Stillwater Consulting

“I want to make a lateral transition but the response from the company hasn’t been too supportive”, a high potential recently promoted manager shared with the cohort. “I was hoping you could tell me if this sort of transition happens in this sort of organization”.

I told her she was asking the wrong question. If she was going to base her confidence on the possibility of the lateral move happening on precedent then so would the people who would make that decision. The question she needed to ask was not whether this sort of transition happened, but what she needed to do to make the transition happen. She needed to identify her transferrable strengths that would contribute to the new role, figure out what she needed to learn to make up for her lack of experience in that area and address it, she needed to have her own thoughts and ideas for what was required in that new division so she could speak passionately about it in the interview conversations.

Happy New Year folks 🙂

As we head into 2025, one of the things I notice in my conversation with our clients and our participants is the rise in the usage of the term ‘mental health’. People are taking short breaks or switching jobs or even taking year-long breaks to prioritise their mental health. Our clients are looking for organizational best practices and training programs that will help them support their employees on this front.

One of the concerns that some people have is that this reflects a greater fragility and lack of resilience of society compared to earlier decades or generations. They are worried that people have become too sensitive and too soft, less

A participant in one of our leadership programs recently shared a personal dilemma with me. He confessed that he couldn’t spend time with his elderly parents due to his jam-packed schedule.

I asked him to slip into his parents’ shoes and give me a sense of what he felt. “Guilty,” he replied.

In one of our recent leadership programs, a participant shared her management philosophy ” I empower the team and enable and learn from their own failures. I don’t interrupt them”

However, her 360 feedback on the other hand indicated that her team members felt criticized anxious. And her own sharing contained several statements that contradicted her initial declaration.

“I’m not sure how much longer I can take it” a participant of one of our leadership programs told me the others day.

I sometimes hear this when people feel they are not being recognized at work, or they have a highly critical boss or work environment, or even as young managers doing roles they feel are sucking the life force out of them.

Sometimes when I put participants in breakout rooms, some of them don’t create much value from the session and blame it on an external factor – ‘the other participants were asking irrelevant questions’, ‘the time allocated was too short’, ‘I didn’t know if the feedback I was going to give would be taken well’, etc.

But I tell them that in a self-awareness program you can’t blame any externality because the subject is you.

Once, I had a chat with two coachees simultaneously who were learning partners on one of our programs.

One of them told me he felt more tangled up than a pair of earphones in a jeans pocket.

On a hunch I asked him to share his screen and show me his Outlook. He was drowning in a sea of thousands of unread emails and calendar invites, neither accepted nor rejected, like a digital Marie Kondo nightmare! It was as if he was hosting an “open loops” party, and everyone was invited. His mental bandwidth was completely swamped and he lived with the constant feeling that he was forgetting something important, and he often was.

One of the participants in our leadership program was completely distraught due to a huge breakdown in an area of his personal life. He was finding it hard to sleep and told me that he was pretty much in a perpetual daze during the day. We were discussing the best way to reframe the situation.

One of the analogies we discussed was that our weaknesses are there even when things are going great in life. But like dangerous rocks on the sea floor, they are often covered and invisible during high tide.

“Do I have what it takes to succeed at that level?” a recently promoted participant in our leadership program shared his concerns.

“That’s a terrible question”, I told him. “Who on earth has the authority to answer that question. Besides It’s not like you’re flying a commercial airliner or doing a brain surgery with no training. The organization has decided to take that risk after multiple interviews and considering various alternatives for the role. Since it’s a question nobody can answer, all it’s going to create is a anxiety and pressure without generating any clarity. What’s a better question?”

“Maybe in retrospect I should have just picked up the phone and called him”, one of my participants concluded at the end of her sharing.

She was reliving an experience where she had a disagreement with a colleague that had deteriorated into a series of increasingly terse emails and trying to figure out how she could get more effective in those sorts of situations.