The Day After

A layoff, a failed or canceled major project, or just a really bad night’s sleep. Our orgs, our teams, ourselves: we all have absolute dogshit days occasionally. Much ink has been spilled and coaches consulted on avoiding these in the first place—and I won’t argue that isn’t without value.

But if you base your plans on every day being at least okay, and you’re in for a world of hurt when you’re wrong.

The real skill isn’t not falling down; it’s knowing how to get yourself back up again. And that is a learnable skill.

Some learning, alas, comes unavoidably from painful experience. But you can also plan and practice the repair in advance:

• On the day after a rough day, how will you and your team get back on your feet? Are there particular ceremonies that you collectively find restorative? How can you emphasize your team’s sense of community and support? Oftentimes, just taking deliberate space to acknowledge that things sucked (and letting everyone air it out) helps.
• When your org as a whole takes a beating, what can it do the next day to help its folks back to their feet? Is there a cultural touchstone or sense of purpose yo can fall back on?
• On the day after you miss all your habits because you were overwhelmed or compromised, how do you get back a sense of rhythm? What’s a favorite song that helps?

As a starting point, getting one small win in almost always helps at all scales.

You can put on your running shoes and walk around the block once and call it a win.

Your team can ship a single bugfix all the way to production and call it a win.

Your org can call out what went right when it seemed like everything was going wrong plan to enable that going forward and call it a win.

And then you can dust yourself off and get back to it—and get better at doing so every time.