Everyone’s Sad and Getting Sadder

How managers can help in truly difficult times

At an early morning call for a Slack group I help admin, my friend Avery suggested we prompt the community for ways to help parents through their stress and isolation during this never-ending pandemic. I bat my eyes exactly two beats before they welled with tears and a lump lodged in my throat. I told myself it was fatigue, but this was in fact the first time after months of balancing everyone’s needs but my own that someone had said to my face: How can we help you endure? It didn’t matter what the ideas were and it didn’t matter how or if they even happened. In that moment, I felt seen, and that was what I didn’t know I needed. It was a powerful gesture of human kindness for Avery to say it out loud.

These days there is an endless stream of tweets like these.

Melissa Nightingale, partner at Raw Signal Group and leader of leaders, writes of the asterisk that has crept into people’s lives, a wedge between people and their managers. As a manager myself, I find this both fascinating and alarming.

We talk to the non-founder, non-C-suite bosses and employees. How are you?, we ask. How are things going? And what comes back is this.