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In this Traps and Tricks episode of the Experimental Leader Podcast, Mel Rutherford and Melanie Parish unpack two big leadership traps: treating criticism as something you just have to “weather,” and shutting down in the face of strong emotions. They explore how to see criticism as data, respond to emotions with empathy (not avoidance), and create healthier information flow between leaders, middle managers, and teams.

 

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Traps and Tricks: From Breakdown to Breakthrough

Hello, I’m Melanie Parish, and I am a content creator. I’m an author, I’m an executive coach, and I’m a teacher.

Hi, I’m Mel Rutherford. I’m an academic psychologist. I’m an author, the author of the book, The Glass Cliff: One Trans Man’s Leadership Odyssey.

It’s nice to be here with you today.

It’s good to be here.

So today we are talking about traps and tricks. I love this. I love this episode that we’re doing. What are you thinking about?

Well, I’m thinking about the leadership puzzle of the completely unexpected disaster, and I’ve got a couple of examples. One example was over the winter during an ice storm, a really huge tree fell down in the middle of the night and fell into the swimming pool.

Yes, it did. Yes, it did. And I think also there’s like work to work, shit happens like in leadership, shit happens all the time. It’s kind of why there’s job security in leadership, that layoffs happen, or a new competitor comes into the marketplace, or your customer wants something you can’t deliver, or there’s conflict, like shit happens all the time in the workplace and in leadership.

Well, and a sort of recent example, so many of my colleagues back in 2019 2020 came into their leadership role with a vision for what they wanted to do with the next five years, and then Covid happened, we were all on lockdown, and those visions didn’t get to get realized.
I think it’s, I mean, this is just part of the natural landscape of leadership that bad things happen, and then what, like that’s the, that’s the trap, so you can be upset, you can flap your arms, you can. I think the trap is really that you lose your leadership control, and that you start to act like things happen to you, rather than having a vision for how you lead.

 

Right, and being able to update that vision when something unexpected comes along.

Yeah, and, and you know, there’s a whole bunch of sort of buzzwords in leadership that I think relate here: one is resilience, one is choice, um but I do think there’s something about positivity or sense of humor, or and I think that organizations can have a culture that supports positivity in these moments, I think, I think it’s really important that the organization’s culture is in support of leaders being at choice. They’re not looking to blame the leader when something happens. What else are you thinking about?

Well, another recent disaster, just this past weekend, we were taking our new to us 1984 Westphalia Vannigan on its first camping trip, and we got it an hour out of town, and after we, after a couple of kilometers of really loud clunking, the axle broke.

Yes, it did.

Another disaster. It was sort of disastrous. It wasn’t like the worst thing, because we didn’t die, but we, we were in peril, that’s for sure. And I think it’s really interesting when I’ve told this story to people, and I haven’t told it a lot, but they’re like, oh my gosh, that’s terrible. So, sort of, the, you know, we, we also express these things like we’re not curious about, oh, well, what’d you do, or what, what was the impact, or you know, all of that. So I do think that it’s interesting, even watching people’s reactions when I tell them that our axle broke, and there’s sort of two parts, I think, one is some people have. No idea what it means to have an axle break, which I would have been in that camp a week ago, and so I wouldn’t have even known it was that horrible. I would have thought, oh, so you go the mechanic, and for those of you who are listening, what happens when your axle breaks is you can lose steering, you can lose brakes and and everything goes bad for us. We were actually just not able to put it into park, and Nome had to sit there with his foot on the brake, but breaks can go, depending on which axle breaks, so they are fairly horrible. It is really dangerous when they go out. I don’t know if it’s horrible, but dangerous. So, well, I think we could take a break here, and then we could come back and talk about some of the tricks for when things go bad. What do you think?

When everything goes off the rails? 

Okay, well, so it’s nice to be back with you. So now, what do you do? Like, what do you do when things go bad?

What’s a leader to do when everything goes off the rails?

Yeah, what, what, what are you thinking?

Well, in both of the examples that I’ve been thinking about today, the tree falling in the pool and our van breaking an axle, we had the best possible outcome of those disasters. What I, what I call lucky disasters, that when the tree fell in the pool, our kids were home, and we, he went out and bought a new chainsaw, and we spent the next four days cutting the tree into small pieces, and pulling well, some of the pieces weren’t that small, but we pulled all the wood out of the pool, and when I opened the pool this spring, learned that nothing was damaged, the tree didn’t scrape and open up the liner, didn’t hit any tubes or piping, and nothing, nothing was damaged, so that was a lucky disaster.

Yeah, and I think I was impressed when the tree fell, that I mean, you did call me and say, ‘Well, Melanie, the pool is gone. That was when I came home and thought, ‘Oh, I think they’re going to need a chainsaw, but I think there were a couple of things, one is we did spend resources to get the tools we needed to deal with the unexpected job that was between Christmas and New Year’s, and I think that’s actually a good, a good thing for a leader to do is just reevaluate what resources they need to deal with a disaster, calling it a lucky disaster, because if we had taken that tree down, it would have cost us 1000s of dollars, and whoever was taking it down would have had to take special care to make sure it didn’t fall in the pool, so, so it’s funny, they would have had to avoid the disaster that happened, but when the disaster happened, nothing actually got damaged, which I think was sort of shocking.

