’re trying to do is find one of the better paths forward. You’ll never know for certain whether you picked the absolute best one, and fixating on perfecting your response is probably counterproductive in most of these situations. For people who are used to perfecting things, this can be a little discomforting when you’re trying to find, essentially, the least bad path forward.
Another key component to consider is that there are no absolutes. You really need to discuss or define the parameters of what an acceptable solution might look like, and that will depend on the priorities, goals, and concerns of all the people involved. There is no absolute right answer. It really depends on the context.
If you try to manage all of this in isolation, without talking to anyone or leaning on—or venting to—anyone, appropriately and anonymously as needed, you will break. Support networks are really key and can be surprisingly helpful.
If you’ve spent the time developing these relationships, building a trusted set of professional relationships with colleagues, supervisors, and others, they will generally look out for you and try to help you through one of these situations. That can be incredibly valuable. This isn’t something you can develop overnight. It’s something you have to invest in over time. People will often be surprisingly helpful and, in many cases, surprisingly willing to stick their necks out for you. I know people have had counterexamples to that, but generally speaking, leaning on your support network and really making use of it can be enormously beneficial.
No one person in that support network is typically going to be able to put your mind at ease or give you guidance on everything you’re dealing with. It’s important to think about your support network in aggregate. You’ll be able to draw on different sources of support, advice, or simply cathartic venting from different people. Collectively, that can be very powerful.
Finally, a lot of these problematic situations are forced upon you unpredictably. You didn’t know about them beforehand, but often they involve issues that have been brewing over time. One of the most tempting things to do is to let them get worse and worse without resolving them because people naturally want to avoid difficult conversations.
Again, this comes with experience, but you’re often better off intervening earlier and having a difficult conversation that is nowhere near as difficult as it would have become if you’d let the issue simmer for another six or twelve months. Proactively trying to resolve, or at least make some progress on, the issue earlier on is often the better path.
Knowing when to intervene and when to leave something alone is itself an experience-based judgement. Sometimes you really are better off letting things play out. Again, if you don’t know for certain, see if you can consult someone who is experienced to give you a second perspective on what you should do.
Being able to deal effectively with difficult situations is a key requirement in many professional careers, especially if you have any sort of leadership responsibility or responsibility for critical things. It’s something you’ll probably never feel completely comfortable doing, but it is something where you can radically improve your effectiveness over time.
That improvement comes through gathering experience—which is so important—developing and leaning on your support network, and taking some satisfaction in the fact that, although you’re put in a difficult position, you’re able to find a reasonable path forward that improves the overall situation.