Dealing with Difficult Situations

🤯 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:

💡 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.

💡 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.

💡 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).

💡 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!

💡 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.

YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gqRiaXRM

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

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. And I wanted to share a few key insights, at least from my personal perspective, on what has really made a big difference for me. And 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 infinite range of personal challenges that you go through in your lives. That's out of scope for this particular video. And I don't mean sort of traditional stereotypical problems like getting your grant rejected or getting your paper rejected, missing out on funding. Those are significant problems, but I'm more talking about the other challenges you'll deal with in terms of difficult HR situations, disputes, difficult political situations, difficult PR situations, people having screwed up and the on-flow consequences, and all those other sort of things that you increasingly have to deal with, especially as you start assuming more senior leadership positions. And 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 often are very tenuously connected to you at all, but 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 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. Now, 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, what is reasonable to expect as this next situation plays out. And of course, 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. And all of that is immensely helpful. Now, any specific situation will not be exactly the same as a prior one, and so you need to be careful in assuming that everything you did or thought last time will perfectly apply, but nevertheless, having prior experience is a huge, huge advantage. Now, 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 sort of anonymously and appropriately some of their experiences with dealing with a similar situation. 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 your personal health and psychological safety and amount of, I guess, reserve capacity is critical. So no matter how clever or smart or experienced you are 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. So you really have to pay extra attention to your boundaries, to being aware of how exhausted you are, emotionally exhausted, not just exhausted in times of energy or perhaps even sleep, and really zealously protect that from getting too bad because 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 judgment. So you really have to protect and be aware of your personal emotional reserves and energy as you go through one of these processes, especially as this can sometimes be a process that runs over many months and is very spiky and bursty. And so 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, one of the things that's really important to remember is some of these challenging situations you come into after a lot of the stuff has already happened, and there are no perfect solutions forward, and perhaps no solutions that are even close to perfect. In those sort of situations, what you're trying to do is find one of the better paths forward. You'll never know for certain whether you pick the absolute best one, and fixating on perfecting your response is probably counterproductive in most of these situations. And for people who are used to perfecting things, this can be a little bit discomforting when you're trying to find, I guess, the least bad path forward. Another key component to consider here is that there is no absolutes, right? So you really need to discuss or define the parameters of what an acceptable solution might look like. And that will depend on the priorities and 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 or venting to anyone again appropriately and anonymously as needs be, you will break. And so support networks are really, really key and can be surprisingly helpful. If you have spent the time to develop these relationships over time, to develop a trusted set of professional relationships with a number of colleagues, supervisors, and so forth, they will generally look out for you and try to help you out in one of these situations. And that can be incredibly helpful. Now, this is something that you can't develop overnight. This is something you need to have worked on over time, but people will generally be very helpful, and again, perhaps surprisingly helpful or surprisingly stick out their necks. And I know people have had counter experiences to that, but generally leaning on your support network and really leveraging it can be really important and very helpful. Now, anyone in that support network, no one person is typically going to be able to put your mind at ease or give you guidance on all of the things you're dealing with. It's important to consider that support network in terms of the aggregate. You'll be able to draw on different sources of support or cathartic venting from different parts of that support network. And in the aggregate, that can be very, very helpful. Finally, a lot of these problematic situations are situations that are sort of forced upon you unpredictably. You didn't know about them beforehand. But a lot of the time it's something where it's an issue that has been brewing over time. And one of the very tempting natural things to do is to let it get worse and worse without resolving it, because people want to avoid difficult conversations. And so again, this is an experience thing, but you are often better off proactively intervening earlier on and having a difficult conversation, but by no means as difficult as it would have been if you'd let it simmer for another six months or 12 months, and proactively trying to resolve or at least make some progress on the issue earlier on. Now, when to intervene earlier on and when to just leave it and see if other factors involved can solve it, that's an experienced thing. Sometimes you are better off leaving things alone. And again, if you don't know for certain, see if you can consult with 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 general responsibility for critical things. It's something that you probably will never feel that you're completely comfortable at doing, but it is something where you can radically improve how effective you are over time, especially gathering experience, which is oh so important for this, developing and leaning on your support network, which again is a very important factor of dealing with difficult situations. And I guess taking the satisfaction that although you're put in a difficult spot, you were able to take and find a reasonable path forward that improved the general situation.