Everyday your business or you yourself have been affected or effected by positive impacted leadership. The idea is to keep that success train chugging down the track but that isn’t reality. It can become very challenging as the business landscape, constant change, or the pressure of the unknown become unfavorable in some way. This shift from the “norm”, everyone once experienced, can now negatively effect. We are all human right?!! Leaders who are proactive, not reactive, and who embrace change themselves will be better equipped to face this challenge head on, as well, position themselves and their teams to lead their organizations to success in the future.
Good leadership can pivot (insert Friends episode with the couch on the stairs) as the situation demands is a must. Framing your leadership approaches is extremely important in this landscape. Team members may require more feedback, coaching might increase due to the obstacles the team might be facing? Other teams might be fine in this area and less oversight is needed. Some team members might find comfort in this affirmation of constant feedback and followup from leadership. That is what I mean by framing the approach, it is not a “one size fits all” answer.
I talk through these often but lets frame these soft skills for this specific need of leading through the hard times. First lets talk about the six areas:
Communication
Accountability
Flexibility
Adaptability
Authenticity
Compassion
Be Present with Your Communication
So lets talk about your responsibility as a leader in a company specifically for now. In the difficult times, employees are looking for answers, or comfort as everyone else could be coming to you asking questions. From a business and organizational standpoint it starts with clear representation of the vision. It could be communicating the company’s culture, core values, the mission or vision that is overreaching of this hard time. When team members understand their position and the range of requirement for actions and behaviors it brings a level of understanding. This understanding could even remind why they are doing the work they are doing and reminds how it’s making an impact.
Feedback is required, on your part and your team. Just as your holding accountability, they will do it to you. Employee retention can become an issue in hard business times. Engagement with the team is detrimental to succeed. Job clarity, confidence in the work the team is doing, communication of how the direction is affecting the outcome all play a part in building that team commitment.
But, to be most effective, it needs to be a two-way street. Leadership must be open to feedback from employees too. This gives employees a voice! Trust with leadership, which increases employee loyalty, can alleviate the collective stress felt during times of change.
Normalize the Expectation of Accountability
Develop an improvement mindset in the team. This hard time is occurring for a reason. Collaboration becomes even more important during difficult times when leaders need all hands on deck to get the job done. But each member of the team has to take ownership of their role for successful collaboration, and they need leaders who are willing to do the same.
Good leaders don’t throw their team members under the bus for the team’s failures or take all the credit when the team does great work. Even though some leaders opt to blame their employees during difficult times, there is nothing more detrimental to a team’s morale than a leader who is more concerned with passing the buck than taking accountability and helping their teams move past missteps and setbacks.
Leaders are responsible for their teams and guide them toward achieving goals. When those goals aren’t met, leaders can help their teams course correct and hold themselves accountable by taking ownership of their role in both goal setting and goal achieving and viewing mistakes as learning opportunities.
The most effective leaders don’t punish employees for failing to achieve expected results. Instead, they focus on ensuring there is clarity in job expectations, goals, and the role employees play in achieving those goals. And they don’t just react when teams fall short of expectations; they consistently recognize employees’ contributions when they do achieve the expected results and embrace mistakes so that they learn how to improve.
This can be even more important during difficult times, when there may be more confusion about expectations, shifting roles and responsibilities, and more anxiety over the future. Leaders can help their teams weather difficult times by holding themselves accountable for providing the clarity employees need to perform well.
Flexibility Works Hand-in-Hand with Accountability.
Effective leadership requires tailoring your approaches as the situation demands and as the needs of team members change. This makes flexibility one of the most important qualities a leader can have, and it makes it absolutely crucial during difficult times.
Being flexible when possible can increase the likelihood that employees will be able to meet goals and holding employees accountable can ensure that performance and productivity do not suffer when dealing with changing responsibilities, staff shortages, and remote work scenarios.
The scenario could be demanding their employees return to an office culture that was often toxic and unflinchingly rigid for many, remote work kept us going during the pandemic. It is hard to envision organizations being able to weather difficult times in the future without it. For many workers who worked remotely during the pandemic, this is the kind of flexibility they’d like to retain going forward. Offering remote and hybrid work options where feasible is a great way to meet an employee’s psychological need for independence.
Some leaders may be wary of offering their employees this kind of flexibility in their schedules long-term, but, remember, fostering a high level of trust with employees is essential to build influence beyond positional authority. It is also essential to helping team members do their best work, even when the circumstances in which they are doing this work are challenging in ways that are beyond their control. Schedule flexibility can provide more structure around work, enhance focus, increase productivity, and improve well-being by reducing burnout which can be a game-changer for your employees during difficult times.
Be Adaptable
Great leaders help their teams to thrive, even during difficult times, and during times of change. As constant change is the only thing any leader can be sure of in the business world, adaptability helps us build resilient teams that are better able to handle change. Leaders need to be able to adapt if they expect their employees to adapt. Adaptable leaders shine in times of uncertainty. So do their team members.
Leaders who embrace change and demonstrate an ability to adapt quickly, but also in an intentional way that doesn’t lose sight of long-term goals, help employees feel a much-needed sense of stability, help them adapt more easily, and create an environment that is conducive to innovation (yes, even in difficult times).
Authentically Lead your Team
Authentic leadership is transparent and ethical leadership behavior that encourages openness in sharing the information needed to make decisions. Building connections with team members that are rooted in authentic trust is so important to keeping team members engaged and motivated to perform well during difficult times. Authenticity helps leaders build influence with those they lead. Honesty, transparency, openness, and consistency will foster a team expectation that lets them know their leader’s “true self”.
Authentic leaders are passionate about the work they do and committed to the organization and its employees. They are strongly guided by values, are true to those values, and are true to themselves. They encourage authentic behaviors in their team members.
Self-awareness and humility are all part of being an authentic leader. To hone these skills and become a more authentic leader, be mindful of your core values and intentional about how you represent them to your team. Remember that it is critical to team morale to model these values and reinforce them with employees to keep them focused on the vision and united with a shared sense of purpose during difficult times.
Be Compassionate
Compassion is an important leadership quality any day of the year, but it becomes an even more important leadership quality during challenging times when employees need more understanding and may be dealing with both personal and professional factors that are creating obstacles to doing great work.
Compassionate leaders have positive intentions and genuine concern for those they lead, and they demonstrate this through genuine actions. Compassion takes us beyond empathy. When we empathize, we understand and share the feelings of another person. Compassion is more proactive because it helps us to actively contribute to the happiness and well-being of others.
Compassionate leaders are perceived as stronger and more competent than leaders who aren’t compassionate, which can give an organization a competitive advantage, especially during difficult times. Compassion creates strong, trust-based connections between leaders and their teams which facilitate successful collaborative efforts. It is a particularly valuable skill for leaders to have due to the potentially negative effects power can have on us.
Greater responsibilities and the resulting pressure of taking on those responsibilities can rewire our brains and cause us to stop caring about others as much as we used to. We may find it more difficult to empathize with others when this happens. As a leader you are required to “keep the lights on and the business moving forward” but in the difficult times, having a level of humanity in your business posture is required.
Thanks for taking the time to read through some of my thoughts on this interesting topic and I hope this has helped you.