Ep79 Your emotional & Moral Contract. do you break it?

Hi, welcome to the Delivery Manager podcast where are your host, Mario de Cristofano, we talk about everything agile delivery, technical delivery, whether you're an agile delivery manager, you work at technical leadership level, maybe you're ahead of IT, maybe you're a CTO, I talk through all my experience, everything I've learned over the last 25 years, so hopefully I can share some things with you, I can learn something, we all all have a conversation, we'll get guests, so I'm going to be amazing. You can get involved in the conversation and myriad of ways on X, DM underscore daily or delivery knocks or Mario DC or Midlands delivery, there's a telegram channel, you can use that, it's still a bit empty at the minute, I'm working on it. And you can go to marioesblog.co.uk or medium.com/mario de Cristofano to find out everything about what I'm talking about, what I'm doing and show notes for all the episodes and more. It's the Delivery Manager podcast, we talk all the time about project health, delivery health, platforming infrastructure health, cyber security health, but often as delivery managers and technical leaders, we don't always get the chance to talk about our mental health and our physical wellbeing, and the toll that doing what we do takes now, obviously in 2025, it's better than ever when it comes to talking about kind of feelings and emotion and mental state. And I also am a believer in not wallowing too much, my own personal opinion is not to always wallow in sort of emotion versus getting on with it and working through things. There is absolutely no doubt that without that time to just take stock and review yourself, sometimes it's easy to forget about yourself. I've talked about the importance of being emotionally resilient, I've talked about that quite a few times on this podcast. I think I've got lost in being so resilient, I forgot to just kind of check in with myself, and the last two years have been really difficult, and I was talking to a couple of people that I've not really met, but I've had interesting chats with, we have this like mental, mentee relationship, and it's really, really interesting to listen to other people's accounts to make you think of things that maybe you'd not thought of for yourself. And I wanted to do an episode to just get you to think really about when was the last time that you actually stopped and did a health check on you, you know, your environment, what you're doing, your job, your, and I mean really, I don't mean moaning about Sheila in accounts or the fact that your projects like three months delayed because you've got no budget. I'm talking about fundamentally lighter, you're happy, is this what you want to do, you know, is this, don't worry, I'm not having some kind of midlife crisis. But the last two years for me have been really tough and challenged me in ways that I've just never been challenged for quite some time, and that has had an impact on my behaviour and some of my standards, and I wanted to talk about that on today's episode of The Delivery Manager Daily. So wellness in the workplace then, let's start there. How many times have you worked for an organization and the notion of wellness is just a sentiment often, you know, from the heart, but it's a tick box exercise. We want to create, you know, a good environment for our staff. We want to create a sense of family, a nurture, and support. And whilst I'm not disputing that there are hundreds of thousands of companies that are empowered to do that and do their best to do so, there are equal amounts that don't. And having worked on clients who develop platforms to measure kind of employee wellness in various sectors. And also with myself, doing a lot of work with young people and adults in particular with sand, sort of special educational needs, particularly around the kind of autism spectrum alongside my partner who is works in a school and similar for younger people. The notion of the psychological impact on the spaces around us, and when we're adults, the pressure that we're under and typically as a leader, and you'll be the same as a delivery manager or a tech leader, the pressures that you're under that often go forgotten about. And over the years, we've kind of changed our posture and culture from you should be resilient and as a leader, you should be strong and demonstrate that. And then we've kind of pivoted over the last five to eight years where you should show some emotion, some kind of human element. But then, you know, where's the middle ground? Do you show yourself as too weak to unstable to volatile? Are you too strong, too robotic, too aggressive? Where's the middle ground and constantly on top of everything else? On top of having all the certifications or the experience, doing all the things, we forget sometimes that we're all human beings. And then the constant landscape of demands and pressures and needing to perform and KPIs and targets and just being a lot of people anxious about keeping their job. It's a right hot pot to create some of the worst environments to work in and thriving. And I see that as a real problem and arguably I've experienced some of that over the last couple of years and it's caused me to reflect. And I wanted to talk practically about some of the things that I've done that might resonate with you and maybe you can try. So in the next episode, I'm hoping to get on one of those people that I spoke to about this very subject and get their opinion on what they do because they've been through some things too. So that wellness sort of element, you know, to create an environment that supports wellness is easy to say but really difficult to do. So what I'm not doing today is talking about the kind of environment that