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Everything happening right now has just thrown our world into the state of wondering what in the world is going on. What’s going to happen with the stock market? What’s going to happen with our businesses or our organization? Are we going to be able to maintain where we are? What’s going to happen with the health of the people around us? There’s so much that is uncertain. And we know that you want to take care of your team.
But at the same time, they still need to be productive in order to keep your organization moving forward so you don’t end up stalling out in this time of uncertainty. That’s why, in this episode, we’re talking about three things that your team really needs in a time of crisis.
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Transcript
People of influence know that their voice matters and they can make it matter more. This is Andrea Wenburg, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today, Rosanne and I are tackling the question of what does your team need at a time of crisis?
You know, everything with COVID-19 has just thrown our world into the state of wondering what in the world is going on. What’s going to happen with the stock market? What’s going to happen with our businesses or our organization? Are we going to be able to maintain where we are? What’s going to happen with the health of the people around us? There’s so much that is uncertain. And we know that you want to take care of your team – you want to care for them well,
But at the same time, they really still need to be productive in order to, you know, keep your organization moving forward and you don’t end up stalling out in this time of uncertainty. So, today, we’re going to talk about three things that your team really needs in a time of crisis.
So, Rosanne, thank you for being with me, again, today on the Voice of Influence podcast.
Rosanne: I’m looking forward to this conversation, and you and I have had a lot of discussion behind the scenes on our own about our own company. So, I’m looking forward to having the opportunity for us to share some ideas with our listeners.
Andrea: So, when we’ve been talking about this, I think one of the things that’s interesting to me, and that has really shown up for me personally, is this desire to grasp for control in the midst of uncertainty. What are your thoughts on why we do this? Why do we grasp for control?
Rosanne: Well, fear always ignites in us either a fight or flight or a freeze or fawn response, right? These are the trauma responses. And all of it comes down to trying to stop something that we don’t want to happen or that we’re afraid is going to happen, from happening. Nobody wants to feel vulnerable. And so, of course, fear makes us grasp for control, but how we respond to fear is going to make a big difference in outcomes. So, that’s what we’re talking about today.
Andrea: Right. I think one of the most important things for us to tackle here at the beginning is “Well, what happens, in a negative way, if we are grasping for control?” “What are the bad things that happen?” I mean, it certainly makes things harder for everyone when the leader is grasping for it or any other person, really.
Rosanne: Right. Yeah, so I think one thing that we have to remember is that fear in the face of uncertainty is normal. That’s a normal – especially if the uncertainty is dangerous – that’s a normal and a healthy response. Grasping for control, however, is not going to be a helpful response. The danger is, fear could very quickly cause us to make everything about ourselves.
You know, I have four children, and all of them are responding differently to the crisis, and I’m dealing with it on my own. And it’s very easy for us all to bounce off of one another at home because, when we feel afraid, we can make everything about ourselves very quickly and then everything degrades.
Andrea: Yeah, because we are trying to protect ourselves.
Rosanne: Right.
Andrea: So, it does sort of become: “How do I keep myself from being destroyed in this situation?” And when I say destroyed, it could mean a lot of different things. But that’s one of the things that people are struggling with.
Rosanne: Yeah. And the most obvious part of that, of course, is the external – trying to not have our business destroyed or our life destroyed or whatever. But what also tends to come out in situations like this is the unhealed parts of us, the unresolved parts of this that we would kind of manage in better circumstances tend to really come to the fore. So, any insecurities that we have in other areas about whether or not people respect us, or whether or not we’re going to be safe, things that have actually nothing to do with the crisis at hand, tend to bubble to the surface any time we feel this vulnerable.
Andrea: Is it possible that somebody might take advantage of me or my business?
Rosanne: Right, right. And, so, that’s another way where we can make everything about ourselves, and that’s just going to make everything harder for everybody around us. It’s not going to be solution-oriented.
Andrea: Right. And the other thing that – I’ve certainly seen this with myself is that – when I am grasping for control, it’s sort of like, you know, you picture your hands trying to grasp and you just can’t quite ever get a hold of it. Your energy and all of your resources and focus are being spent on this grasp that you’re trying to achieve, which is really impossible to achieve, at this point. So, we’re grasping, grasping, grasping, and then I realized that, “Oh my gosh, I actually cannot…I cannot actually control the situation.” And very little of the response of other people, or even, you know, there’s so much that I can’t control that I’m totally wasting my energy and my resources right now.
