A good friend of mine in the project management business once told me that each time you get a promotion (i.e. new responsibilities) you might suffer the adaptation until your body builds the appropriate defenses to deal with the pressure. She called those defenses “Job Antibodies” which was rather amusing but very true.
I experienced this when I was appointed manager for the first time. I certainly didn’t feel like a manager – I had yet to build the confidence – and although I had had the de facto manager status before, the actual title conferred a very palpable accountability. Since the manager inside of me was still crouching, naturally everything about anything regarding the job made me nervous: team meetings, one-on-one conversations, reporting to upper management, etc.
Although my team (the functional analysts) was a very cohesive, extremely skilled, high performing group of people (actually it might have been because of that) those were a shaky first three or four months until I grew the antibodies for the job.
However, antibodies are not needed exclusively in the aftermath of promotions, but rather to cope with any situation that you have not faced before and for which your emotions are still unprepared. Again, I was able to experience this, fourteen months or so after that first management appointment, when I faced the first resignation on my team.
To give you some background let’s just say Argentina is a very sweet country for IT job hopping and since this occurred way before the sub-prime crisis surfaced, it was even sweeter. Our universities cannot produce enough professionals to cope with the demand of the market which results in a very interesting battle between companies trying to best one another based on salaries, advancement opportunities, benefits, etc. Think of it as a reverse game of musical chairs, only when the music stops, everyone has a seat and there are a couple thousand extra ones available.
So rotation levels were high but I felt very proud that during that first year and couple of months my team held strong and did nothing but grow in number, even amidst some pretty big attrition numbers in the rest of the company. Intimately – mostly to myself – I wore that record as a badge, so when one of my analysts told me she was leaving it hit me pretty hard.
The month or so that passed after I got the notification I was decreasingly miserable. My misery of course peaked the few days after I found out: I was a nerve wreck, I felt incredibly guilty and I could not face upper management with a straight face although everyone was supportive and pretty much casual about the situation.
It was in that coolness from upper management that I ultimately found peace. My mind put two and two together and realized if they were cool about it, it was because they have lived through the experience over and over. It’s a fact of life that people are going to leave your company at a certain time, and although it’s reasonable to have a grieving period about it, you cannot have it paralyze you.
I found a great statement in a very crappy movie (Top Gun) that illustrated this clearly: Tom Cruise character’s co-pilot had just died and Commander Big-Moustache comforted him by telling him that “First one dies, you die too. But there will be others, you can count on that.”
Since I was then and I am still a touchy feely person who does not relate with subordinates exclusively at the professional level I grew antibodies of two types: Type A to deal with the personal loss of a person I cared for; and Type B for dealing with the professional loss of an excellent analyst.
Eventually more people in my teams left and although it is something I never enjoy, I am now able to deal with it in a more professional manner aided by the antibodies I built way back then.
Bottom-line: Emotional intelligence is a great ally in the workplace; do not build yourself to be a cold-blooded old-school business type. Embrace the small amounts of grief that accompany learning and let your antibodies thrive. You will grow with them.
Shuje
On my next post I will give you a sneak peek of the screenplay for Harry Crapper and the Malfunctioning Toilette.
Recently grown any antibodies? Post below or email me at shuje@holoom.com
Posted by shuje 