Stating the obvious, whatever side you come down on in this week’s election, according to the numbers about half of us are disappointed. To put it mildly.
I’m not very good with disappointment. Here’s a funny bit of personal trivia. My earliest memory of dashed expectations was as a contestant for the Little Miss America pageant in 1970. No, my parents did not enter me in this contest. I did. After seeing a little girl on TV insisting it was the best thing she ever did in her life, I wrote a postcard and slipped it in with the mail my father took out a few mornings a week.
Two weeks later we got a letter telling me I was in! Much to my mother’s disdain, the location for the audition was the Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey. She bought me a white lace dress with a yellow velvet ribbon at the neck. I changed in the backseat of the car driving across the Hudson River.
There were masses of girls with masses of curls. We were given a number and told to walk across a stage. We waited in a packed room until they called out numbers. The walk back to the car was not fun.
“It’s fixed!” my father yelled, steering me away from the rides. Maybe it was his disappointment slathered on top of mine forever etched in my mind that hasn’t given me the best rebound skills. Better than I had at seven years old, but can still respond, shall we say, dramatically.
So if this week feels like your Little Miss America moment, or much, much, worse, I’m with you. And if you have to go to an office where your own disappointment is met with the glee of others, like being trapped in a space with all the little girls who got their numbers called, there are ways to keep your sanity and your job.
This article by Heidi Brooks, a senior lecturer in organization psychology at Yale School of Management has some great tips for surviving and even thriving where tension is running high. I love the illustration that accompanies it with cartoon office mates awash in either red or blue. Rather than establishing a ban on political conversations, Brooks advises calling out the elephant in the room, and the donkeys too. Ba dum bum.
But seriously folks, she wants leaders to encourage respectful, compassionate and curious conversations. I am stifling my instinct to make a joke here, because I haven’t seen a lot of examples of this in the wild. I very much appreciate that Brooks makes a distinction between being a citizen of society and being a citizen of an organization. For my money, her most compelling suggestion is focusing on what we want to create and how we talk to each other. This will definitely take discipline in the coming months - or years - but is genuinely helpful for a healthy work culture.
I wouldn’t have thought I’d have so much in common with a Yale SOM professor, but there I was reading her article and nodding like a Laughter On Call bobble head. Creating cultures where there is levity and a sense of belonging relies exactly on what Brooks talks about. It’s not going to be easy, but we can do this. We can use tools to stay present so we can create. And we can be conscious of our tone which can often change the meaning of what we are saying. In fact, one of my favorite exercises in marriage workshops is revealing to people all the ways you can ask a partner, “Did you load the dishwasher?” just by how you ask.
In the coming weeks, months and even years we are going to be challenged to tap into our humanity. Taking a deep breath and attempting civility and respect, a novel approach for some, is the only way to get us back to what we really need, which is figuring out how to laugh together.
