How to Support Your Team During a Crisis - Part 3
What have you done for YOU lately?
Maybe your staff has been furloughed, maybe you’re working at 50% capacity due to lock-down requirements. But you’ve been in connection with your Team, you have all the safety standards and more, implemented and available. You’ve done check-in calls with your Management, reminded everyone about your healthcare options, you’ve donated time and energy giving back to the community in this time of need.
Let's remember that you are a part of that Team, of this community. The misnomer that we are in “down-time” during lock-down is hard to battle. Some of us are working longer hours than ever, in fact. Some of us have not only NOT stopped, but we have picked up where other closures left holes in the community service needs, and unless we begin preparing now, we will NOT be returning refreshed, revitalized, and ready to take on the new world of change.
How do we combat the strain of being a Leader at this time? At ABS, we have found that the answers for us lie in learning about the rest of you. How you are coping, what projects you are tackling, the inventiveness of your adaptability and resourcefulness. We’ve been attending webinars and product-launches, forum chats, and Town Halls looking to link, help, outreach, support, interact, and change the game of this “down-time.” It has been such an immense value to participate in networking groups of all shapes and sizes, all over the country, bringing debate and conversation, fresh eyes and new perspectives to our own laptop screens, week by week. The risk of exhausting the tank of personal capacity is fierce.
We need to remember to:
Feed ourselves, physically and mentally.
Check in with our Mentors.
Walk. Run. Bike.
Take up that healthcare option of virtual counseling sessions.
Read.
Play with the kids or the dog or the hamster.
Laugh.
This can be key training time.
Bring back your Leadership or Management team part-time, remotely, and start having meetings now-- prepare the team for what is to come in the next weeks and months, as we slowly chase these phased-re-openings to the new “business as usual.” If you don’t know, that’s a great place to start: “Hey, team, I don’t know what tomorrow is going to look like.”
Now is excellent project prep, new idea roll-out time. Share with or sign-up your Team for online webinars that will help in organization, performance, new software integration, fundraisers, or advertising plans you wish to undertake this or next season. Reach out to us for an updated employee handbook. Study up. Re-fill your knowledge-bank. Visit our reading recommendation list for outstanding content. Delegate Team members to read them as well, and organize some Zoom meeting sessions to talk about the ideas and methods and how you might best put them to practice in a phase-by-phase process.
We can use this time to lift those collective knowledge weights and grow stronger and more mentally fit together. Leadership means knowing how to delegate as well as how to implement, and your Team will be hungrier than ever to get their teeth into some good solid structure with a sense of self-agency, knowing we are all going to have to make shift together to get the Country up and running again.
All of us.
You are not alone.