Some people just have to navigate survival, and everything else is secondary.
When I was working in Dubai, I had to roll out updated goals for the back half of the year, starting in Q3. The goals were big, and as you know, salespeople's compensation is dependent upon their ability to achieve these goals. If all of a sudden the goals got out of reach, it was going to cause issues with compensation, and the sales team was probably going to look for different jobs, or it would create culture issues with the team.
Instead, something happened that I never expected.
I had never worked abroad before. My only experience was working in media and tech companies in the US, and my most recent experience before that was with a large tech company that gave everyone a voice. And not just a voice, an equal voice to everyone. Which meant that if someone had a gripe or something to say, they voiced it, often publicly, or with HR's involvement and sometimes support. It was a difficult place to lead at times when you had to watch and prepare for every little thing you said.
So when I had to sell some bullshit increase in goals to a sales team I had only been working with for the last sixty days or so, I was concerned about the backlash I was going to receive.
I hit send on an email on a Thursday night to my leaders. They had a few questions. Some of them definitely had some opinions. They rolled the goals out to their team the next day, and the moment in time came and went.
There were no HR complaints. Nobody booked a meeting with me to present the ten reasons why this was a bad plan. The sales team didn't even give me dirty looks or say snide comments to me. They just went about their day as if nothing had happened.
I was confused.
In the States, I would have had to deal with weeks' worth of fallout, distractions, and essentially annoyances as a result of this change. But in Dubai, where I had 40+ nationalities in my organization, nobody said a word.
So I asked one of my leaders just what in the hell was going on. Her response was, "The team cares way more about their visas in the country than revised goals or any other annoyances with their job, so they stay focused on what they need to do to succeed, and they stay focused on going forward."
I had never given it a second thought. The team was more focused on survival than they were crying for days and days about changes to their sales targets. They were more focused on ensuring they could keep a job, perform, and send money back home or just make sure they stayed grounded in Dubai without any issues.
It made sense, after all, some of these people had come from war-torn environments, their parents had escaped almost third-world countries, and a few of them even fled situations so dangerous in their hometowns that a privileged American like me couldn't even fathom the thought.
So why sit around and complain when the name of the game was survival?
The truth is, no matter your background, family of origin, experiences, or life story, we're all just trying to survive each and every day. Life is hard. Your job is hard. If you have kids and a family to take care of, that is hard. If you have a difficult job, that adds to it. If you have expenses you're trying to cover, that makes it even harder. The list goes on.
It brings me to two conclusions. We all need to give everyone a little more grace than we do. We're so quick to judge, quick to react, and short on patience that we forget that everyone is fighting a battle to survive every single day, and sometimes they're doing their best in that moment, even if we can't see it.
And our life experiences shape our desires to take risks, to go for the big goals, or to stay in our lane. Oftentimes, the people who sit back and just operate in the shadows are doing it because they can't afford to take a misstep, while the people who jump without fear have backup parachutes they know they can rely on.
The next time you feel yourself jumping to conclusions or predicting how someone's going to react, pull back for a second and think about the story they're carrying. Everyone is doing the best they can with whatever they're dealing with in that moment. When you see people through that lens, everything feels a little less personal and a lot more human.