How To Keep Your Team Connected And Focused

What I’m going to be talking to you about today is the challenge right now, is like being isolated from those that you work with. I’ve been working with clients over the last few months on helping them transition their businesses as leadership teams, and certain leaders in how they lead.

I’ve been talking about what it’s like to lead in a world where everyone’s working from home. Everyone’s got their own sort of personal context and personal challenges that are a struggle and what is like for you when you’re trying to keep focused on your work and keep focus at home when there’s continual distraction happening. 

I’ve done a series of videos on this and if you want to check the rest out, just check out my website www.thereasonandtheroad.com.

The Challenge

What I’ll be talking about today is how do you help your team keep connected and focused during this time. We’ll go to the big picture first. What I’m hoping to get you to do is with your thinking, with your brain and in the way your brain works is to help you move from survival thinking to creative thinking. Just a big shift and instead of seeing this as a potential thing where the world is gonna stop, seeing this as a chance to pivot and to take advantage of the opportunity and I want to help you and your team to do that.

Four Problems 

1. Isolation. How do you Do this in an environment where you’re physically isolated from everyone else?
2. Distraction. How do you minimise the distractions, personal, health, family,?
3. Cancellation. How do you deal with clients in terms of cancellations and the challenges of redigging part of your business, investing and divesting as things change?
4. It’s all you. How do you deal with the fact that there’s so much that’s about your own personal mindset, your own thinking and how you respond? 

Manage Through Isolation

What we are focused on today is how do you manage through isolation, and how do you create focus and momentum in your business when you’re not in the same room, and you can’t train someone in the hallway. So, here’s the thinking behind it and that I’ve been doing and what I’ve been sharing this one already is what’s been around for millions of years in leadership, is that our primary job is to give someone clarity of task, What is it you got to do? How you got to do it? When is it gonna be done by? and at the same time to establish and maintain a relationship with that person.

Now, just ask yourself in this environment, what’s the toughest thing to do to get clarity of task or to maintain a relationship? For most people giving people instructions as to what, when, who and how they can continue to do either on the phone or on chat, WhatsApp, but what’s hardest is these two things –  which is keeping the team connected and keeping you as the leader connected to the team.

Get Them Engaged and Connected

What do you think you get if you’ve got lots of tasks and none of that relationship? What would you think you’ll get? You get everything feels a bit soulless, everything just sort of has no purpose. Same time if you’ve got no heap of relationship and no direction it kind of feels like what I would describe as a warm bath. Really comfortable, lovely, have some candles on, but how long do you actually want to sit in a warm bath before you get up and do something? 

Here’s a challenge. You look at a virtual meeting and so let’s say we’ve got 60 minutes of the team, and you can engage with them over time and this happens in normal meetings. Everyone comes to the meeting, let’s just say that they’re up for it, they are open. 

What happens is that if we go all tasks, your focus on task overtime…boring. And it’s a little bit soulless, so we need to be conscious of the two items giving them clarity of what the task is and what we’re focusing on, but also on the relationship. What we would ideally want to do is to see through focusing on engagement and relationship. 

We will see it go up over time, or at least. If you are spending that amount of time as a team, things that help the engagement. First of all, get people chatting with one another – Zoom and Teams got those functionalities, get them connected.

It doesn’t matter if they’re not talking about what you needed them to talk about if they’re just connecting and chatting, that’s great! Ask about personal questions at the start of your meetings. Where are you joining us from? What’s the one thing you’re loving about this time? Sharing time with your family? Get people open up a bit more, it greases the wheels and gets things done.

I’ve been using Breakout rooms a lot to get people to have personal conversations and connect with each other. They can talk about work. The Breakouts in a virtual environment, they stimulate the hallway conversations.

Summary

Here is the lesson, in a virtual environment when you are dealing with isolated people who are physically isolated. You’ll lose the soul of the team, the momentum of the team if you just focus on tasks. That’s incredibly important and I think getting the team together to talk about what the shared problems are that you focused on, which I help a lot with and what’s the plan forward. 
What’s the plan on the horizon and one of the things you can focus on are really important.

But so is keeping the team connected because that gives you momentum. If you get this right you get the combination right, you can keep your team absolutely focused and inspired during this time. Now, the way you got to think about it is just like you would in a normal meeting. You’ve got to have some things that help people get clear on what they’re doing, and you better build it today that meeting connection points where people could chat and connect with one another through that 60 minutes meeting. 

Leave me a comment or Get in Touch

So I hope this has been useful. I’ve been learning this stuff myself and teaching it as I go. And when I continue to teach around how you can help yourself and your business focused, keep yourself thinking creatively and help your business pivot during this time of isolation. If you want more info about the Pivot Program, and how I’m helping people. Just send me a comment below, happy to have a chat to see if it fits with you. 

Talk to you soon.