For years I've called sponsors and mentors when I get anxious at work. Those calls have become fewer and fewer over the years, but my default is to look at every tense situation at work as a personal assault.
I used to see confrontation as a threat to something I thought I need to get or something I wanted to hang on to.
One of the biggest pieces of advice I've gotten over the years has been applying the traditions at work. The 12 steps adopted by many recovery programs lay a path to our personal recovery. But the 12 traditions are oriented toward how we work as a fellowship and in our group. They can also be applied as spiritual principles at work to help us be “a worker among workers.”
The traditions came about after the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous realized that they needed to have the fellowship be run by the members and not by them dictating things as executive leaders. Sound familiar? This is something that every startup (and, more frequently, large companies) has to deal with at some point. Your employees want to be partners in a team, and your stakeholders and bosses want matrix-based collaboration.
In thinking about what worked and what didn't, Bill Wilson set down a set of principles that came out of years of experience and trial and error. There's a great book about this process called ‘AA Comes of Age.’ It’s kind of an amazing business book in that it outlines every possible failure and dead end in the early AA fellowship.
By the time the 12 traditions were written, they had learned from their failures and experiments.
The key to understanding the traditions is that they’re very much spiritual principles. How can I let go? How do I interact during conflict? How do I trust an outcome I didn’t invent? These are issues that are challenging for most people but absolute killers for alcoholics in particular. We seeth with fear and resentment, then we act where we should be trusting. We explain when we should be listening.
Over the years, and with a lot of repetition by my sponsors, I’ve found that the first three traditions have become invaluable as a leader in any organization. You can translate each of them to a business context pretty easily:
This is essential in any job. If we’re not a team and not a company, then we all sink. You can ask yourself in any work situation if you’re remembering that your job is meaningless if the company goes out of business. So be on the team, don’t try to dominate or sabotage it.
Everyone I’m working with has different experiences, different education, and different skills. Surely the group together has more experience than I do on my own - therefore, something greater than me is speaking if the group agrees on something. Even if I’m opposed to it, even if I’m the boss, I should really listen carefully.
The same is true of work. I accepted the job, it wasn’t forced on me. Likewise, no one has the right to deny me a voice while I’m employed there. There are appropriate ways to express yourself, but we’re talking about mutual consent and respect. And it means I have to respect that other people have voices too. We’re all a part of this team as long as we say so.
These ideas helped me untangle a lot of personal drama and a lot of personal issues with bosses, peers, teams, and stakeholders at work.
H@anon.coach