Anne Morris

You've gotten yourself in the mindset to move forward.

But the people around you are just beginning to move through those phases of metabolizing this information and their new reality.

And to your point, if you're somewhere stuck in the middle of this hierarchy, if the pattern holds, your senior leaders probably have not thought

deeply and rigorously about how, from a storytelling and from a support standpoint, they're going to bring the rest of the workforce along.

And so what can you do within the circle of influence that you totally control?

It might only be with your direct reports.

to block out these narrative steps with people, we've seen it make a huge difference.

Because part of that first step of owning the past, owning the mistakes, owning where we are, owning the costs for everyone leaving and staying, you're also making that discussable.

You're bringing it out of the shadows, the individual pain that people are experiencing in their offices.

And you're saying, yeah, no, this is collective pain.

We're gonna name it, we're gonna work through it, and we're gonna get to the other side together.

Yeah, what I find so hopeful about Argyris' research on this, and it really did fall out of a lifetime of work on identifying the variables that really explain high-performing teams.

And then here's the part that really excites me.

They're not even that good at it.

Courage over competence.

Because sometimes, you know, I have this people-pleasing side.

And so I will pause in the face of conflict sometimes.

And I have to, like, steel myself for it.

And I go back to this again and again because his research doesn't conclude.

You're a UN-level conflict negotiator.