When "Landing It Well" Becomes the Whole Job

This week's short Note to Self for HR and other leaders carrying difficult change...

Note to self:

"I just need to land this well" isn't a goal. It's a demand.

Most HR leaders I work with are saying something like this without hearing themselves. The restructure nobody wants to call a restructure. The AI rollout. The new wellbeing policy. There is always something to land — and the unspoken job spec is that the person do

ing the landing has somehow already worked out their own feelings about it. I must keep them calm. I should already have it figured out. I have to look steady through all of this.

The words sound responsible. What they actually do is leave no room for your uncertainty, your fatigue, your own perfectly reasonable questions about what you're being asked to carry.

The sentence isn't the problem. The rule underneath it is.

Try changing one word. Not "I must land this well" but "I would prefer to land this well." Not "I should be steady" but "I would like to be steady." It sounds small. It isn't. A preference lets you hold the standard without paying for it with your own wellbeing. A demand quietly insists that being human is unprofessional.

The leaders I see thrive through this kind of work aren't the ones with no doubts. They're the ones who've stopped demanding that they shouldn't have any.

So this week, listen for the musts and shoulds. Catch one. Try it as a preference instead. Notice what changes — in your shoulders, in your sleep, in how you walk into the next room that expects you to be steady.

Think about it…

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“A single new idea can make you radically different in many ways” - Albert Ellis