How to lead when your team is tired (and you too)

How to Lead When your team is tired (and you too)

Compared to the adrenaline-fueled response in the early days of a difficult moment at work and the possible false sense that this will go smoothly just with hard work, the second phase requires a new understanding of personal resilience. In the first phase, personal resilience relied on a psychological emergency response called arousal. Shocks, threats, and sudden uncertainty make us super alert and we activate resources that are skin-deep: Adrenaline, fighting spirit, and pulling together. This response is impulsive, almost universal, and immediately recognizable across many teams.

Personal resilience in the second phase is a different story because it relies on psychological stamina. Psychological stamina rests on more deep-seated emotional patterns shaped by our individual needs, histories, and experiences. Stamina is required because, frankly, the second phase is not exciting at all as it is now about dealing with tons of issues and not always seeing the end of a long tunnel. People could report feeling tired, sometimes disconnected, and unnerved. In contrast to the skin-deep reactions of the first phase, the second phase requires perseverance, endurance, and even defiance against the many upcoming difficulties.

Cultivating resilience requires some emotional rewiring and calls for a different kind of appeal to team members and colleagues. The essential task is to identify your biggest challenges over the next year and then tap the psychological stamina you and your team needs to get there. There are three key steps: understanding the difference between urgency and importance and show the courage to say NO; balancing comfort with containment; and finding new ways to energize yourself and others.

Understanding Urgency vs. Importance, Show courage to say NO

This may sound self-evident, but it is amazing how much entire organizations avoid facing up to the toughest challenges ahead. One reason is our natural response to crises: We become short-sighted and push aside all that is not urgent. Once we have fixed what is urgent, we feel we deserve a good rest but the next wave of Important things hit us and become urgent too.

Leaders and teams must avoid this temptation. As a high-ranking officer in NATO said one day: “It is better to act and make a decision than not to act. In other words, the consequences are often greater if you decide not to act than if you do act. A willingness to take risks and go out of your normal way to anticipate the next issue is a precondition for being able to act under pressure or in demanding situations.”

The way ahead may be to follow for example the question : Ask yourself and your teams: Are you doing all you can do to be able to perform as early as possible? The window for change may be closing due to immense task ahead and the time to turn good intentions into action is now.

Finally it is mandatory to have the courage to protect you and the team by saying NO MORE to top leaders and colleagues who come with their own agenda. It is very rare that a strong push back with some rationale and a clear NO is resisted even by higher management ranks. But you owe it to your team and to yourself.

Balancing Compassion and Containment

In order to act, you and your employees must be motivated to act. Specifically, action requires both compassion and containment.

First, let’s look at compassion. Working in isolation, health concerns, job pressures, juniorities in the team, heavy workloads, and rapidly shifting priorities.

Leaders need to be serious about mental wellbeing and intervene sooner rather than later. This means that your employees need more warmth and comfort than they might have prior to the second phase. But you can’t soothe your team with spreadsheets and plans; that takes listening and daring to stay in the hardest moments –daring to talk about doubt and discomfort — instead of skipping ahead to the next item on the agenda.

There are a couple of ways to approach this. One involves saying “I don’t know” or sharing your own feelings of discomfort. I see an enormous difference in leaders who express their insecurities, because it goes both ways: When you dare to tell your team about the issues you struggle with, they will follow suit.

Another approach involves encouraging the fundamental feeling that people are good enough, that they have earned their place, and that their worth is not just a function of their actions and results, but of who they are and how they carry themselves, hoy the team supports them. So, don’t only talk about “getting things done” in your conversations with your colleagues, but also recognize “who they are” using specific examples of their personal contributions (look back at what you have already achieved – be proud” and human qualities. This will reduce anxiety and second-guessing.

Compassion, though, must be balanced with containment. Containment is described by IMD professor Anand Narasimhan as “the ability to observe and absorb what is going on around you, but to provide a sense of stability.” Stability comes from setting limits, raising the bar, keeping the pressure at the optimal level, and helping each other snap out of self-pity and moodiness.

In fact, too much caring and compassion can drive people into a learned helplessness trap, believing that they can’t perform without help and support from others. We experience learned helplessness when we face uncontrollable and inescapable stress. We simply stop trying to respond to dangers and passively accept whatever harm befalls us. You don’t want to go there.

So, once you lift people (or yourself) up, the goal is not pampering. Rather, it’s about using your connection to catch a second wind. And as any boxer will tell you, a second wind is brought on by defiance, anger, fear, and frustration. Feelings that we usually suppress or intellectualize in our professional lives.

So instead of lowering the temperature completely and feeling the effect of exhaustion, it might be a good idea to turn up the heat and go into fight mode. Take a good look at the battles that will meet you next year. How can you stay ahead of the curve? How can you prepare for the next stages? How can you mobilize and be able to attack rather than just play defense ?

Yes, the current moment calls for compassion, but it also calls for a little more edge and collective defiance on “we are not going to drop things now – we have done so much already – we will win this”. You want people to say “enough is enough” and rise to fight against the gloom and the difficulties . As with good parenting, the key is to find the right balance between caring and challenging, between compassion and containment, between saying “you are good enough as you are” and “get moving and get to the next level.”

Energize Everyone, Every Day (and you too)

The hardest part right now is managing your own mind.

As we enter the last stretch, the greatest challenge for leaders may be to sustain energy in themselves and in their teams. We don’t quite know how long it will take to finish the last mile of this ramp up and we cannot rely on the urgency of the crisis any longer. Patience with feel-good language like “we need to pull together” or “we will get through this” is now close to zero. The appetite is for specific and actionable communication — what to do now to pull together and how to get through it.

The key is to get the energy flowing and never accept that meetings and interactions become stale or boring. Energy is not a given and must be generated and channeled internally.

There are many ways to energize: Sharing success stories, setting up competitions, dividing long projects into sprints, communicating, being grateful for living through the experience and working with great colleagues. But also shortening endless zoom meetings, cutting tumbleweed projects, and allowing constructive conflicts and honest feedback in your teams. How you do it matters less. That you do it matters immensely.

Further, people with a high degree of resilience tend to prevail because they interpret setbacks as temporary, local, and changeable. When something is viewed in this way, it leaves us able to think: “It will go away sometime, it can be curbed, and I can do something about it.” This enables us to act. It is the mindset of the resilient leader. Resilient people are more willing to make decisions because they believe they have a real impact on their situation and are not afraid to influence it.

Alternatively, if we face an obstacle thinking, “It is permanent, it is a general problem, and there is nothing I can do about it,” it leaves us with little or no power to act. People lacking resilience also tend to internalize the problem by ruminating and having thoughts like, “It is probably me. I am no good. I can’t do anything right.” This leaves the person paralyzed. You can probably imagine how these thoughts can spin out of control and end up in pure self-destruction.

Resilience is the most fundamental quality for navigating through chaos. The belief that we have the ability and the strength to overcome obstacles and perform involves a constant balancing act. Without resilience we tend to act indecisively or follow directions blindly. If we are not confident that we have the necessary abilities, we risk getting paralyzed or subjected to forces beyond our control. Managing your own mind and deciding to take charge of your destiny (and helping others do the same) is where you find mental strength for the last mile.