How do you fire a friend?
The last couple of weeks have been absolute hell with the podcast. Due to the circuit breaker and us not being allowed to meet in person, I’ve been spending hours trying to find the best online alternative for us to have an actual recording session (finally ended up finding zencastr … this podcast audio platform that’s currently free due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Coordinating your team when you don’t have the chance to meet them at designated times in person is another mess (with each person having different activities that never seem to coincide and instead take up massive chunks of the week.
My main source of frustration, however, comes in the form of two close friends of mine. Now, our podcast group is a small, tight-knight group who … in general, tend to work quite well (and efficiently together). However, there has always been one individual in particular (will not name names obviously) that has made things quite difficult for me as a leader. Perhaps it’s his nature, but the man is an absolute pessimist about everything. To give you a recent example, when I first proposed we continue producing episodes over the circuit breaker phase and complete our recordings over calls, he was extremely dismissive of the idea. The issue is that he is extremely vocal. He takes his ideas of dissent and spreads them to everyone else in the team, discouraging them whenever and wherever he can. It may sound stupid, even a little egotistical, but there needs to be a certain amount of respect that exists between the leader and his team … and that particular individual (likely due to our close nature), does not maintain that … and spreads that attitude to others in the team. He caused my entire team to doubt the idea of online recording altogether … and it took me some time (I had to produce solid evidence) that it would 100% work.
Another issue is that certain members of my team can be quite lazy and simply aren’t as committed to this activity as I need them to be. For instance, we have been planning to record our Vietnam episode of the podcast for 3 entire weeks now. Every single time I suggest a date and we confirm, closer to the date, one out of our three hosts will state that something ‘urgent’ has come up and they CANNOT record. It pissed me off because we’re not getting anything done, and it’s shitting on the work of those that were actually prepared.
I actually had to have a talk about this with my dad to gain some advice on how to go about fixing my team … and the conclusion he came to was one I was initially quite opposed to. I need to get rid of any individuals who are slowing the progress of the podcast. Look, I’m not someone who gets confrontational very often, and the thought of getting rid of someone close to me quite honestly terrified me. It’s quite funny because I’ve had several years of experience with ‘leadership’ activities in the past (i.e. Service exec and MUN exec). Yet, this is the first time I’ve had to do something like this … perform a type of action that leaders truly need to conduct in the real world. Quite frankly, I’m so grateful that I pursued this activity because I’ve learned so much by striking out on my own than I have by completing a ‘leadership activity’ where we’re still very much being handheld by the school and teachers. Delegating, timelining, and handling difficult situations like this.
To cut a long story short, I ended up getting rid of two individuals in that group. We now only have 4 members, with me having to take on the role of podcast host and yet, we’re doing better than ever. Our third episode (on Vietnam) has just been completed and we’re ready to release. We’ve started looking into a 4th, 5th and 6th episode, in Europe this time, and I’m incredibly excited. The actions I’ve taken over the past few weeks have honestly been some of the most difficult in my life and yet, I’ve grown tremendously as a result of them.
Link to the podcast (https://soundcloud.com/blue-dragon-podcast-uwc/tracks)