Right? And those four days that we spent chopping up the tree and pulling the wood out, it turned out to be a lot of fun. It was like we were working together; the boys really enjoyed the puzzle of it. When we had, when we big pieces of the trunk were in the water, puzzling how to get that out of the water. How, when we ended up wrapping it in rope and then bouncing it, we bounced it in the water and then pulled it up when it was bouncing up. So having a puzzle and solving the puzzle turned out to be a lot of fun.

Well, and all you know, for those four days I would find different.. there were three of you working on it, and I would find two of you, random two, standing around talking about, well, I was thinking we could do this, or I was thinking we could do that, and in terms of like dude projects, it was like right up there in terms of like it didn’t take an enormous amount of mechanical skill, and it took a lot of brawn, and we had brawn, like they, the guys are, you know, they’re competitive athletes, so they are super strong and powerful and tall, and could reach everything. So, I, I do think, and I, and I was really impressed by how everybody just got to it. There was no moaning or like upset. It was like I came home and saw. Saw you know people with a like one Emerson, I think, had a hatchet, and I was like, oh, he’s gonna need a chainsaw, because a hatchet is not the tool for the job, but I do think it’s interesting that you all three believed that you could do something, and so you did something.

Yeah, it was kind of fun having a project, and it was kind of fun having a project that we could work on together.
Yeah, and then what about what about Fern, the 1984 VW van again?

 

So, as we started clonking, you were able to locate a mechanic, so we pulled in the mechanic and described the clunking. They looked under with a flashlight and said, “I don’t see anything wrong. Go ahead. So we tried, tried to make a hard left turn right out of the mechanic’s driveway, and that’s exactly when the axle broke. So we’re on the side of the road, right across this, the road from from the mechanic, and which was terribly lucky. We didn’t have to call a tow truck. They pulled us, put it, put a chain on a pickup truck, and pulled the van back into their parking lot, and we had to wait an hour for our son to come get us, and during that hour they had already located a new axle, so the new axle was on the way before we even left their parking lot, so what could have been quite disastrous, we could have, could have been fatal to Fern turned out to be another lucky disaster.

Well, and, and you’re not talking about the bottle of wine we drank in the parking lot after we called our son, and the car was disabled. We had a really nice bottle of wine we were taking camping, and we cracked the bottle of wine and enjoyed, enjoyed it in the parking lot, and sort of laughed about the whole thing, but I also spoke with them today, and, and it’s interesting in the same way that, like, we didn’t have to pay to have someone take down the tree. It’s a lucky disaster in that I’ve been looking for the right mechanic to do some work on the van to look at some things to check it out and I talked to them today and they’re like yeah when we start working on it we’re going to check it out top to bottom and see if there’s anything else that you need and they’re exactly kind of the right level of mechanic to they’re not like a dealer, you wouldn’t take your 1984 van to a dealership because they’re the wrong level of to do it, and these people seem like they’re exactly at the right level to work on it and figure it out, so we may actually get them to, you know, fix a couple of other things, or help us figure out a couple of other things. I think they’re going to turn out to be nice partners.

Yeah, so when you’re in a leadership position and a disaster finds you, greeting that disaster with some curiosity, like, what’s what are the opportunities here? What can we learn here what’s what’s the best next move.

Well, and also I think sometimes we get stretched so tight as leaders that everything has to go well, and in our case we knew when we bought a 1984 you know, RV that probably we were going to spend some time in a mechanic, so we had prepared ourselves mentally for how we would greet a disaster, and, and I think that that’s part of leadership too, is to not put yourself on all everything is so maxed out and so stretched thin that you don’t have any resources or resilience to handle things as they occur, so because of that we were able to go, okay, well, there goes our camping trip. What do we need to cancel? And then, how do we continue to have a good time? I mean, this was a vacation, not, but work can also be enjoyable, and it can also be that you go, yeah, that bad thing happened. Now, what do we do? How do we create resilience? How do we solve it? How do we get all hands on deck today? Do we need to order pizza? You know, what do we need to do to care for our people as they are grappling with the consequences of the bad thing that happened, and it’s, it’s much better to have a bad thing happen and to be in alignment with the leadership across the organization, rather than to be in a position where the leadership is blaming someone for a bad thing. Happening because bad things happen.

When, when a, when an unanticipated disaster happens, it’s a good time to pull the team together and support the team. Figure out how you’re going to support the team.

Well, in just a minute, we’ll wrap up, I So that was an interesting discussion, Mel. What are some of your takeaways?

I mean, we were lucky that there were nobody got hurt, and we were lucky that our neither our van nor our pool had catastrophic injuries. but starting from that, you know, in both cases it was a really what could have been a scary experience. We didn’t know when those events happened, how bad it was going to be, how much it was going to cost, how much damage had been done, and we needed to assess the situation. We needed to support the support our team, support ourselves, and and get curious about what opportunities we had.

Well, I love this idea of the lucky disaster. I think it’s a really interesting concept that there’s, there’s always, there’s always something that you can be a choice about. I mean, not always, but mostly, even if it’s your own approach to dealing with something that happens, but I also think that it’s stepping into positivity, figuring out how to make the best of a situation being aligned with the person that you’re with, or the team that you’re with, or the company that you’re with, makes a huge difference in being able to make the best of something that doesn’t go your way, and

Yeah, looking out for everybody, seeing where they are emotionally, and then pulling together and moving forward.

And bad stuff happens. I think it’s important to realize that there’s choice, and you get to decide what you do with all that in leadership.

 

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