you may not be able to change your bosses, your leadership, where you work. But what I'm going to talk about is what you can do as an individual, what I've done, what I've found works, what's impacted me, what I've had a challenge with and actually just as a reminder, it's good to just hopefully listen to this. And think, yeah, do you know what some of this, yeah, I went through that or I went through that and I don't particularly want to just all the time talk about here's 10 things you can do to deliver your project better. So wellness in the workplace, I think has to start with yourself and you have to take accountability and responsibility for your own happiness. Now, this is point number one. So for me, I used to spend a lot of time putting that responsibility on to others. I expected based on the standard to which I thought I worked at that it is the organization's responsibility to do the things that I ask of it to make me happy and whatever I see fit at the time. And I'm probably being a little bit hard on myself. It wasn't quite that demanding, but in my head at the time was this notion of, well, I'm really good at what I do. So you're paying for that, right? In return, you know, give me the environment to kind of, you know, thrive. And whilst I don't think organizations go out of the way to not do that, I think practically sometimes with the nature of business and the constantly changing landscape of the environment and the workplace itself. You can't not not take responsibility yourself, but that was the thing that I wasn't really good at doing. And what I would do is go through this mental cycle of, well, I'm not, you're not doing, you're not putting in the same effort. I used to treat everything like a almost a romantic relationship, right? And I was short to the table after the speed date. Well, the thing that I said I am, I am. I haven't lied. You haven't just seen NECUP as a picture. I am the person that I said I am. So in return, I'm holding you accountable. And I think as much as that is in my nice black and white binary world, you know, nice and quite right to think that the reality is, it's just not like that. And then I go through this cycle of constantly punishing the environment around me and taking myself into this kind of almost this closed off sort of Mario Island of, well, I'm better than all of this. So what I'll do is I'll put some walls up and actually instead of working through some of these challenges, I'll just isolate myself because I'm better than that. And what this at the time and we're talking maybe 10 years ago, this was my kind of ML at the time. It would put me into a position where there was only one path and that was, that was to move on. Then what I learned maybe five to eight years ago as I started to develop my kind of maturity and my kind of, I guess I don't want to, you know, say something like spirituality because it's not really that. But kind of your own understanding of your own emotional being, I started to think, well, I'm going to stick with this and instead I'm going to try molding change and look at the environment. And look at how I can be in a right post about the shadows that you cast and how you can manipulate that for positive or negative effect, you know, I can, I'm a physically quite a big guy. So I can come into a room and sour it like milk pretty immediately. I'm a really good communicator and a very sort of a real physical sort of body language that's very easy to read and open. And I can manipulate that and there'd be times where I'd manipulate that and seeing the power of doing it positively. But I could also do it negatively as well, you know, the, the adage of you, you know, if I'm in a bad mood because you'll all be in a bad mood, that kind of thing. And that's really difficult to, to move to, to get rid of and if you the type of delivery manager or project lead where you might be similar and you just, you know, pissed off. Oh, everything's wrong. You forget the impact you have on others. So we bring the last three, four years up today and I've matured even more. And now I'm very, very at the other end of the scale. So I'm very kind of mindful of others. I'm very mindful of the shadow that I cast. I'm very mindful of the things that I say. I'm very mindful of how other people feel. I'm very mindful of the impact that I might have. But what's that done in turn, because obviously I haven't got the balance right is I've forgotten about myself from what that's meant is that I've kind of been beaten up, sort of emotionally with the pressures of work and what I do. And we know one to talk to is you get higher up the chain, you know, you constantly talking to others and helping others and supporting others. And obviously my personal life and non professional life, I do that as well. And that's not to have someone pat me on the back. I'm saying that is just that you forget and I've forgotten to kind of take a mental recap of myself. So that's what I did. So bang up to date now, you know, we've gone back 10 years, we've come up through the years and where I am now. The first thing I did was did a self retro got my whiteboard out and started writing down all the things that wind me up how they make me feel. Whether I can influence those things, whether those things are outside of my control and built up a map of action points that I can achieve. And by laying it all out, almost taking my own advice over the last kind of 80 episodes of this podcast or so. I'm able to now navigate the things that I'm not very good at emotionally or the things that I need to change or the things that are outside my control and I need to find coping mechanisms to cope with that. Then I ever laid over the top of that kind of a lens of by my actions. Am I then making it worse or