How to motivate your team during tough times

1. Understand human behaviour

We dedicate a fair amount of time to understanding our customers, but what about our colleagues?

You don’t need to be a behavioural psychologist but you do need to understand how people behave when they’re in survival mode.

If they’re feeling threatened, fearful or scared they’ll be operating in “fight, flight or freeze” mode, with elevated levels of cortisol and adrenaline. You may witness procrastination, avoidance, extreme perfectionism, disengagement or aggression. These are coping mechanisms that don’t work long-term, but try telling your brain that!

What you can do:
Ask the simple and non-judgemental question: "Tell me how you are finding things generally right now?" It opens the door to a deeper conversation – but be sure you genuinely listen to the response.

You can’t “fix” Covid-19 but allowing someone to be heard is often the most powerful thing you can do to help them ground themselves and find a small step forward or a new way of looking at things.

If your team can’t share openly the things that worry or upset them without fear of recrimination, you have work to do on creating psychological safety within your team.

2. Evaluate and change as you go

When we’re working at pace it’s tempting to keep on going, so we keep repeating the same mistakes and don’t learn from them.

What you can do:

Take time out to review the week and your staff meetings using these two simple questions: what worked well and what can we do differently next week? Then make the necessary changes.

It’s great to end the week with genuine appreciation for people’s efforts too – it’s a sure-fire way to help them feel energised and valued.

3. Time out is not a luxury

It’s easy to put yourself last; to keep on going. Your team doesn’t need an exhausted leader any more than you need an exhausted team, so “put your own oxygen mask on first”.

What you can do:

Take time out of the working day for exercise, a lunch break and for time away from the screen. Have space between meetings to think, reflect and gather your thoughts. Practise deep breathing to reset the nervous system and clear your brain. As well as doing this for yourself, tell your staff you expect them to do the same.

Whatever else is going on, these three things are within your control every day.

Finally, a good rule of thumb for all of us right now is to focus only on what we can influence and change, and not to waste energy on the rest.