Leadership Wisdom of the Week #25

“When we are no longer able to change a situation … we are challenged to change ourselves.”

– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

As most coaches know, we have three options in most situations in life: we can try to change the situation, accept it or leave it. This is one of the fundamental principles I return to when training and coaching people – and in my own life. Even when we know that we have genuinely tried to change a situation and there is nothing more we can do, it can be very difficult to move to the second option: accepting the situation as it is.

Viktor E. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor who emphasised the importance of meaning and purpose as motivational forces. When we know why we are doing something, we can adapt to many different kinds of circumstances.

The workplace situations we face are, of course, in no way comparable to the circumstances in which Frankl developed his thinking. Yet his insight into our ability to choose how we respond can also help us navigate the more ordinary challenges of working life.

Take, for example, an organisational change that you are expected to implement but do not fully agree with. You have communicated your concerns and have been listened to, but senior management still insists that the change must be implemented as agreed.

This is when you realise that you need to move from trying to change the situation to accepting it. Acceptance does not necessarily mean that you would have made the same decision yourself. It means acknowledging that the decision has been made and, as a leader, taking responsibility for communicating and implementing it constructively with your team.

I read Frankl’s words as an invitation to change not who we are, but how we interpret the situation, relate to it and act within it. We can start by working with our own thinking: returning to what makes our work meaningful and putting the change into perspective. Why do you do the work you do? What does it give you? What will this change genuinely take away – and which aspects of it can you understand or perhaps even see as useful?

But if thinking is important, doing may be at least as important. Sometimes we overthink and overanalyse things and allow our thoughts to paralyse us. Taking action can help us move forward: finding out more about the change, listening to our team’s concerns, identifying where we still have room to influence the implementation, or simply trying out a new way of working. Once we get going, we may discover ways to adapt and adjust that make the change more meaningful and useful – both for ourselves and for the people we lead.