Episode Transcript
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Welcome to the comfy chairs, a podcast from 123 limited.
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Today's episode is part of our new this year series comfy chairs hard questions.
comfy HQ is a bite sized offering to help grow our knowledge of leading and learning
during each HQ episode.
I answer your questions about specific comfy chairs topics or how to tackle day to day
leadership challenges or any other subject that fits in the beautifully broad category
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of leading and learning.
My aim is for us to learn together.
So for today's answers from comfy HQ, we're going to talk about balancing goals and handling
setbacks.
Our first question today is how can leaders balance long term vision with short term goals?
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Well, for starters, make it as easy for yourself as possible.
One of the most straightforward ways to do this is to evaluate those short term goals
and make clear and explicit connections to the long term vision.
Ideally, work with your team to describe how what you're doing today will benefit everyone
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tomorrow.
This has the added benefit of making it easier for the team to understand the underlying
purpose of daily assignments and shorter term projects.
Anytime you can connect your work to purpose, it's a good thing.
If there is no relevant connection between the short and long term, then you have an
opportunity closely examine this unconnected goal to determine if it's really necessary.
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Ask if this one project task piece of work isn't going to our future success.
Why are we doing it?
Should we stop?
I recommend discussing these questions with your own leadership to avoid any missteps
and to ensure you're making those decisions with support.
It's all too common that we keep doing work that doesn't serve us just because it's
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associated with an established goal or past procedure.
This is a waste of time and other resources.
And part of balancing your present demands with future vision is validating that every
resource is being put to its best use.
This is why I recommend you develop a practice of reviewing all goals and priorities frequently.
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You should have a schedule or routine associated with every goal, short and long term.
Not only does regularly revisiting your goals allow you to assess their relevance and necessity,
but it is also an opportunity to check how balanced your approach and efforts have been.
You can use this check to rethink where you're directing time and effort and make adjustments.
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Depending on the nature of the goal, this could be wise to do on a daily basis, or you
may only need to evaluate how balanced your goals are each month or once a quarter.
It's important to identify the right frequency and then plan the time you'll need.
One way to make this process easier?
Schedule it.
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I actually recommend blocking time on your calendar, especially if you need to involve
other members of your team.
Goals that contribute to achieving your long term vision often have many moving parts and
collecting the relevant data can take time.
Don't leave this to chance or expect that you can do a balance check in an ad hoc fashion.
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I have my company goals, which were developed to integrate my mission, vision and values
on my desk where I can always see them and reference them.
Your presence prompts me to stay focused on what I'm trying to achieve today, this week,
this quarter and this year.
Additionally, my weekly tasks include a goal review during which I update my various project
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plans and check that I'm making consistent progress.
This visibility is key.
We benefit from simple cues when it comes to goal management.
If your work environment can accommodate it, I strongly recommend posting both the long
term vision and your short term goals and then making use of the information from your
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review process to update both frequently.
Reference them often.
Draw people's attention to them.
Do not let them become wallpaper.
Visibility will only work if it has life.
You've no doubt seen the theme here.
Your active involvement with and frequent monitoring of goals are vital.
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Just think about balancing for a moment.
It's not a passive act.
It is dynamic and even a little risky.
If you were to stand right now and balance on one foot, what would you notice?
A bit of wobbling?
A moment needed to find your equilibrium?
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The many little adjustments you need to make to stay balanced?
The number and variety of muscles you use?
Making present work and future vision is no different.
You can't set and post your goals and expect balance to simply happen.
Instead, you need to focus on creating and maintaining alignment.
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Small and simple practices will make this possible.
There's no need to overcomplicate things.
Highlight the existing connections.
Monitor progress on an established schedule.
Make goals and progress visible to the entire team.
As you think about your own leadership, ask, are your daily goals truly aligned with your
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long-term vision?
If not, what small adjustments can you make today?
Great leadership isn't about choosing between short-term and long-term.
It's about learning to balance both, intentionally and consistently.
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Today's second question is how do effective leaders handle failures and setbacks?
