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Drew Barrymore’s squatting on top of a leather chair in three-inch heels, staring directly at me. Or, at least, into the crowd directly in my vicinity, which has to count for something. Her eyes are locked on our amorphous group, emphasizing her point: “I love when you jungle stare at someone, and you’re perched like this, and you’re staring at them, like ‘Are we gonna do this? Are we gonna have some f*cking fun?!’ Pretty quickly, you see who’s into it…and who isn’t,” she says (though, admittedly, I’m paraphrasing, because I wasn’t about to break eye contact to take notes!).
Drew was sharing her thoughts on work and founding a film/beauty/home brand (all under the Flower umbrella) at American Express x WeWork’s For The Love of Collaboration discussion, and she was INTO IT. So was the crowd. And while this anecdote, in particular, was meant to illustrate how fired up she is about her work—and how passionate she is about finding people who share her fire, even if it means potentially terrifying them with her “jungle stare”—she got honest about the days when she doesn’t feel so hot about her job.
The big difference between acting and running a business, she says, is that as a manager, you spend most of your day putting out fires. You’re hearing about all of the problems the company is having, which can easily start to drag you down. That’s what inspired Drew to change the way she conducts meetings—not just for her sake, but for all of the people who work for her, too.
“Identify at the beginning and end of each meeting something that’s going right in the business, so we know why we’re all here doing this,” she says. Because otherwise, what’s the point?!
That little moment of positivity—”here’s one thing where things are going right”—can go a long way, when you’re sitting through an hour’s worth of all the ways the company’s falling short, you’ve dropped the ball, or the work is piling up to straight-up overwhelming levels.
I’ve worked with people who thought it was too Pollyanna to note the good stuff, or that we were discounting or ignoring the bad by mentioning the one good thing, but it can go a long way for morale. For Drew, it’s been the tiny silver lining that’s kept her from quitting on particularly rough days, so if you feel bogged down, it’s worth a shot.
Top Photo: Walmart