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Just got an e-mail describing a situation I’ve seen many times over the years. There are teams that are so demoralized nothing feels like it will help. My first official ObjectMentor coaching gig was one of those. Bob Martin gave me a parachute, three index cards, and a bowie knife, then pushed me out of a plane somewhere in the great northwest: come back when you’ve converted the natives.

The natives were suffering despair.  This particular team, about a 120 developers, had been on mandatory 60-hour weeks for eighteen months. They — what was left of them after >50% turnover — were exhausted. It was the worst death march I’ve ever seen.

Can Anyone Guess What I Did?

Exactly, very good guess!!  I screwed it up.

Anyway, ten years have gone by, and shocking as it seems, I’ve worked with a lot of teams suffering despair.  I began to formulate an approach. Eventually, I liked that approach so much, it in turn became one of the pillars of my coaching practice. Ideas and techniques I developed for working with despair have turned in to ideas and techniques I use all the time.

First, let me make sure we all know the problem.  Despair is not unhappiness.  Unhappiness comes sometimes, and it goes sometimes, and though it can create problems, it’s not despair.

Despair Is Hopelessness

Through the use of integrated biplanar ultrasound imaging, relating planning and monitoring is offered throughout the duration of the treatment as well as images both before and after of the entire infected region. news purchase levitra online Having a healthy http://aimhousepatong.com/item2679.html cialis properien lifestyle and exercising regularly helps. Later on line levitra on, it was found that Kamagra is cheaper than its alternatives. Kamagra is levitra canadian pharmacy a drug which is used orally to treat the problem of erectile dysfunction in men. Despair is the belief that nothing matters, because things will never change. There will be some unhappiness, of course, but a lot of what you’ll see is neither happy nor sad, just numbness.  Despair may or may not be articulated by team members: it is precisely the fact that they’ve acculturated to it that makes it despair in the first place. That acculturation can make the despair invisible to its victims.

You could reasonably wonder how I came to know so much about despair.  Easy.  I’ve been a diagnosed and treated major depressive for about 25 years.  Despair in a team is analogous to depression in an individual.

Which, in fact, suggests our approach. We just secretly drug them!  Well, actually, no. I never tried that.  My approach stems from realizing that depression is so often accompanied by severe anhedonia. Anhedonia is an inability to experience pleasure.

To Reverse Anhedonia, Apply Joy

To start working with a despairing team, you are going to have to bring them back to being able to experience pleasure.

Oddly, it isn’t that hard.  Remember, we have the tremendous advantage of working with geeks. And geeks — that is, in the overwhelming majority — are defined as geeks because they wear their joy-source on their sleeves (and their pocket-protectors).

3 Responses to “Coaching: Attacking Despair (Part 1)”

  1. Meza says:

    Well, that explains our 300+ bottles of energy drink in the office 😉

  2. Jon Kern says:

    Last year, I was involved with a project when the VP demanded some crazy extra time be put in by the team to get an interim release out the door to meet what was largely an arbitrary date.

    I rallied the team, we made the date. I told the VP that he was shooting his last bullet here, to not expect the team to respond like this as a matter of routine. Otherwise, I explained, you would burn them out.

    Turned out the date was indeed rather arbitrary and not as critical as he had anticipated — and as we all more or less knew.

    It never happened again.

  3. As usual, brilliant insights and experiences, brilliantly articulated, with humor and compassion. Time for some sort of iPhone multi-player game for this here team, apparently. 😉