making it better and what I was able to fine tune was the worst some little kind of tunnels I was going down that we're just making things worse. And what I wanted to do was focus on a few of those to put me in a better headspace and this has taken about a year to be able to get the behavior sort of spot on. So two years ago, two and a half years ago, I was what you would call the classic on paper sort of meme like high performing human, I guess, you know, up really early, Jim sometimes twice a day, electrolyte water, running, climbing mountains, mentally focused, mentally sharp, calorie deficit, know everything about my body, you know, I bought myself with it. And that unlocked quite a lot of performance for sure. But then it only took one hit. I can't even remember what the hit was, but all that good behavior was quite quickly unraveled and what I learned was that what I feel I've learned is that consistency over a huge amount of time for all your life, basically. It's probably more important than those massive high peaks and others always aspire to those high peaks and I think we all do I think everyone listening to this podcast, you probably aspire to really high peaks, it's why you do what you do and you put yourself in the firing line. But actually, you've probably got to find the plateau, you've got to find your point that is comfortable and comfortably allows you to be consistent permanently. And I have a habit of extremely overperforming for short bursts of time or even medium length terms to get where I need to be. But then I put a lot of pressure on myself and it all comes unraveling around me. I'm really emotional and I think that when we work in this space and we constantly having to watch what we say and shield and protect others and protect our teams, it's easy to kind of forget the emotional toll that takes. I've got this data, I've got this map on a whiteboard and what I started to do was all the basic things that this shouldn't be new to you, right, but just reminding yourself to go back to the gym and stop working so many hours. Think about how you're spending your time and just recapping kind of where you're spending your time and is it worth it. The most important, you know, I've talked before about using the Eisenhower priority matrix and doing that on the whiteboard to work out what's absolutely critical and worth spending your time on now versus what's important but that you can do later, you know, that kind of thing and being really, being really cold with how you spend your time. One of the challenges was say yes a lot, we'll all be guilty of that, right, we want to please, we want to do a good job, we want to be seen as the helper, but it actually becomes then very difficult to start saying no, so reconditioning the environment around you and actually start saying no to colleagues or peers or project requests. As long as it's done with the best intentioning, you're not being like Truculent, we'll talk about Truculent in a minute, not only as a word, I've only just learnt what it means, yeah, I'll talk about that in a sec. So not being Truculent, but really defending your emotional well-being. So I think point number one is to kind of just take a step back and do a retro, however that is comfortable for you. It might be just looking in the mirror and talking through things in your head, it might be sitting down listening to music doing it, I'm quite practical and visual, so I'll draw it out on a board, quite psychological in that respect. But find a way that allows you to kind of really, almost like I'm going back to some project management techniques, kind of the five wise, you know, why and then drill down at least five levels of depth and to really understand root cause and to constantly make sure that you are on the right track. And it's really important if you can go back to a time where you were absolutely happy and everything was absolutely perfect and then contrast and compare with where you are now and work out how much of that is under your control. And often you'll only be able to do that in a closed room with the door shut on your own because it's very difficult to do ego wise otherwise, but I thoroughly recommend if you go through kind of challenges. First, take a step back and work out how much of it is you. So that's point number one. So you've had a bit of a think you have done a retro, you've looked inwards of yourself, you've identified areas where maybe you're making matters worse, maybe you've identified areas that you can't control. Therefore, you should let go. You feel it emotionally a bit better about it, a little bit more stable. You've done all that great. What next? Well, maybe on to point number two. And one of the things that are constantly here from others, the two people that I'm having these kind of mental mentee relationships with at the minute. Their challenges are always around someone or a group of people in the team or the organization that offer whatever reason causing difficulties, not only for the individual, but for the progress of the thing that everyone's working on. And that's really difficult. And for years and years and years, the advice that always give and the answer I would always give in and into you, you know, how do you deal with, in quotes, challenging stakeholders. It's pretty, pretty straightforward. You should understand where they're coming from, understand their pain points, what's valuable to them, understand their language, their position, you know. And really break through that and let them know that you're listening and that can take time and needs a little bit of charisma and personality flair, but you can, you can do it and broadly speaking, you can break almost everyone down using that technique. What is often not talked about