What to Do When Your Organization Disappoints

You’ve experienced disappointment at work.  Disappointment can happen when you least expect it (or want it).  Things are going along fine, you feel you have that “balance” thing everyone says is important; work and home life are going well, and whammo.  Your organization makes a decision you don't agree with, and impacts you.  

​Yet you’ve decided to stay with your current employer despite this experience (maybe because you want to, or maybe because you have to, at least for now).  You recognize the benefits of staying outweigh this rough patch…and yet you cannot seem to get past that period of time when neither your needs nor your expectations were meet by the organization you trusted.  It keeps coming up for you, building resentment, frustration and disappointment, affecting your well-being and getting in the way of being able to trust them again.

No one makes the decision to stay with an employer who has breached some aspect of their trust lightly.  It is a decision full of anguish.  Once that decision is made what follows is the hope that everything will go back to the way it was before.  On this path of hope arise new expectations; acknowledgement from your employer that mistakes were made, there may even be expectations of an apology.  This is dangerous territory, because none of those things may be possible.  Not that there shouldn’t be apologies and acknowledgments when trust is broken, but this is murky territory where your employer may have no real idea how you were impacted or how you perceived the breech of trust.  Thinking “How could they not know?” is not the same as having a clear, compassionate, conversation with your employer about the rough patch, while remaining open to understanding all sides of it (their side may be very different).  Your employer may have no idea what you went through.

Or perhaps they do and conversations were had, your manager was aware of your concerns and addressed them…but your manager was not the problem, and as far as you can see you are at risk of being impacted again by something similar because there are no assurances the same set of circumstance will not arise again to create another rough patch.  You have a concern with someone outside of your sphere of influence and you have no idea how to resolve these feelings of resentment without coming off, well, resentful.  It’s a tough spot to both be in and be productive at work (never mind feeling good about yourself in your work).

Consider owning your truth in all of this, which means figuring out specifically how the impact of this made you feel (“I felt disrespected” is a truth statement giving you something material to discuss; “You disrespected me” is a judgment that will inflame an already emotional situation).  Only when you can look at the rough patch with objectivity and compassion is it wise to initiate conversations to explore what went wrong and how to prevent future breeches of trust.  

Working with Carleen I've learned to support my needs first.  I was preparing myself to accept the consequences of this at work.  Turns out, there were none as both my work and home life have now shown me that when I meet my needs, everything else just falls into place.

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