Cara Bermingham

why we should embrace it instead of avoid

Here’s something I talked about for 10 minutes at Agile on the Bench as part of Agile Cambridge this year. It’s a subject I care about and judging by the response to the talk, other people can relate too.

Some words that could be used instead of awkwardness – embarrassment, cringey, uncomfortable….what else? For the purpose of this post I’m going with awkward because that’s the word that resonates the most with me.

Me and awkwardness: a history

I entered the corporate workplace in my early 20s after a stint in TV which was quite casual and fun. Suddenly I was in a different environment and instantly felt out of place and wasn’t really sure how to handle it.

Being the only woman in a group of techie types, along with a few other things to add in to the mix meant I dealt with (or didn’t deal with) awkwardness a lot.

Thinking back, there were definitely moments where if I hadn’t avoided certain situations I could have progressed more in my career and taken up opportunities. There are also a few things I wouldn’t have put up with.

My breakthrough

It wasn’t until my 30s that I first got my first taste of awkwardness being an actual good thing.

As part of my time at ustwo we were lucky enough to get to train with kaospilots as part of their creative facilitation programme. The trainers were Danish and it turns out the Danes are very good at embracing awkwardness and they proceeded to give us a masterclass in it.

Right from the off our group was expected to provide verbal feedback to everyone in the group. We all had to sit in a circle looking at each other and to say what we felt each person brought to the group.

This was my idea of hell but I realised at the time I had been avoiding this kind of stuff all my life, this was my chance to go for it. I could see I wasn’t the only person in the group who found this completely excruciating and that helped.

Something happened in the room when we did that exercise and I think the people with me at the time could probably feel it too. The energy changed. We’d pushed through something really awkward and we didn’t die, nothing really bad happened. We actually learned something about each other and it made us feel a bit closer. The rest of the course was fantastic and built on that initial moment of extreme discomfort.

From that moment something definitely changed for me in how I approached my work as a team coach. I started to get a buzz from awkwardness and went back to work begging to go round teams and facilitate feedback sessions for them. Who was this person?

I think that witnessing the awkwardness in teams helped me to enjoy the process more and started to cement my idea that it is actually essential to be awkward if you want to do meaningful and valuable work with other people.

This has now become a core part of my personality and I’ve used it to my advantage as a team coach over the years.

The science behind it

I wanted to know what kind of research has been done around this subject and and there are a couple of things I’ve learned that jumped out to me. They are both from a book called Cringeworthy by Melissa Dahl that goes deep in to the subject of awkwardness.

1. Awkwardness is an emotion not a personality trait. Which means like any of our emotions shouldn’t be suppressed but acknowledged and moved through.

2. Even more shocking to me was that being awkward makes people trust you more – not less. Studies were carried out with various awkward situations and the actors who displayed embarrassment always came out as someone who people wanted to affiliate with more vs the people who were confident and not bothered. (Let’s talk about those people another time shall we)

So it turns out there are lots more positives about being awkward than I first thought and that I think lots of people believe.

If you aren’t awkward at work – it’s probably a problem

Taking this into the workplace then. I genuinely think that avoiding awkwardness causes major problems at work

As an individual it can hold you back. It can stop you from giving useful feedback to people that they need to know. It can stop you progressing by not wanting to have those awkward salary conversations. It can prevent you setting out your boundaries and protecting yourself from burning out.

As a manager you owe it to people to get over your awkwardness and have a direct conversation with someone about something they need to hear. I’ve worked in and with a lot of organisations where managers won’t and have seen what the effects of that can be. There’s often a sense of unease when the unsaid hangs in the air. People don’t know what’s expected of them and what people think of them. This can be very demoralising and it’s really hard to move through. It can also be seriously damaging to your efforts in what you want your teams to achieve.

As part of a team, I’m sure some of you are familiar with the 5 dysfunctions of a team by Patrick Lencioni. According to him the most important dysfunction is the absence of trust. How do you build trust? Yes you guessed it, by being awkward with each other! More specifically by being vulnerable but some might say they were one and the same thing.

So what can you do?

Like I said earlier, if you’re a coach or a facilitator type you are lucky because you get to act as someone who can hold space for other’s awkwardness while you practice on moving through your own. This could be as simple as:

• Asking a question that you think others are scared to because they see it as ‘stupid’
• Embracing a silence, sometimes an awkward pause can be what’s needed to move through a difficult or sticky situation
• Do a really cheesy icebreaker (just kidding, but you can if you like)

As someone who doesn’t get to do that job, then you can still do those things and remind yourself that:

• Awkwardness is an emotion, it doesn’t define you
• People will trust you more if you display awkwardness
• Each time you step out of your comfort zone you are getting better at embracing it

Final thoughts

I’m a work in progress and I still having to make that conscious decision to push though awkwardness fairly often. I’ve started to realise that life generally gets better when you embrace it no matter how much you want to die inside.

Awkwardness is something that never goes away – and that’s ok, it’s part of us.

I hope this starts the process for some of you to start moving through your awkwardness and seeing what happens.

Will be looking in to this whole subject more as I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface.