Your Fuckery Map: A Blueprint to Trust
When Jonathan Sabol and I initially collaborated to map out habits of Fuckery in the workplace, we captured the most common trust-damaging behaviors on index cards we affectionately referred to as the Fuckery Deck. The deck is a useful tool to prompt an open dialogue about patterns of behavior in the office. When I introduce it to an individual or team, I ask people to identify one personal behavior they engage in regularly. If they can’t identify even one behavior—such as Complaining, Micromanaging, Unconscious Bias, or Intimidation—they have to invite suggestions. (This never happens.)
The Fuckery Deck turns words and concepts into something tangible, something you can see and touch. Being able to hold a physical representation of your own fuckery is visceral. It demands we own the behavior named in that card we hold regardless of the content of the card. Whether it’s Acquiescing or Contrarianism, ownership is what leads to accountability.
This article will walk you through a practice of transforming your own Fuckery—whatever it might be—by putting the Fuckery deck to work for you. I recommend setting aside some quiet time to sit down without distraction (apologies and empathy to the working-from-home parents in the room, I get it) and start by acknowledging your intention to become more mindful of your own behaviors and blind spots. This is important to do, but it shouldn’t be undertaken if you are in a place of overwhelm. Come to it when you can be focused, relatively relaxed, and open.
Find Your Fuckery
First off, review the Fuckery Deck here and consider a few from the Notorious Fuckery list below. You’ll want to find 5-10 words that resonate with you in order to better visualize your own habits. Jot each one on its own index card. When you’re done, you’ll use these cards to populate your first Fuckery Map.
These five culprits emerge regularly:
ANALYSIS PARALYSIS
Good intentions often accompany this form of fuckery. Worrying about disappointing others stalls action, and fear of failure becomes paralyzing. Perfectionism, Regret, and People-Pleasing are common causes. These leaders are often gregarious and likable, but performance and accountability suffer when they won’t make a decision. Analysis Paralysis leaves your ship rudderless. The resulting confusion is a disaster for business.
What stalls you?
How do you feel when decisions come to a bottleneck?
AVOIDING CONFLICT
It might be as simple as not saying what you think, or hiding bad news or information. Some of us are unwilling to confront colleagues directly. Culture, gender, and race are key factors, too. Conflict Avoidance also shows up as Intellectualizing, Making Excuses, or literally Hiding in a Cubicle (or remote office). We’ll go to great lengths and get super creative to manage our anxiety and avoid a potentially painful experience.
How do you deal with interpersonal conflict?
What tactics do you use to avoid conflict at work?
BLAMING
Blaming is about a lack of accountability on the part of the person assigning fault. It’s easier to shift blame than it is to solve complicated problems. You can blame sales for not managing the customer. Marketing failed to define a resolution plan, so let’s make it their fault. You can blame engineering because, well, everybody blames engineering. Bottom line, though, is that your organization and your deliverable are your responsibility. Blame doesn’t solve problems. Accountability does.
When are you tempted to blame others?
What are the consequences in a team that tolerates blame?
IGNORING BOUNDARIES
Reducing a colleague’s name to a familiar variation—like “Jennifer” to “Jen” or “Richard” to “Dick”—isn’t cool; you need permission to do that. Not everybody needs to know about your urinary tract infection. That woman in finance might not want to talk about her personal relationships or hear about your neighbor’s meth problem. You are never allowed to touch anyone’s hair and you cannot assume that people want to be hugged or touched at all.
If you’re uncertain about whether you’re the kind of person who ignores boundaries, you probably are. Like most skills, it starts with paying attention.
How do you assess personal boundaries?
How do you define your own?
WORKAROUNDS
If you’ve found a problem and circumvented it instead of finding a way to fix it, you’re not clever. You’ve forgotten the “You found it, you fix it” rule. Leaving a problem for the next person to deal with is not looking out for the good of the organization.
There are consequences to skipping steps. If there’s an established business process that allows for important steps to be skipped, the process either needs revising or crucial things are falling through the cracks. If it’s the former, revise it. If it’s the latter, you’re being reckless.
What Workarounds can you spot in your organization?
Why do people create Shortcuts, and what happens when they do?
How many of these habits are familiar? Did you identify a few of your own from the Fuckery Deck? Any takers for Eye-rolling? Being Defensive? Procrastinating? Fuckery leaves us feeling threatened and uncertain, prone to attack or hesitate instead of engaging. It’s time for a plan.
Your First Fuckery Map
When you’re ready to build trust and amplify success, it’s time to make a Fuckery Map. The map is a visual representation of our work relationships. It helps identify critical interactions with the sole purpose of motivating personal change. Laying out negative behaviors on a grid gives us a concrete way to examine what has been ignored or unacknowledged up to this point. The map is the blueprint to unfucking your work life.
Completing a Fuckery Map also identifies how trust-damaging habits interact with each other. Correlations and patterns emerge. For example, reducing Intimidation decreases another bad habit, Avoiding Conflict, which multiplies your productivity gain.
What forms of visualization do you currently use to problem-solve or make decisions— kanban, brainstorming, pros-and-cons lists, mind-mapping, etc.?
Here are some questions to use in the creation of your first Fuckery Map:
Recall a situation when your actions damaged trust. What were the sequence of events and the outcomes?
What do you tend to do when your personal goals are threatened?
What habits damage trust on your team?
How do these habits make you feel?
How do they impact other team members?
Don’t rush. Don’t run. Sit your ass in a chair and wrestle with those questions for the love of your team and your business. Self-awareness is required for leadership and a critical component in emotional intelligence. These questions hone those skills.
Here are your instructions:
Set a time limit of thirty minutes.
List the forms of fuckery you see in yourself in your work environment.
Try not to judge or edit yourself. This is basic brainstorming. Just write your habits down.
Pare the list down to five to ten items. The process is about focus.
Assess probability. Put the items on the list in descending order by number of occurrences per week or month.
Assign impact. A forced distribution works well. For example, if you have six items, put two in the high-impact category, two in the medium-impact category, and two in the low-impact category.
Now that you’ve assessed probability and impact, fill in a blank Fuckery Map like the one below. If you’re like me, you’ll overthink where to place each habit. Don’t obsess over it—just do it. Voilà—your very own Fuckery Map!
Blank Fuckery Map ©Lori Eberly & Jonathan Sabol
Creating a Fuckery Map for the first time may take longer than thirty minutes. Once you see how trust-destroying habits interact with one another, you’ll have to stop to process what you may be acknowledging to yourself for the first time. This has the effect of slowing the process down, particularly the first time through. Keep repeating the process and you’ll be creating maps in a fraction of the time.
Practice What You Preach
When I finally made my own Fuckery Map, the issue that stood out the most was Avoiding Conflict. What else did I fess up to? People-Pleasing. I am Patronizing when someone doesn’t understand what I think is obvious. I can be Self-Righteous. There was also Analysis Paralysis and Overcommitting.
Other traits on my map: Overprotecting. Loyalty is an honorable trait, but not when it clouds your vision. I’ve also masked Commiserating under the guise of being an active listener. I’ve participated in Bitching & Moaning and called it catharsis. Stuffing Anger? I’m a pro! That produces insomnia, loss of appetite, and horribly unpleasant ruminations about injustice.
Once I brainstormed my list of fuckery, I needed to whittle it down to a manageable size. I struck six habits that were less likely to show up. I then assessed the probability of the remaining nine and put them in descending order of (likely) occurrence.
Lori’s Fuckery, arranged by Probability. © Lori Eberly & Jonathan Sabol
Ranking these behaviors was painful for me. I worry too much about getting things right. (Hello Perfectionism!) Thank goodness this was a timed exercise. The forced distribution helped:
Lori’s Fuckery, arranged by Impact. © Lori Eberly & Jonathan Sabol
Once I had assigned probability and impact, I filled in the Fuckery Map template. Matching up the words with their corresponding vectors felt like putting a puzzle together. The result was this:
Lori’s Fucker map. ©Lori Eberly & Jonathan Sabol
The Fuckery Map provides perspective because it involves recall, listing, prioritizing, and assessing impact. Recalling my fuckery helped me realize what provoked my bad behavior. Whenever I felt powerless, scared, stuck, or unheard, my anxiety increased. Much of our fuckery comes from feeling afraid or ashamed. I’m sure I felt justified at the time of my fuckery, but I still have to own it.
My map helped me see how interconnected all of my negative habits really were. For example:
People-Pleasing is directly correlated with Avoiding Conflict. Overcommitting falls into that category, too. If I can focus on reducing my tendency to Avoid Conflict, two other habits will also decline.
Being Patronizing and Self-Righteous are in the same vein, as are my Overly Accommodating and Overprotecting habits.
What’s left? Analysis Paralysis, as well as that late-to-the-party fuckery, Perfectionism. See how those are connected? My need to be right stalls me, while my fear of failure slows me down.
Putting Your Fuckery Map to Work
Leaders are, by nature, problem solvers. It is our search for solutions that keeps us up at night. It is our frustration with the status quo that propels us to try new approaches.
Creating my Fuckery Map revealed the work I need to do. Seeing it laid out before me resulted in clarity and understanding. It wasn’t a surprise that Avoiding Conflict and Analysis Paralysis emerged as my top fuckery behaviors. The map’s power doesn’t come from shocking revelations about our bad habits. Its power lies in the totality of what it reveals. I didn’t like the results I saw, which left me only one course of action: change. Converting insight into action, I made a commitment to reduce my own fuckery by repeated, daily applications:
Be direct. Replace Stuffing Anger and People-Pleasing with assertive communication. If you Bully me, I’ll tell you to stop. If you Play Victim, I’ll ask you to state your needs.
Face potential conflict head-on. Face-to-face is now my preferred method of communication. Phone conversation is second choice. E-mail is a last resort.
Don’t cave. I set my own expectations and hold aggressors accountable.
That was my action plan. Execute and repeat. Three years later, I can proudly say I’ve reduced self-limiting fuckery by these daily applications.
Can you connect my action plan to fuckery reduction?
How could a fuckery reduction action plan change your work environment?
Follow-Through and Follow-Up
By offering examples of my personal fuckery and how I mapped a clear path to change, it’s my hope to guide you through your own process. No one goes through life without stumbling over their own fuckery. No one. Applying our action plan to reduce our personal fuckery is the last step in the process, but the process works best when we revisit the entire thing periodically. After six months or a year or three, take stock in what you’ve been able to change and reassess. Fuckery is nuanced; new patterns emerge even as we transform old ones. Review and revise your Fuckery Map on a regular basis for best results—just don’t do it too quickly or often because Perfectionism compels you.