Oxygen Mask
Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. Before you take action or applying other plays, ask yourself, "Am I asphyxiating? Am I being buried alive? Am I suffering self-induced overload?"
We're back after an unexpected pause. During a day of back-to-back video calls in December, I decided to go for a walk outside and take the next call on voice. It was raining, I was struggling with the Teams app, descending some wet stairs, and I fell and broke my leg in 3 places. Surgery was successful and now I'm getting back to it, but I have 7 more weeks before I can put any weight on my leg.
There is a message here for PMs - if you are booked back-to-back in meetings, MAYBE you do not have to join every single one? Or, maybe it's safer for you to join late? Take care of your personal health and safety first.
And it feeds nicely into this pattern, which has taken me months to write.
Product Management is often a high-stress job, and there is a thin line between energizing stress and harmful stress. This is a line we need to watch - for ourselves and for our colleagues. All too often we are reaching to action, trying to solve more and more problems, when we actually need to take care of ourselves first.
Context
There are a lot of problems. It seems like the organization is going in the wrong direction. Issues are coming up in 1:1s faster than you can address them. You are ending the day with less energy than you started with. Work problems are consuming your nights and weekends. The team can see that you are thrashing and flailing around. Your boss is giving you strange looks.
Discussion
You might think you're dealing with the stress well, but everyone else can see it. One CEO who led his startup to a successful IPO told me he had learned he had to be careful about the mood he showed up with. If he was frustrated, and shared his feelings too freely, he ended up dragging others down with him. He learned it was better for him to keep some of the negative energy to himself, lest it spread.
It's easy for a small amount of negative behavior to become toxic. In his course on Cleaning Toxic Waste, Jim Benson explains how normal human problems combine with inhumane systems. Toxic behavior in some infects others, who then spread it to others.
And this is super-common in growth companies. There is a ton of pressure on the leadership team, often shared among people who have not been in this kind of roles before. Even when they are trying their best to lead well, the extreme pressure often leads to unhealthy dynamics within that team. Literally every growth company I have worked for has experienced a period of deeply unhealthy behavior inside the executive team.