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As a leadership coach and wellbeing culture strategist, I’m always advocating for healthy feedback loops—those intentional communication practices that help us share information and learn from one another. But, Subscriber First Name, there are certain feedback loops that I absolutely loathe: Workplace Vicious Cycles. Truthfully, many of us are caught in these cycles without even realizing it. In the social impact sector, these cycles are often fueled by our desire to prove high impact under immense pressure and impossible conditions. We want to reach more people. Raise more money. Respond to community needs as quickly as possible. Before we know it, the strategies we developed to help us reach these goals become the very things making our work unsustainable. Let me know if any of these examples resonate: The program team who determined that success is about maximizing reach now find themselves in a cycle of adding more programs that stretch staff beyond their capacity. The fundraising team whose goals are fueled by scarcity now find themselves in a cycle of urgency—chasing every opportunity and saying yes to everything. The executive leader whose leadership strategy is built around high performance and over delivering now finds herself in cycle of pushing herself beyond her limits… taking one just one more project… solving just one more problem… canceling just one more vacation to get the work done… It all looks effective on the surface. Below the surface, people are in the trenches. So, what does it take to break a vicious cycle?First, acknowledgement: We have to be willing to name the patterns. Maybe the behaviors that got us here did work at some point. Maybe they helped us survive, or grow. But now, we have to acknowledge when these same patterns create fractures and compromise our wellbeing. Second, curiosity: Ask yourself… if your team could replace scarcity, urgency, and pressure to deliver, what would you put in its place?
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