When Life Gets Hard. The Real Sh*!#t.
In Life and Startups
NOTE 3/31/2020: This was originally written in 2016. Sadly, it is still apropos for today. Lightly edited for clarity.
I have been mourning the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in America. The proliferation of technology has exposed how black men are systematically being hunted and killed. Yes, if you are a black man in America, you are terrified, and now everyone knows why because of technology. Technology can be wonderful in exposing injustices, but exposing is one thing and doing something about it is another thing.
Your company is just a tech company that isn’t focused on social justice. In fact, your entire world 24/7 is about running the company (don’t die), product/market traction, and building a culture. How can you stop for life?
Reality is, if you don’t stop for life, life will stop for you.
I’m not saying take a leave of absence, but how you lead your work community during the wake of tragedy will have immense impact on culture. You will come out stronger for it or weaker.
People get sick, people get hurt and sadly people pass away. Layer on the national tragedies that affect your employees and community as Americans. No matter how big or small your company is — how you respond as a leader to these tragedies has a deeper impact on culture and the people around you than that team building event focused on culture.
Our company has had our fair share of sadness and tragedy over the past years that is related to life. I remember our first life tragedy was when we had an employee pass away suddenly in her sleep, leaving behind a husband and four kids. Our company was only about 120 people at the time and growing like crazy. We found out the next morning and were in shock. After frantically verifying that she did indeed pass away, it was time to lead the company through mourning.
A few years ago, a controversy that turned into a movement rose up that impacted a portion of our employees. People (of a certain people group) who had spoke out against the controversy would get personal threats, including death threats — unfortunately this is still going on. [1]
Both cases had either direct or indirect impact on the employees — personal, community, and even societal tragedies. How do you deal with this thing called life when trying to build a company?
Empathy
This all begins with empathy. Perhaps you are not directly impacted; however, having empathy enables action. Oftentimes for those that are not directly impacted, empathy may be the largest lifeline to those who are impacted because they are busy mourning.
Oftentimes after a moment like these, empathy can be as easy as:
How are you doing today?
That phrase is used so nonchalantly, but in the wake of a loss or tragedy, it is a phrase that is most needed and never uttered. Empathy begins with stepping outside of yourself and recognizing that someone may live in a different world than you, or going through their own battles much greater than your task list that day.
Communication
As a leader, it is okay, after a tragedy like this, to recognize that you are emotionally affected (grieved, saddened, frustrated, etc…) and communicate that to your employees. In fact expressing your authentic emotions will give your more strength as a leader in times like this.
It is also in times like this that employees look to leadership on how to behave. And it is in this moment you have a real opportunity to impact past your product and your company walls.
If it is a personal situation or a people group that is directly affected, it is best to speak to that group first on how you can best drive towards something healthy from the rest of the company. This way the communication can be most helpful versus harmful to those directly affected. (Mandela Schumacher-Hodge wrote an excellent article about coming back to work after the shootings and gave an excellent primer on how to talk about race after tragedy. Thank you for sharing your story!)
When our employee passed away we spoke to her team lead, colleagues and family on what would be the best way to help support and help them through their mourning process.
With the other controversy, there were several conversations with impacted group about how the company could respond with the impacted group’s safety being the top concern. We decided an email driving to next steps that anyone could do was not helpful, instead we used the controversy to open a dialog around diversity. This led to concrete next steps for people who were interested as well as those just learning. With most injustices, everyone is on a journey and recognize that people will be at different parts of the journey. [1]
Mourning & Self Care
Allow a period for mourning and self-care for those directly affected. For some cases provide grief counselors. Allowing employees to take time off to take care of themselves emotionally if they need to should be available. Even if they do not take it, communicating that it is there is a large step in empathy as well as demonstrating that you as a leader and as a company cares.
Connection
Allow people to talk about the tragedy or loss to each other. Allow people to mourn together. When it comes to social injustices that are heated or where it is so easy for the privileged group to be apathetic, create a forum for which people can begin to dialog. This should be carefully crafted with a lot of thought and care from leaders as well as with HR (give legal the heads up so they won’t freak out, but legal or HR should not drive the dialog — leaders should drive this). The dialog should not start with jumping to solutions, it should be used to build empathy as well as mourn. For us we found it helpful to kick things off with a mixed panel of leaders and then break folks off into mixed groups, which allowed them to discuss reactions and thoughts in a smaller group setting. It was from there that several solutions were put forth into action. And today, we are more diverse and better for it.