6/19/2024

What Do Elephants and Vampires Have In Common?

They will both sabotage your team if you let them.

Elephants in the room are the issues that you haven’t addressed and will stomp on your morale and teamwork if you don’t address them.

Energy vampires are the people that suck all the positivity out of your culture, draining your time, team and energy.

Too often leaders ignore the elephants in the room and energy vampires on the team. As a result, the issues, problems and negativity only get worse.

The key is to identify your elephants and discuss them and confront your energy vampires and transform or remove them.

Both require you to have difficult but necessary conversations!

And here in lies another challenge. Too often we avoid difficult conversations – and that’s why we don’t deal with the elephants or vampires.

We avoid conversations and conflict that make us feel uncomfortable. We also avoid them because we don’t know how to adequately have these conversations.

That’s why we recommend Amy P. Kelly and Jon Gordon’s book “Difficult Conversations Don’t Have to Be Difficult.” Their STAR3 model for difficult conversations will make your conversations easier and your team a whole lot better.

While you may still feel uncomfortable when implementing the model, we’ve found it gives the confident to move through the fear, embrace the discomfort, and grow in the process.

After all, discomfort leads to growth if we step out in faith, utilize smart strategies and take action!

So you don’t have to get the garlic and wooden stakes to take care of your vampires and there’s no need to harm elements. In fact, they provide an opportunity to utilize the strategies in the STAR3 model to have growth conversations that will make you and your team stronger and more unified than ever.