While adversity often results in some kind of growth, many challenges are painful and exhausting - and yet, most of us need to continue to show up at work even during these hard times.

Show Notes

The adversity from personal challenges can lead to personal growth, enhancing life appreciation, personal strength, relationships, spiritual growth, and recognizing new life paths. Although painful experiences are something any of us want, many people experience Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG). No one really wants or asks for that gift, but there it is - even at work.

When we are managing employees in crisis, we can be most helpful by bringing our best in terms of compassion and flexibility. Managers should set a compassionate tone, offer creative solutions, and check in regularly without becoming overly involved or making unfulfillable promises - and even with flexibility remember boundaries. Consistency in treating similar situations among employees is crucial.

Personal crises can impact our work lives - everything from divorce, bankruptcy to illness and death.

During a crisis, brain function is impaired by stress. It's essential to process emotions fully to avoid burnout. Stress perception impacts our functionality: however, viewing stress as a challenge can enhance concentration and performance, while viewing it as a threat increases fear. Key questions to foster a challenge response include identifying control points, specific actions, strengths, and resources.

10 Ways to Function at Work When Your Life is a Mess

1. Vent Wisely: Vent to a friend outside of work, not coworkers.
2. Manage Information: Inform your manager and selective coworkers about your crisis, keeping work as a non-therapy zone.
3. Prioritize Clients: Maintain professional boundaries with clients, sharing minimal personal information.
4. Prioritize Tasks: Make lists of non-negotiable tasks and break them into manageable pieces. Use a timer for focus.
5. Take Personal Days: A productive day off is better than multiple unproductive days at work.
6. Respect Flexibility: Ensure your flexible schedule meets both personal and organizational needs.
7. Utilize Benefits: Leverage Employee Assistance Programs, bereavement leave, etc.
8. Set Boundaries: Establish clear work-life boundaries to manage stress.
9. Seek Help: Enlist support from team, family, or friends to manage life outside of work.
10. Colleague Support: Encourage compassion, flexibility, and regular check-ins without becoming overly involved.

While adversity often results in PTG, leading to renewed life appreciation, enhanced strength, deeper relationships, spiritual growth, and new life directions, we acknowledge that these challenges are painful and exhausting - and yet, most of us need to continue to show up at work even during these hard times.

Good Reads

10 Ways to Function at Work When Your Life is a Mess

How to work when your life is a mess | Alexandra Samuel

PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Rethinking Stress: The Role of Mindsets in Determining the Stress Response | Semantic Scholar

Working Through a Personal Crisis (hbr.org)

How Adversity Makes You Stronger

How to Manage an Employee Who’s Having a Personal Crisis

We are surrounded by entrenchment - in our communities, at work, in our families and certainly politically. Entrenchment happens when an attitude, habit, or belief becomes so firmly established that it morphs from “what I believe” into “who I am,” and it makes change difficult and unlikely.

Enter fault lines: the cracks that split groups into subgroups based on aligning attributes like race or age. For instance, young Latino players might form a clique separate from older white players in a Major League Baseball team, creating internal conflicts that erode team cohesion and performance.

Faultlines can breed conflict and hamper communication, however, they can also foster a sense of belonging within subgroups. Accountants and marketers might struggle to collaborate due to their different professional languages, yet find comfort and cohesion within their own teams.

To combat entrenchment, leaders need to first understand the different types of subgroups and their effects. Consider spatial presence, surface-level characteristics like gender or race, knowledge bases, and deep-level identities like values and beliefs, which all play roles to a greater and lesser degree in subgroup formation and entrenchment.

Observing team interactions—who talks to whom, who aligns with whom—can reveal existing subgroups. Leaders should also be aware of their own potential alignments with these subgroups. To break down these entrenched barriers, leaders can mix up team memberships, emphasise shared goals and adversaries, encourage formal and informal time spent together, and engage boundary spanners who can navigate between groups. Embracing curiosity about other subgroups is also key.

Other Good Reads:

Toward A Temporal Theory of Faultlines and Subgroup Entrenchment - Meister - 2020 - Journal of Management Studies - Wiley Online Library

Is Your Organisation Digging Trenches or Building Bridges?

Faultline Theory: Why Teams Fall Apart | by Small World Solutions Group | Medium

On this episode of Crina and Kirsten Get to Work, our gal pals focus on memory, how memory affects the workplace and how we can address or minimize memory issues. Crina had several experiences where people she was in meetings with or spoke to had wildly different recollections of what was said.

Let’s shout out to the ladies’ memories - which are better than males - at least according to

The Wonder Of You: Why Women Have Better Memory Than Men. This may be because memories “stick” better when we pay attention, focus on details and they are accompanied by feelings. It is kind of like telling ourselves a story and it makes our memories better.

Neuroscientist Lisa Genova has done a deep dive into memory and neurological disorders - in fact, she is scientist turned fiction writer telling stories about the experiences of people who experience neurological disorders. Her most recent book, Remember: The science of memory and the art of forgetting is non-fiction. She tells us that memory is essential to almost everything we do - walking, talking, interaction, watching a movie, eating. Without memory, we are untethered to the life we live.

Our brains are designed to remember what is meaningful, emotional, surprising, new and what we repeat and practice. This applies to our four kinds of memory: muscle memory, semantic memory (facts and information), episodic memory (what happened in your life) and working memory (doing things like writing, talking and problem solving).

We create memory when our brain takes in information, weaves it together and stores it to a neural circuit we can later access. Every memory actually changes our beautiful brains. And our memories are surprisingly accurate. We can train our brains to be better at memory, but the passage of time does impact the reliability of our memories.

Stress, lack of sleep, poor diet and lack of sleep can impact our memories. In short, think self-care for a better memory. In addition, writing things down, repeating what you have heard, telling yourself stories, making connections and calming down can all improve memory.

This is all to say memory is remarkable and also not always reliable - if we take care of ourselves and pay close attention our memories will better serve us.