Leaders: You are not alone

These last four weeks I’ve talk to so many Leaders like you who are working valiantly to face this pandemic challenge and who feel utterly alone. Leaders like you who are…

• Responding to the latest developments, adapting to restrictions, and trying to keep your organization viable.

• Struggling with heart-wrenching decisions to control expenses and retain revenue as the economy teeters.

• Wondering what the future will hold for your organization when the world emerges from this pandemic, or perhaps…

• Racing to keep up with unprecedented demand for your essential services.

• Trying to find ways to keep your team members safe in their essential roles.

• Worrying for team members who’ve become ill with COVID-19.

You are trying to sustain the work you love, serving customers you love, and trying to preserve the livelihood of employees whom you love.

You might not have used the word “love” before, but it is clear now that you love your customers and you love your team members and your love what you do. You care about people, their families, well-being, and security. You’ve found a niche to fill, a contribution that brought value to the world, and a way to employ people in meaningful work. And you long to keep doing that.

“You long to keep feeding or educating or advising people. You long to keep hosting people in your hotels, or supplying them with parts, or providing their uniforms, or cleaning their buildings, or managing their events. You long to keep providing social services, or furnishing offices, or entertaining customers with your music or dance or stagecraft. ”

As this pandemic hit, you worked day and night to ensure continuity for your operations.

But while you deeply care about people and have always considered yourself a human-centered leader, you may be struggling to find any bandwidth to attend to continuity for your people. You worry about them even as you fall exhausted into a fitful sleep. It’s not your nature to neglect people, but there’s nothing left at the end of a day. Literally nothing left.

But please hear my words and the practical hope and advice that follows.

The words of the poet, David Whyte may be true for you, “Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.”

Whyte reminds us in the poem, Everything is Waiting, of the “intimacy of our surroundings” and the objects that support and enable us, that see the good in us and grant us freedom.

I want to remind you that your great mistake may be to act this pandemic drama as if you are alone. Instead please know that you have sources of support, enablement, and goodness to help you care for your people.

You know that fear, uncertainty, and overwhelm are taking their toll on all of us, including every person on your team. You are experiencing that the stress response from this trauma is causing adrenaline and cortisol from the amygdala to hijack our brains and suppress our pre-frontal cortex.

That’s the reason we are all having a hard time thinking clearly, that everything takes so much longer to do, that it is hard to solve problems and learn anything new. There’s a reason we are exhausted. The fight-flight-freeze stress response is causing that. This is also suppressing our immune system, elevating our blood pressure, and bringing on inflammation, insomnia, depression, and eventually illness. That is what traumatic stress does.

So it is essential that we take care of ourselves and each other.

We take care of ourselves when we, “Put on our own oxytocin mask first!”

Oxytocin is the hormone that comes from loving connection to ourselves and others. It lowers our stress, bringing healing, calm, rest, and repair. We can take care of ourselves through mindfulness practices, breathing, exercise, being in nature, water, rest, and human connection.

And then we must take care of each other, our family and friends to be sure, and our team members too. We spend a great deal of time in common cause working even while apart. We must help each other to lower our stress response.

We do that by checking in authentically, by listening generously, by taking time to process this experience, by talking about what’s really going on, what we feel about it, what we are doing, what we hope, by adjusting our expectations, and by offering support to each other.

This care for team members should be an expected and explicit part of our work.  

But you as a Leader don’t have to try to care for your people all alone. You can activate three sources immediately available to you to help your organization live its human values and care for each other. This will look differently depending on your industry and current demands, but the principles are the same. Here are three things you can do:

1. Activate your managers and supervisors with explicit instructions to care for people.

Make clear to all your managers and supervisors that it is their job to care for their team members as human beings. But don’t stop with a general directive because many won’t know what you mean. Model this to your direct reports so they experience it from you, and then offer clear instructions:

Let them know that you want them to take time to check in with team members regularly and to ask team members how they are really doing. Ask your managers and supervisors to invite employees to speak honestly about their situation. Encourage your managers and supervisors to acknowledge how hard this experience is. Let your managers and supervisors know you want them to really listen with empathy and concern and to ask their employees what they need. Tell them to ask what they can do to support their employees. Ask them to listen and adjust to meet those needs. Make clear that you want them to be flexible about how the work gets done and to re-evaluate what is actually needed during this time. And please support them by adjusting your own expectations too.

This means that your managers and supervisors may come face to face with human emotions, and it is their job to be with them and not turn away. They may be uncomfortable with emotions, but this is the time to step up. It is time to be strong enough and brave enough to be with human feelings.

If they have not built trust with employees before, this will be harder, but it is never too late to begin to care for people and to show kindness, compassion, respect, empathy, and gratitude.

2. Activate your employees with explicit instructions to care for each other. 

A second resource you have are your employees. Your employees can help care for each other during this time. Communicate clearly to employees both directly and through your managers that 1) you understand the stress response they are all experiencing and how damaging and difficult it is, and 2) you want them to take time to reach out and care for each other.

Encourage team members to schedule time with each other to check in on each other, not just about work outcomes. Make clear that this must be inclusive so that no one is left out. Ask them to create a buddy or trio system for a web of support. Remind them to honor that people will choose to engage differently based on preferences. Again, describe what checking in and supporting each other looks like in practice.

Let them know that you believe it will not only help everyone to sustain them in their work, but it is the right thing to do for their well-being. And you care about their well-being.

3. Activate your human-centered, empathetic employees to reach out to support co-workers and to advise you and your leadership team.

You have team members whose true superpowers are caring for people. They are the ones with Essential Human Skills, which are often misnamed “soft skills.” They organized the potlucks, remembered birthdays, and were the natural confidantes on the team. They are almost certainly still plugged to your team’s human needs. Their Essential Human Skills are, well, essential to your organization now more than ever.

Tap into them. Reach out and give them permission to spend time providing human support to team members. Make clear you want them to have virtual coffee with people, to talk to people about how they are doing, to listen as people process so they feel seen and heard.

Ask if they would be willing to advise you on how the team is doing and share ideas for how to support the team as this journey unfolds. Respect the confidentiality of their conversations and ask for themes not specifics when they provide guidance. This must be done with care for their emotional capacity and well-being so be sure your human-centered team members are getting support too.

This is an incredibly difficult time, with challenges, fear, sorrow and uncertainty, to be sure, but it is also a time of hope for a human-centered reset. We have heard this from hundreds of people in every Virtual Gathering we host on "Working Alone Together.” And it is in the difficult times that we discover our deepest desires and what we are truly made of individually and collectively. May you discover new and deep wells of love and humanity residing in your organization and teams.

Everything is waiting.