Compartmentalization
Maintaining momentum amidst powerful setbacks
At Microsoft. there is training that managers go through around handling delicate situations and the processes to follow. Within that training is the escalation path to follow with HR (Human Resources) if you as a manager witness or are told about any inappropriate behavior, more precisely termed an “HR violation.” So I knew what needed to be done the first time I was put in this situation … and had to report myself to HR.
Daniel sent me an email at 7pm, titled “not so funny”. I read this mail at 8pm (this was from an earlier time in my career before I’d established my Inviolates1 and my Triage Shield2 that would have had me reading this mail during my workday). The mail detailed an incident when I told an insensitive joke to members of the team I was leading. I immediately felt bad. Daniel went on to share their family history that made the joke especially hurtful. Now I felt even worse. And then came the worst part of all: the mail gave the date of the incident … two years ago.
I experienced a horrible sadness. I had hurt someone close to me. And I had obviously created an environment where that person didn’t feel comfortable telling me about it when it happened. How much additional pain did that cause this employee as they tried to bottle it up? Was every interaction with me in the intervening time a reminder of this incident? What else had I done to my team that they had kept inside? I had prided myself on my dedication to my team and the “2nd family feel” that I always tried to nurture. In an instant that was replaced with complete doubt. I felt helpless, ashamed, and depressed.
Everything stopped.
But when you are a manager for 50 people, “stopped” is not an option. In coaching sessions with new managers, a phrase I commonly use is, “When you have a bad day, your team has a bad day.” Bad things happen, and you need to give them due space and attention. But you also need to contain it, boxing it in as best you can, so that life outside of that event can proceed, and you can be part of it. You need to develop your Compartmentalization muscle; to avoid “stopped”.
I knew that. I replied to Daniel asking for a 1:1 the following day, which they agreed to. I then “powered through” the next morning with this weight. At 1pm, I had an in-depth 1:1 with Daniel. Immediately afterwards, I wrote-up a recounting of our conversation which I shared with Daniel … and then raised to my management and the HR department. Then, at 2pm, I closed my office door and closed my relight blinds (a shut door meant you were busy; a shut door with shut blinds next to it meant you were seriously busy). I sat down in my comfy meeting chair, laid my head against the chair back, closed my eyes, and let the full internalization happen: sadness, anger, second-guessing, regret, failure, disbelief, embarrassment, disappointment, …
About 30 minutes later, I opened my eyes, stood up, grabbed a dry erase marker, and started writing. It was a total stream-of-consciousness, attempting to articulate every thought bouncing around in my head. When I filled up one whiteboard, I moved on to the next whiteboard. When all three whiteboards were full, I started writing on my windows. When I felt that I had gotten everything out, I stepped back and did a re-read of everything written. I took pictures of what I wrote, selected a few thoughts as “keepers” and erased the rest. Four of the six keepers had been written on my windows. I transferred the two that were on my whiteboards over to the windows.
This one-hour exercise was my “immediate closure” that allowed me to feel satisfied I had given this issue the short-term attention it needed. I could now mentally park this for later exploration, with those keepers on my window in my field of vision from my desk to prompt further rumination at a later date. I opened my door and blinds and resumed my manager role.
I gave this incident its due time over the course of the two weeks that followed. And then I erased the keepers from my windows. There were fundamental changes to “how I show up” as a manager after that incident. It was a very impactful “lesson learned” moment in my management career.
But in the moment of this event, on the day I had the talk with Daniel and in the two weeks of post-processing that following, if you were to have asked any of my employees if I was checked out, preoccupied, or inattentive, I’m certain no one would have said they noticed. Compartmentalization was my success amidst my failure. I had a bad day, without my team having a bad day.
Compartmentalization as a skill
Psychology Today defines Compartmentalization as “a defense mechanism in which people mentally separate conflicting thoughts, emotions, or experiences to avoid the discomfort of contradiction.”3 Psychology Today goes on to talk about “Compartmentalization in Everyday Life”, where they capture the balance necessary to keep the compartmentalization helpful and healthy. I want to focus on Compartmentalization as a skill, much like I had talked about the skill of Embracing Angst4. So my thoughts here center around the healthy attributes of Compartmentalization.
