My team needs my leadership and I don’t know how to help them through this storm

By Chris Hutchinson, founder and leader, Trebuchet Group.

Dear How to Help Them,

I’m glad I’m not the only one who missed the Coping with Multiple Disasters Simultaneously as a Business Leader conference. That session on How to Deal with a Global Pandemic and Market Crash would have been handy right about now.

My mentor, the late Richard Reardon, taught me stress is not knowing what to do next.

This is new territory for all of us. Especially as business leaders. As I have written before many times in our “Ask a CEO” articles, you are not alone. Leaders all over the world are asking, “What the heck do I do next?

The good news:
You most likely have all the ability you need to make a difference for yourself, your team, and your business — even with the unknowns happening right now.

On your journey, you’ve probably gotten up more times than you’ve fallen down. You’ve experienced setbacks which took you off your desired course. You figured out how to get answers to questions. You are someone who overcomes obstacles and helps others do the same.

Through it all, you are still here.

In business — and in life — one of the primary skills you’ve learned is to break big problems down into smaller chunks. Pieces that are easy to understand and actually achievable.

So, let’s work together to start breaking your situation into actionable chunks.

Chunk number one: take care of yourself

If you’ve ever flown in a commercial airplane, you know to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. If you aren’t caring for yourself first, you won’t have a sustainable ability to support your team.

I find it tough to feel I’m worthy of taking the time to exercise, eat well, and sleep. I’m well-trained in the School of Martyrdom. However, just this morning, I found myself sharing at our team virtual Zoom huddle how getting more sleep is helping me be more resilient and relaxed. The rest of the team agreed they were also a bit surprised at the unexpected benefit of a little more (seemingly forced) rest.

Depending on your work and family role, you may find it difficult to get the time to help yourself.

When I find myself starting to feel self-sacrificial, I try to stop and ask myself questions like:

• How long can I keep this up?
• What could I do to recharge myself?
• Where would it help to take better care of me? Will more sleep, riding my bike, a long, quiet walk, or something else help?
• What can I do to help myself feel grounded so everyone else in the family and at work can feel the same?

Get creative. Try a short walk around the block instead of immersing yourself in social media for half an hour. Where you find yourself escaping and numbing, seek another option where your brain can idle while you do something physical instead. Sort laundry. Clean your room. Or maybe even try some guided meditation where you learn to quietly sit and let your mind settle even as the thoughts popcorn around inside your head.

Once you’re operating from a place of groundedness, you can better help others decide what to do next.

Chunk number two: continue to keep your team connected

Recently, a client who manages online learning told us, “How we work together as a team has become even more paramount as we decide what to do next.” She’s right.

It’s likely every player on your team now has different concerns popping up. How you choose to work with these realities and encourage folks to stay connected is essential to your success in the next few weeks.

While every team is different, here are a few ideas to encourage people to support one another.

Start each day with a 15-minute video call

The agenda can be short and quick:

• How people are feeling on a 0–10 scale
• What they will be working on that day
• Something going right
• Something people may be struggling with

We, as humans, are programmed to focus on what is going wrong. Ground people in gratitude first for what is going right to help everyone have the momentum to help one another.

Invite humor

It may seem dark and twisted to ask people to laugh together when things feel they are falling apart. Inspire others to remember the good while tackling the rough and a sense of balance and optimism can return. You need not gloss over the current reality to help people feel a tiny bit more human. Laughter helps with that.

Chunk number 3: Sketch out and activate a short-term plan B

Once upon a time, you and your team created a plan for where you all wanted to take your organisation. Maybe you’re using a multi-year strategic plan. Maybe you just had the next six months planned out. Up until a couple weeks ago, I’ll bet you and your team were making progress on your goals.

I’m guessing your plan did not include a contingency for responding to and operating within a pandemic.

When you’re driving a car and fog or a blizzard suddenly sweeps in and obscures your vision, what do you instinctively do? Slow down and shift your gaze in closer.

There can be a lot of power of an all-hands-on-deck, here’s-where-we-are, what-do-you-see-is-needed-next? meeting with your team. Transparency and communication can help everyone see how they might help.

Our method is to ask 3 questions to get everyone’s insight out quickly:

• What’s working well?
• What’s not working well, right now?
• What’s missing or unclear?

For remote meetings, a good option is to put these three questions at the top of a shared spreadsheet (hopefully all can edit together or designate one person as typist) and fill the sheet up with inputs.

Then, sort through the inputs together by clumping them within the question/category.

Finally, have everyone vote for which clumps are most important to build on / address. (We recommend giving everyone half + 1 votes, so if there are 6 clumps everyone votes for 4 items each).

Once you have the prioritised lists of what you can build on, what needs to be better, and what need to be clarified or added, then ask people:

• What are the next couple of steps that can help us?
• How will we know we’re making progress?

Repeat this process for the next few days, the next few weeks, and/or the next few months and keep building Plan Bs you can work on and revise together as you go.

We want you to succeed

How to Help Them, we know it’s lonely at the top — even without the social distancing and not being together.

If you are wondering about how to revise your plan, bolster your team, get more grounded for yourself, or frankly anything else that you’re working through, we would like to help. We believe we’re stronger together, and we hope sharing your burden with us, even for a short time, can provide you the energy and confidence to help your team succeed.

Thank you to Trebuchet Group, a US Based B Corp, for allowing us to re-post the article. A version of this post was originally published on their website.