Is your team rudderless and disinterested?
Like many leaders today, are you struggling to help your leadership team regain the energy, passion and purpose they had prior to COVID?
Over the past 3 years your team has had to help their people navigate through a once-in-a-lifetime event, one where society as we knew it was completely shut down and the risk of falling sick or dying was all too real. The trauma of that experience continues to affect many people, including those that are immune-compromised or have
pre-existing health conditions.
Your leadership team has had the added burden of keeping the business afloat while coping with periodic lockdowns, unreliable supply chains and scared staff. Now, with many of those issues behind us, businesses are left to cope with unmotivated staff, conflicting work-from-office and work-from-home mandates and a deep malaise that manifests itself in a lack of interest and direction.
Shift to becoming purposeful, passionate and engaged
As leaders, it is essential for us to reestablish purpose, passion and engagement across our organizations.
A great way to start is by defining a clear challenge that you want the team to address. This challenge must be achievable within a relatively short time, ideally 6-9 months. It must make a meaningful impact on your business. It must also involve the entire organization. Taking on such a challenge will energize and align your team towards competing and succeeding in a new post-COVID world.
An example of such a challenge is where you target a key market or competitor. Bringing a new product to market, offering a new service, challenging a distracted or weak competitor, can all help energize your team’s purpose and focus.
Once you have defined the goal, work out the ways in which you will build broad engagement across the organization. These can include holding in-person brainstorming sessions at the start to solicit the best ideas. Regular town halls are very effective in building awareness for the project and strengthening alignment and commitment across your organization. Finally, ring-the-bell events to acknowledge progress and celebrate final success make everyone in the business reaffirm their commitment to a winning team.
Working together in this way will help your team relearn how to collaborate and rebuild their trust in each other. By replacing fear, isolation and disinterest with purpose, possibilities and success, you will help your leadership team step out of the long shadow of COVID and take charge of building a brighter future for your business.