There is a particularly interesting, but not often examined leadership competency that can
directly support this.
I've seen it called paradoxical thinking or tension tolerance.
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I like to call it double vision.
It's the ability to see and understand that two or more competing truths can coexist.
Like it's possible for someone to love tomato salsa but dislike sliced tomatoes.
In this case, double vision allows a leader to view success and failure as equally valuable
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and to comprehend that both present opportunities.
I am going to discuss how to develop this skill, but I want to start first with two
ways to respond productively when you encounter a setback.
That's when, not if.
Setbacks come in many forms.
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Missed opportunities, failed projects, decisions that don't go our way.
Regardless of scale, failure is uncomfortable and it is oh so tempting to move on as quickly
as possible when we fail.
But when we do this, we are not dealing with the sometimes significant, but always present
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emotional implications of failure.
A failure is a loss.
Humans grieve when we experience loss and we need to experience this grief.
I'm not talking about entering deep mourning and definitely not wallowing in self-pity.
I simply want you to know that it is okay, natural, and even beneficial to pause after
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a failure and acknowledge the loss and accompanying grief.
I'm assuming here that we're only addressing failures that occur in a professional context
and not our personal lives.
But if your sense of loss or grief is big enough, it can help to remember the stages
of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
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They're not sequential or tidy, but they can help you to identify and process your feelings.
When you pause after facing failure to grieve, allow yourself to assess what must happen
next and what can be stopped or delayed.
Let me sketch out an example to help clarify what I mean here.
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Several years ago, I was hoping for a promotion.
My division had some leadership changes that I saw as an opportunity to propose a new structure.
So I wrote a formal proposal outlining my rationale, recommendations, and the role I
hope to hold if this proposal moved forward.
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It did not.
I was told, we're going to stick with what we know.
Now, you could classify this as a failure or a setback, but either way, I was deeply
disappointed and definitely felt that I had failed.
I wish I could tell you that I was a paragon of dealing with disappointment and experienced
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no hard feelings or disruption, but I am remarkably human.
I struggled with this failure for longer than I wanted, but here's what I learned from
that struggle and how I hope to behave if or when I encounter something like this again.
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I know I've already advised processing your emotional response, but I want to stress it
here again.
I tried very hard during this event to suppress my sorrow.
It didn't work at all.
In fact, it began to morph into resentment.
When we ignore our feelings, they don't go away.
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I'm not advocating for explosive emotional displays.
This is about nurturing a healthy relationship with your emotions and recognizing that choosing
not to deal with them can have consequences.
If I knew then what I know now, I would have taken time to pause and grieve my disappointment
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and then to think through what I needed to do next.
If I'd done this, I would have seen that I needed to set aside my hope for this specific
role, not all promotions, just this one, and would have examined what the leadership changes
were going to mean for myself and my team.
This happened eventually, but nowhere near as quickly or smoothly as it should.
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Letting go of a plan or desired outcome is really important and really hard, but if we
fail to do so, we leave no space for the reality that is unfolding.
Any setback brings its own series of events or results.
Staying focused on the what could have been means you run the risk of being swept away
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rather than being able to maintain control of your responses.
Emotional responses and practical ones.
As a leader, this will impact your team, so it's important to hold lightly to what could
have been and keep yourself looking ahead to what is really happening.
Of course, there is still space for reflection on what has happened.
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In fact, it's absolutely necessary if you hope to master the second way of responding
productively to failure.
In addition to caring for your heart, the emotional impact of failure, take time to
care for your mind.
Every setback creates a chance to learn.
Your approach to this can be as simple as asking yourself, what did I learn?
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Or it can entail a structured process like a root cause analysis, but the nature of the
failure, its scope, its impact, et cetera, dictate how you mind for lessons.
Your role is to recognize and pursue any new knowledge that the failure creates.
Do this for yourself and get your team involved.
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Failure isn't just an obstacle, it's information.
And leaders who make the most of setbacks treat them as data points rather than dead
ends.
