I also write with the intent to reach out to individuals who have suffocated their own inner flame by internalizing problems caused by bad management:
“Maybe I was just being too much of an idealist.”
“Maybe I just haven’t grown up.”
“I need to just manage my stress better.”

I want to be the warmth of reassurance:
It’s not that you’re just an idealist.
It’s not that you haven’t grown up.
It’s not that you just don’t know how to manage your stress better.
It’s real. You’re real.

I want to be the spark that rekindles your desire to do what you believe is right, and the updraft that raises your confidence to take the first step forward.

A few years ago, I spoke with someone who has decades of experience in organizational change management with the hopes that I can do something to change my organization. I had a few conversations, but nothing useful came out of them. In fact, I came out of those conversations feeling not only useless but worthless too.

I was faced with the cold reality that change management consulting is, in fact, a business. Change management consultants need revenue to make a living, so they need to choose their clients. Their clients are executives in the C-suite who have the authority to pay the consultants. So they cater their services to where the money is.

As a result, the suggestions I got from the change management consultant were not applicable for me at all; they were for the C-suite executives. Building a business plan. Speaking to the board of directors. Budget. Finances. All I could say was "I don't know," or "I'm not in the position to do that." It felt like I shouldn't be a part of the change management conversation to begin with because I don't have any power.

Are there people who are feeling useless like the way I did a few years ago?
If yes, then how can I help them?
What can I do to find them?
​How can I reach out?

One of my answers to these questions (although not a complete answer by any means) was to write - to share my experiences and to not stay silent about the matters I care about, get angry about, feel guilty about. Someone may stumble across what I write and realize that they're not alone.

​Could it be you?

This is an answer post to my previous piece on how someone's undesirable behavior could've been seen as a symptom of a larger-scale problem but it was dismissed as only that person's problem. I see this as an opportunity cost for the organization. The organization could have:

1. become self-aware that it has a systemic problem,
2. learned about how it was affecting individuals,
3. thought about how to mitigate symptoms, or even better -
4. thought of how to stop it from the root.

​To properly address the cause of undesirable behavior in individuals and to get honest feedback about the organization, it is of utmost importance to make the person feel safe and relaxed (the person is probably on the verge of crumbling with anxiety). In doing so, there are a few things to take into consideration when soliciting authentic feedback:

1. To not make it (even remotely sound like) a punishment. The point is to get valuable information out of the person. It doesn’t make any sense to make them think that it’s not worth opening up and sharing their thoughts with you (because you look like a threat).
2. To listen, with patience. This sounds obvious, but it’s easy for managers to do one-way reprimands (not to mention unsolicited advice that doesn't even make sense) without realizing that the other person has something to say (but is too fearful or beaten up). And it can take a lot of time — and courage — for a person to open up. You never know what they’re carrying.
3. To re-frame the context as “a check-in” rather than a “meeting.” You wouldn’t want to rub work into their faces when they might be feeling constantly guilty and ashamed about not getting things done as early as they should be. Changing the environment: the location, time, and even the person soliciting the feedback may help make it less threatening (although it is better to have an authentic conversation).​

​
​I'm sure I'm coming back to the "what do you do instead of blaming someone?" theme over and over again in future posts because blaming in the workplace happens way too often and to me, it ends up harming the organization as a whole as opposed to protecting it.

Disclaimer: This post is not about “X ways to overcome procrastination” or “procrastination is actually good for you.” I choose to not to write about either topics because a) many people wrote about that already (there’s not much that I can add), and b) it’s usually about the individual, and I’d like to focus more on the impact it has on the organization.

First, allow me to clarify what I mean by procrastination. Derek Thompson in “The Procrastination Doom Loop—and How to Break It” provided a great definition for procrastination so I will refer to that here:

​Furthermore, in this context I will assume that the procrastinator is a high performer. For example: the person knows he/she is responsible for the work, knows how to prioritize and manage time well based on the priorities.

​If a high performer is chronically procrastinating despite the fact that he/she is very capable and perfectly aware of his/her responsibilities, I suspect that there is a much larger, ominous problem underlying the behavior.

The lack of motivation.

There are many ways a person can lack motivation, and it may not be that person’s fault. The person might not believe in why the work they’re responsible for is actually worthwhile doing. The person might not believe in why the task or role is delegated to him/her. The person could be suffering from clinical depression. Or burnout. It could be a combination (if not a myriad) of things.

Some may think, “well… it doesn’t have to do with whether you’re motivated or not because what needs to get done needs to get done.” I find this view to be prevalent among both the people who tell procrastinating high performers to “just do it,” and the procrastinating high performers who drag their feet to get things done. But to me, it looks like sticking a band-aid on a swollen area that’s actually caused by a bone fracture.

Let me tell you a story about a procrastinating high performer, and a handful of things that contributed to the procrastinating behavior (names have been changed due to privacy reasons).

Oftentimes, deadline setting strategies are mentioned in pieces that talk about procrastination, but in Judy’s case, deadlines — whether they are self-imposed (“I need to start on this by next week.”) or external (“I will get penalized if my submission is late!”) — do not influence her motivation.

Judy does not have a good fit with her role.

But you see... the problem does not stop there. It turns out that Judy was not in the right role, yet there was no one else who had a better fit for that role! Although Judy has problems keeping track of things, her teammates were even more disorganized than she was. There wasn’t the right mix of people running the organization: everyone in the organization was strong at one thing, and weak in the other. So the problem was actually systemic — it wasn’t only about Judy.

Yet, Judy was the only one who was blamed for. ​Her inner flame was extinguished. She left the organization not too long after she got bombarded with a tirade by a "livid" (I'm using the word "livid" because that was the word used by the person delivering the tirade) colleague.

I can't stand to see one person's inner flame get extinguished as a result of a system's problem (they're getting all the blame for something that's not their fault)! It isn't fair.

​This case study was an example of when a behavioral problem (like procrastination) could have shed light on a larger-scale organizational problem, but that never came to fruition because one individual was blamed for (and that person left). I believe that there is a way to actually address individual behavior problems so that the organization can gain insights about itself (and the systemic problems it may have).

​More on that in a later post. I need to take deep breaths for the next week or so to calm myself down.