When the Bee Buzzes

It’s a picturesque spring day — the type that seems like it’ll never arrive during an endless winter — and you’re sitting outside enjoying the sun, when suddenly a bee starts buzzing around you.

You really don’t want to get stung, so your instinct is to jump up and get away. Except the bee follows, and it seems that it only becomes more determined to hurt you the more you try to evade it.

Losing the bee is counterintuitive in many ways. The harder we try and the more action we take, the more determined it often gets. The practical strategy is typically just sitting there motionless, continuing about our business as if the bee doesn’t exist. And yet, that can be a major challenge.

We encounter this bee scenario in our leadership worlds constantly. We have difficult days, abrupt threats present themselves, and we need to make quick decisions about whether to get up or sit still.

We fear that remaining in place will make us look naïve or weak. We rationalize that at least if we take swift action and it doesn’t work out, then we can claim that we did something and were on top of the situation.

But too often, we dramatically overreact to short-term threats. We make macro structural changes after a poor performance week. We fire people after they make a frustrating mistake. We overhaul our offense after a bad loss.

Our determination to avoid short-term pain can lead to long-term anguish.

This isn’t to say that sitting still is always the right solution. If there’s a sudden swarm that’s going to require beekeepers to come in, it’s probably best to vacate the area. But we need to avoid overreacting to minor threats that do not appear to be fatal.

We might be surprised at how often the bee just flies away.