How An IT Manager Can Turn A Bad Week Around

A bad week can ruin things for an IT manager
A bad week can ruin things for an IT manager
Image Credit: eLKayPics / Lutz Koch

I’m willing to bet that you’ve had a bad week before. A bad week stands out from a bad day in that it seems to be a whole collection of bad things that just keep happening to you one after another. It starts out as just one thing going wrong, and depending on just how big of a deal that is, no matter how good your IT manager skills are, things can start to go down hill. If something else bad happens the next day then the tempo for the week has unfortunately been established.

Where Do Bad Week’s Come From?

When you are in the middle of a bad week, it can be very easy to believe that the universe is conspiring against you. However, I think that we can all agree that that is probably not the case. A bad week is simply a week where it seems as though nothing is going right for us. There is no IT manager training to deal with this. In order to deal with it, it’s going to be important that you focus on the right things.

When a bad week is happening to us, it can affect how we feel and how we view the world around us. As the bad week starts to unfold around us, we will start to feel uncertain and anxious. This causes us to start to look for patterns in what is happening to us as we search for a way to get back some sense of control over our lives.

It’s times like this that it makes sense to take a step back and remember that when we are experiencing misfortunes like this, they are really random events. In the world of statistical probabilities, there is always the outside possibility that several bad things will happen to you at the same time – thus the bad week. When a bad week is happening to us, we tend to see a cause-and-effect relationship where none exists.

How Can An IT Manager Deal With A Bad Week?

The good news about having a bad week is that you can fend off the bad luck that you are having. If you take the time to change your reaction to the things that are happening to you, it can have a very powerful effect on how your perceive what is going on in your life.

One positive way to deal with a week where a lot of things seem to be going badly for us is to use a positive attitude. If you have a positive attitude and bad things start to happen, then you can realize that things could be worse. That gives you something to be grateful for. Alternatively, people who are having a bad week often think that the reason that they are having the bad week is because at some point in time they tempted fate (jinx!).

Having a bad week can rattle us. When this happens, we start to make things even worse. When you believe that you are unlucky, you start to make bad decisions. When you are having a bad week, in order to get control over your week back you can imagine yourself in the future. What you may want to consider is how much better things will be one the very bad week is over and done with.

What All Of This Means For You

In our lives, there will occasionally be bad things that happen to us. However, what’s worse is that there will also be times where a whole string of bad things happen to us one right after another. When this is going on, we may start to believe that we are having a very bad week. As IT managers, we need to realize this and take steps to turn things around.

We start to realize that we are having a bad week when it seems like nothing is going right for us. When we realize that we are having a bad week, more often than not we’ll start to feel uncertain and anxious. It’s important that we realize that the world is not conspiring against us, instead a bad week is a random sequence of events that all seem to be happening at the same time. How you react to having a bad week can have a big influence on how much it affects you. Keeping a positive attitude can help you deal with a bad week. Try to picture a future where this week is behind you and think about how good you’ll feel then – once you can get back to doing some IT team building.

There is nothing that we can do to prevent a bad week from happening. There will be times that bad things just seem to line up and come at us one by one. However, if we can keep in mind that this is all random and that things will get better once this sequence of events has exhausted itself, then we’ll be able to get through it and get on with our next good week!

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that you should tell your team when you are in the middle of a bad week?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If I asked you how you learn best, what would you say? A lot of us would say that we learn best when we are sitting in class room and the professor is up at the board teaching us. However, especially when it comes to younger workers, this approach does not always work. IT managers need to come up with a training method that will work for everyone on their team.