When something happens that at first sight seems like a major setback we have two main options:
I'd argue that for the sake of making progress we should aim for (2.) and I want to share with you what process I tend to use to get there and want to give you a recent example that happened at our company.
This is paramount to accept the things that are out of your control as facts and find an angle of attack for the things that are in your control.
Instead of dwelling on things that we can't change (the past), we need to look at what we can change (in the here and now) to impact our way going forward.
After breaking down what part of the event is in your control, come up with atomic, actionable steps to improve going forward.
This will make you feel more in control of what's happening and will help limit your negative thoughts around the event as you regain control over the situation and end up with a clear plan of how to proceed.
Recently one of the founders of our company decided to quit, he was one of the two people that got together in the beginning before we approached our third founder and holds a unique skillset (Growth & Product).
Those skills are complementary to the other 2 founders (Development, Product) and we've also recently developed a product in a niche where his expertise was important to build up an audience.
Let's put the "process" into action by looking at it in more detail.
Friend/Founder with unique skillset within the company is leaving because they feel too stressed with our company as a side hustle and want to have a better work/life balance.
A couple of first impressions:
Now all of these are reasonable to think/feel as a first impression but only parts of them are helpful, a lot of it is actually harmful, driven by negative emotions and judgments of what happened.
I gave each of those points some thought and separated emotion from what was actually happening and what was important and that is simply:
Some of the things he was doing were not yet in operations manuals so they're a bit of a black box for us
Get the operations manuals in order and try better to keep them up to date
This decision didn't come from one day to the other, so we should have made sure to talk about how we're feeling in regards to the work more often.
I expected him to speak up but that didn't happen and I should have known better not to expect anything, so this is clearly something to improve.
Have regular explicit check-ins about how people are feeling with the progress, where the company is at, and how it blends into their life. We've added an item to the Agenda of our weekly call for this.
There's more but these are probably the most important ones from my side 🤷♂️
First off, thanks for getting through this, it was a long one 😁
How do you handle negative events? Let me know in the comments below.
This post is by no means meant to blame someone for making a decision, I wish my friend all the best and we're in fact still Friends to this day, rather I want to give you a process that can be used to turn a seemingly negative situation into an opportunity for growth.
The process is somewhat loosely based on Stoic principles and we strive to use those as a way of handling things within our company.
For a lot of people, Stoicism can a bit hard to internalize so we're to trying to make it more approachable and we've put together a site with Stoic quotes that you can check out to get inspired by the ancient Stoics.
If you're not yet familiar with Stoicism check out the Questions section we have some info for you there.
If you're already familiar with stoicism we'd love for you to submit your favorite quote
We're also working on content like this article that breaks down stoic principles for specific use cases, so stay tuned 😛
As always I appreciate any feedback that you might have and I will try not to judge you 😳😏
Stefan, that's a great application of stoicism into a framework. I would add negative visualization on the most vulnerable/crucial parts of our project as a pre-step 🙂
Sorry to hear about your co-founder. I'm glad the framework stood the test and now you guys have a process in place just in case 💪
I've added my favorite quote to beststoicquotes:
Also thanks for the quote, sorry I forgot 💪😁
Yes, you're right.
I think it's also something that can go into learnings, to do more to be prepared for "bad" events aka negative visualization.
I can definitely do better here in a company context, I do this quite a bit for my personal reflections.
Great post, Stefan. Also a nice framework I didn’t know about. And what I like most is how you applied it. The internet is full of „this is the framework to rule the world“-posts but no one actually applies them in practice.
I‘m sorry for the situation with you co-founder though. But I think you drew the right conclusions from it 😊
Thanks Dennis 🤙
No worries, all things considered, it seems to be the best way forward for all parties involved 💪