It's important that you role model a learning mindset in the wake of failure and that you
engage employees in identifying causes and problems and in contributing their perspectives
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about the failure and how the team can move forward.
This heart and mind attitude is the first step in responding to and handling setbacks.
Balancing the dual nature of the moment following a failure, addressing both the emotional and
learning needs is part of being adept at double vision.
So let's spend the rest of our time examining how you can develop this skill in preparation
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for future failures, big or small.
Practicing your ability to hold competing truths isn't just about mindset, it's about
practicing key skills that help you navigate setbacks with clarity and resilience.
Let's start with the role of critical thinking.
This double vision or paradoxical thinking requires that leaders resist binary approaches,
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the idea that something is either all good or all bad, all success or all failure.
Instead, you need to analyze setbacks with curiosity, identify both what went wrong and
what's still valuable.
To develop this ability, consider adopting one of these tactics.
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Practice yes and thinking.
Encourage yourself and your team to look at failure using yes and statements instead of
either or.
Framing setbacks with both loss and learning makes it easier to integrate them into future
planning.
Instead of this project failed so it was a waste of time, frame it as this project failed
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and we can learn from what happened to avoid future failures.
Or you can consider conducting post-mortem reviews with a balanced lens.
After a failure, don't just ask what went wrong.
Also ask what elements worked well even if the outcomes weren't what we wanted.
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What factors were in our control versus beyond our influence?
Questions like these prevent setbacks from feeling like total losses and reframe them
as learning experiences.
Seeing failures as complex and nuanced is a critical thinking skill.
But to truly practice double vision, you also need emotional intelligence because how you
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feel about failure influences how you respond to it.
Setbacks can trigger strong emotional reactions as we've discussed, frustration, embarrassment,
defensiveness.
Double vision requires leaders to acknowledge those feelings while also keeping perspective.
You can develop these skills with taking the time to pause and label the emotion before
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reacting.
This is emotional regulation.
Instead of immediately interpreting failure as a catastrophe, name what you're feeling.
Studies show that labeling emotions reduces their intensity.
Saying I feel frustrated because this didn't work out helps you process it faster than
an internal monologue of this is a disaster, I have failed.
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You can also practice self distancing.
Talk to yourself like a mentor or a coach or a trusted advisor would.
Instead of reacting in the moment, practice this by asking if I were coaching someone
else through this failure, what advice would I give?
This shifts you out of a reactive state and helps you respond with wisdom rather than
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emotion.
Emotional intelligence helps you manage the discomfort of failure, but leadership isn't
just about how you handle setbacks yourself.
It's also about how you help your team navigate them.
If leaders model an all or nothing approach to failure, their teams will fear risk taking
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and innovation.
Leaders who normalize learning from failure and mistakes help create resilient, adaptive
teams.
Try this.
Make failure debriefs a habit.
After a setback, normalize discussing both mistakes and insights.
Encourage team members to answer questions like, what did we learn?
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What will we do differently next time?
This shifts failure from shame to strategy.
You can also try celebrating recovered failures.
There are stories of setbacks that led to breakthroughs to show that failure is part
of progress.
For example, this campaign didn't land the way we expected, but we discovered a new audience
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we hadn't targeted before.
Building double vision takes time.
But the more you practice seeing setbacks as both challenges and opportunities, the
more naturally it will come.
So the next time you face failure, try this.
As a leader, you need to learn to focus on the challenges, name the lesson, then ask
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yourself, how can this failure serve the future?
Leaders with double vision understand that failure isn't the opposite of success.
It's a necessary part of it.
And the best leaders don't just recover from failure.
They learn to use it to drive their next step forward.
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Thank you for listening.
If you have a question for the Comfy Chairs, I would love to hear it.
Just use the link in the show notes.
Comfy Chairs Heart Questions episodes will be out every other week between in-depth conversations
about leading and learning.
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Next week, I'll be back with a conversation for leaders about fearlessness with guest
Dr. Benjamin Ritter.
I hope you join us.