LEADING IN TROUBLED TIMES
HOW TO KEEP YOUR PEOPLE MOTIVATED, ENGAGED AND WELL
Every day this week, we’ve published parts of an article on how leaders and managers can avoid social isolation and engage their people in working towards success in the post COVID-19 world.
We’ve been here before
We always have a choice
Working in isolation: what does good look like?
Look
after yourself
How are
you doing?
Day Four: Look after yourself
It can be hard to take the time to focus on your own needs as a business leader or owner who is holding all this together. Yet this is the essential first step – stabilising yourself practically, emotionally and physically will give you a more solid base to work from to stabilise your teams and find new ways to re-engage them as the business adapts to the current situation.
Only then can you really start to stimulate ideas, look at disruptive models and start testing them. Your instinct might be to move to that stage right away, but it really is worth taking a step back to make sure you’re in the right place to lead your teams and business forward into a different way of working.
When working with business leaders to implement major change programmes, we’ve noticed time and time again that it’s those individuals with high emotional intelligence who are able to unlock the enthusiasm and creativity of their colleagues to make the change happen. And the opposite is also true – with behaviours resulting from stress and anxiety often acting as a greater blocker than any practical challenges. Just being aware of the difference between these reactive stressful behaviours and emotionally intelligent behaviours can make a huge impact on how you relate to your teams at this critical time. And if you can take the time to start applying some more mindful techniques, it should help create a more stable platform to move through the ‘adapt’ stage.
All this might seem like wasted effort right now, when there are so many immediate challenges to deal with. However, even if you can just take a little time each day to get yourself into a more reflective place and practice your most emotionally intelligent behaviours, that will help shape the organisation that you ultimately lead out of the current crisis.
Contact us to discuss how we can help support you as a leader through coaching, mentoring, e-learning and emotional intelligence profiling.
Monday: We’ve been here before
Tuesday: We always have a choice
Wednesday: Working in isolation – what does good look like?
Thursday: Look after yourself
Friday: How are you doing?