there is some people are just fundamentally our souls and enjoy it. And it's not really something that's acknowledged or identified because you wouldn't, would you? But what I've learnt is that I've spent so much time and effort on individuals using those techniques, you know, understanding what their challenges are, understanding where they're coming from, understanding their pain points, understanding their kind of what it is that what's valuable to them, right? Try and, you know, break them down. But what I've learnt through that analysis is some people genuinely are just dicks and enjoy being dicks in the workplace. It's part of their character and actually what you can start to do is lose your own identity, trying to make them change rather than sort of just accept that's who they are. It's difficult to do and it's something that I've only learnt how to do. Really recently, really, to be able to identify where you're a cock, you are fundamentally a cock through and through and nothing's going to stop you from being a cock. It can be politically difficult, it can be based on hierarchy, it can be based on length of service, it can be based on age, it can be based on sex, it can be based on a number of different, sort of biases and politicking. But some people are just cocks. So point number two would be really think about as a delivery manager as a leader, who you are helping and working with and how much you are trying to influence them and is it worth it. If you can crack the knot and work together, you don't have to particularly like one another and that's great. But you will hit some circumstances where this person in your kind of stakeholder group is important for decision making or their major stakeholder that control the purse drinks for the project or the project's direction. And you might hit a dead wall and think well it's impossible, how can I break through that and actually part of the answer is well you might not be able to and I think you can lose hours and hours and months and months and possibly years and years of time and emotional turmoil in trying to deal with these people. So I think having a bit of a checklist of a bit like in a relationship, you know coming back to that romantic relationship, have you done everything you can do can you honestly look at yourself in the mirror and say I've done everything I can and as long as you can just turn the relationship into a transactional one. So just make sure that every conversation, every sort of interaction, every exchange is purely business transactional and spend as little emotional time on it as possible. And I think this is a really big point right because it's not talked about in performance podcasts and agile podcast and how to organize, you know, high performing self-organizing teams, some people are cocks. So what you've got to do is build resilience and understand how to identify them, put some working to start with to try and sort of break them down a bit and where you can't recognize that and stop and you can apply this to to whether you manage or mentor individuals or teams or you lead people, you know, I've worked in plenty of teams where I've put my and poured my heart and soul into people who is just it's just a wasted energy. I used to never think that I used to think that an infinite amount of energy put into someone will always yield sort of value and it just it just won't and there's a bit of a humanist, it's soul destroying when you think that that is possible, you know, that can happen. But yeah, it is what it is and people are going to people so really think about for point number two, how much effort you put into people and why you're doing it. And then I guess the final point is recognizing the emotional toll and impact that it might be having on you, whether it's the stress that you're going under the environment that you're working in, these people, these cocks. Are they emotionally changing you for the worst, you know, are you becoming more irritable, grumpy changing your personality, what was once sort of affable and, you know, bouncy and rainbows and glitter and is it turning it into sludge and rain and mud and depression and darkness and cloud. And it's sometimes difficult when you've got your head down in an organization, you know, you have in these problems delivery manager or a lead or a head of whatever you are and you just think, well, this is this is how it is right maybe you're in handcuffs financially, you know, the job market's difficult so it's not easy to just leave. But the biggest strength you can have is understanding who you are like morally and ethically and having that contract deep within you and knowing when you're prepared to compromise it or not. And we're going to mention that word truculent so truculent. I've only just learned means you're always ready for a bit of a fight, you know, you're always always a bit kind of combative, bit aggressive. That's probably not the textbook dictionary definition, but it's kind of that. No, no one said I'm truculent. I've learned that word to try and find something that I think might accidentally this all might describe how people might accidentally describe me and it's just not. But you do have to have that amount of sort of defense mechanism with that and getting in the way of what you do to know when to say no to know when to say this isn't acceptable to know when to call out people's behavior. And I think a strong leader has to be able to do that no matter the risk. I'm known throughout my career for people that have talked to and preach to you should put your mortgage on the line. It's a classic Mario saying that put your mortgage on the line. And although realistically and it's very difficult to do that and I get that rightly or wrongly I've personally found