It can be hard for leaders, even leaders of socially conscious non-profits, to want to address or even acknowledge problems within their teams. Harder still to see the problems that you have in your own personal life and to address them.
Even the most die-hard problem solver will, when under pressure, have to admit that it’s way more fun, and much easier, to fix problems that someone else created, and not themselves.
The problems that we create ourselves we often justify, ignore, or defend because we know what we intended to do when we made the decision that created the problem.
The reason we don’t face problems? Pain. Problems bring pain and are the result of painful misalignments.
Avoiding pain, whether personally or for your team, only makes the pain go deeper, get infected, or creates dysfunction in you and others as you try to prove to
yourself that the pain isn’t real. You can try to cover it up, you can try to medicate it, but in the end healthy people deal with their pain. Healthy teams deal with their pain.
David Curry