There are the slow burns in your everyday life. Your child is struggling in school. Your parent is deteriorating in health. You’re wrestling with your own career growth. Long term pressures like these are a fact of life for adults, and thus this is where we most naturally develop our Compartmentalization skill, steadily over time, bit by bit.
And then there are the explosions, where something out of the blue hits you hard. Your child has a fight with a student on the playground. Your parent breaks their arm. The work project you’ve devoted the last two years to gets cut. With these events, our responses tend to be more all-consuming. Of course there are associated immediate actions with these explosions (e.g. visit principal, visit hospital, meet with team), but then there is also the emotional cloud that lingers. Dealing with what lingers requires what I consider to be a more advanced level of Compartmentalization.
Here is the pep talk I give myself when Compartmentalization is needed:
Life isn’t easy, and you’ve just found yet another reminder of this.
You need to give this some attention, but you can’t let it consume you.
You have responsibilities and accountabilities, first and foremost to the individuals on your team.
Remember, when a leader has a bad day, their team has a bad day.
Don’t let this win.
Repeat “Everything is always okay” a few times. (I’ll dive into this one below)
Another aspect of this pep talk is to hang on to your biggest Compartmentalization success and bring that memory to the forefront when you are faced with another Compartmentalization opportunity. This will make this daunting task feel doable. And, most of the time, it will provide an “at least your current challenge isn’t this bad” relief.
“Everything is always okay”
Most of the coaching I received at Microsoft was from fellow employees. But there were three occasions where I leveraged outsourced career coaches, with terrific lasting improvements each time. Craig May was my first coach, and I met him at a relative low point in my career. It came at the end of “the Splash run”, a five year period (2007 - 2012) that yielded two of my top three favorite products (Zune and Windows Phone) while building a dream feature team of 12 developers working in concert with a dream partner feature team of another 10 developers. The 22 of us were the Splash team that provided a state-of-the-art UI platform that enabled some of the most captivating user experiences of the time.
The Splash run ended after Windows Phone 8 shipped, when an ill-designed reorg left my incredibly strong feature team blowing in the wind. We tried for several months to integrate into our new team, but it was a “donor host rejection” experience that drove half of my team to seek jobs elsewhere.
As I looked back at the steps that led to this complete implosion, and tried to reason about ways it could have been avoided, there was an incredible amount of anger, guilt, and sadness for my responsibility in the whole affair, and for letting my team down in a mega way.
Conveniently, as part of the leadership program that I was in at the time, I had already been working with Craig May, an executive coach, on my professional development. So I turned to Craig for guidance as I worked my way through this problem. It was probably a month of personal struggle, during which Craig gave a lot of helpful insights. He told me the importance of keeping things in perspective, and how central of a theme that was for him, to the point that it was incorporated into his family’s mission statement. Craig shared the exact line from this mission statement: “Everything is always okay.” He said that he and his family used this phrase as a calming chant when they hit a bad patch.
You could say that this line represents denial. And that’s entirely possible if used in an “ignorance is bliss” way. But I have used it, instead, at times when the negative has me stuck. This line unsticks me. It forces me to focus on the positives and incentivizes me to act so that the negative doesn’t grow. Work the Problem5 to move more things towards “okay”.
You could say that this line is dismissive. I remember one time when I shared this line with my team at an all hands meeting when we were discussing an upcoming big change, and my PM counterpart quickly added, “… until it’s not.” to help counter the potential dismissiveness of this line. That made me realize that this line is best shared in a “for future reference” context, meant to arm people with a tool they can use themselves when they are personally struggling, and need help Compartmentalizing so that they can make forward progress.
Compartmentalization is an even deeper application of Timebox Everything6. The alternative is being consumed by the negativity to the point that your Energy Flywheel7 grinds to a halt.