peace by putting your mortgage on the line. So every day do the right thing and do the right thing for the mission. Do the right thing for the people. Do the right thing for the company. Do the right thing for while you're employed, but do the right thing for yourself to and sometimes it's easy to forget and you can actually look at yourself in the mirror and really dislike yourself based on, you know, what you're doing and I've worked with lots of people who have watched from the sidelines, the organizations, swallow them up whilst their moral and ethical contracts get stamped on and push to one side because they need the money, they need the salary and they go to work every day and working in these environments and contributing to this landscape of kind of all the bad things that we've talked about impacting people in a really negative way. And just having a kind of a fake mask on to say, 'What case are us or are this business?' And I just don't think it should be like that. So what I encourage all people or leaders or delivery managers or project leads or anyone really is really define what your moral and ethical contract is in terms of people interaction and things and acceptable behavior and acceptable standards and what you work for, you know. And really think what that is and then set a line to make sure that you never cross that that alone is giving me the most kind of inner peace and has given me an alignment to be able to stand behind almost like an invisible kind of person that's got you back, but it's basically yourself. So don't feel that you have to compromise all the time. Now politics is, yeah, it's a part of business and we've talked about politics on previous episodes about how to play it, what you've got to play it. And the greater good of pushing your project along is often almost always bigger than any individual, but you still have to have a line, you still have to draw a line. And most people that I talk to and support to, including myself, the issues are when you cross that line, knowingly or not. So really have a think about in your environment where you're having problems just to summarize because we're about at 30 minutes. Look at yourself, look at the challenges that you've got. Write down what those challenges are and why they're challenges to you and ask yourself the question, am I contributing to that issue? Am I doing anything positively to change it and make it better? And am I doing everything I can do to change that? Think about overlaying onto the top, how you feel of all those things and maybe wear your kind of moral and ethical compasses and how many times you know, that's being impacted. Think about are you happy with your environment and are you contributing to the world positively and the environment positively and your teams positively or are you potentially part of the problem? And that's something you can really only do alone. And then once you've established those things, define a plan to how to change what you want to change. It could be anything from changing your attitude, your posture, maybe a relationship with someone and your team that you're not getting on with. But it's a bit of kind of six or one and a half dozen of the other. Or maybe it's a challenging stakeholder that you just can't break, but you've decided you've done enough and that's it. You're going to stop spending emotional energy on it and letting it bother you. Maybe you want to remind yourself of all the good things you've done and all the, and you know, rally around those that support you and champion you. And ultimately you understand, you know, how you can do better too. And then finally, think about that moral and ethical contract. What are the things that you will not kind of tolerate? What are the things that you won't accept? What are the things that you will always call out and challenge? I will say, it is easier to start calling stuff out and highlighting stuff when you're new. So whenever you go into a project or a team or an organization, really leverage that new person time that you'll never get again. And again, it's not about being truculent, but it's about asking why, why this, why are we doing this, why are we doing this, why are we doing this direction for this piece of technology or why have we made this decision? I think that really helps as an individual kind of build up what we always talk about as emotional resilience. But I think those three practical things, do yourself retro, you know, pain points, your emotional contract, are you contributing negatively or positively? I think those three things are really important to kind of your own internal happiness. And I think if you can crack your own internal happiness, you've kind of mastered life really. So I'll leave you on that kind of existential point. I hope you've enjoyed listening to this episode of the Delivery Manager podcast. And on the next episode we'll be carrying on this conversation and picking at it with a buddy of mine, I think Alex Ray, who is delivery manager and now entrepreneur again. But we'll go into his story when we talk to him. But thanks for listening. I'll see you on the next one. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Delivery Manager Daily Podcast. I hope you've enjoyed that. Do share, far and wide with all your friends, colleagues and peers who you think might be interested. Go to marriesblog.co.uk to read all the additional content that I tend to post. And find me on x@marriesbc. If you've got questions or comments or you want to leave feedback, do please subscribe. Click that bell notification so you get notified every time I release a new episode, which is usually at the minute. Every Friday about 8 a.m. So do please subscribe. It really helps me out. Thanks for listening. [BLANK_AUDIO]