I think that was something that after a couple of days, maybe the initial kind of, “OK, this is what we have to do. This is what we’ve got to get done.” And then I started to notice this in myself, and I started to realize that I was really wasting a lot of time and energy on something that I really couldn’t do anything about.
Rosanne: Right. And especially when it comes to other people, like, are we calling things out of them or we’re trying to manage them? Because managing just ignites their fear, it increases their sense of lack of control, and they’re going to fight us. And then we’re just all spinning off of each other. We’re like a bunch of bumper cars, bumping off with one another.
Andrea: Yeah. And I think I think even just to take that and explain it a little bit, Rosanne, the idea of managing people is really the idea of controlling people, trying to manage their response, trying to get them to do something or get them to respond in a certain way is that idea of managing. So, it is, versus, what was the other thing that you said about that either managing or…
Rosanne: Calling out the best in them, giving them real leadership, which is believing in them. And believing that they have the capability of rising to the situation, and therefore calling that out, which is leadership.
Andrea: And we’ll get to that more as this conversation moves on for sure. When we’re to grasp for control, there is a level of trust that just starts to diminish with other people and how they feel about us. What do you think that is?
Rosanne: Well, nobody likes to have their choices taken away, right? We don’t like that. We don’t like feeling trapped. And so if we behave in ways that make other people feel even more trapped than they already feel in the situation, that’s not going to end well.
Andrea: Right. So, we know that it’s not wise, it’s not going to get you where you want to go, to grasp for control. And yet, there is this sort of…I don’t know, you do come to this point where you start to realize that “Oh my gosh, I really can’t do anything about this at all.” So, the hope is, though, that we don’t go into this sense of feeling like we don’t have any kind of agency in this situation. We still matter, your voice still matters. So, how can we get it to matter more in this situation? You know, we’re all in this together. We all know that this is a really difficult time.
Rosanne: Yeah. I think there are things that we cannot control, and we have to make peace with that. But then we’re left with the things that we can control and can be proactive about and recognizing, first of all, like you said, “We are all in this together, so we need to address it together.” We need to be together. We need to be other-focused in the middle of this and realize everybody’s having a hard time.
Andrea: You know, one of the reasons why we wanted to tackle this particular question about what people need from you or what your team really needs from you, is because we are a trauma-informed business. This is something that we know quite a bit about. So, Rosanne, you mentioned something really interesting to me earlier about the people who are used to trauma and live with PTSD; they have an interesting perspective on this. Can you share with our audience about that?
Rosanne: Yes. For one thing, resilience is learned. And so, people who have been in very nurturing environments for the most part, like everybody runs into situations that are difficult. Everybody has to overcome obstacles – that’s just a part of life, right? But there are some people for whom life has worked fairly well. They’ve worked hard. They’ve seen the benefit of their effort. They’ve had opportunities for education or for expansion of using their gifts, and life has worked pretty well for them. But then there are other people who, on a very basic level, spend a lot of time -sometimes because of the choices they’ve made, often because of things that they’ve been through that were completely out of their control, either in childhood or because of health reasons or whatever, there can be a lot of different reasons – that a person has to spend a lot of energy just managing life.
And I say, this as somebody who spent a period of time early in my life battling an autoimmune disease. And so, just basic living – the things that everybody else around me took for granted were very, very difficult for me because I wasn’t at the same starting place. And so, even though the situation resolved eventually, my health resolved eventually – I learned something from that time. That if you don’t have very basic things that other people have – we could look at Maslow’s pyramid of needs – if you are used to having to struggle for your basic physical needs, there are not the same opportunities for creativity that a person who does not have to struggle in those areas is going to be able to exhibit in good times.
However, in a crisis like this, when people who are used to being able to put all of their energy into creativity and innovation and self-fulfillment and that kind of thing, when they’re used to being able to live meeting those higher-end needs, when that gets taken away from them – it’s people who are used to having to struggle to survive who have a lot to teach you because they’ve had to do this a long time. And, so, if you can take the burden off of them in terms of making sure that they know that they have a paycheck coming, and that they’re going to be OK with their basic physical needs – those actually may be people who can offer you insight and innovation and help in ways that maybe you’ve never seen the full value that they can offer to your organization.
Those will be people who can think strategically in a crisis, because they’ve had to do that over and over and over again for whatever reason in their lives. People who have survived abusive childhoods are often very strategic thinkers because they had to be in order to survive. That’s just one other way that I’ve seen that work. And, so, people who are used to living, they’ve had at some point in their life, they had to live long-term in very traumatic circumstances. There’s a resilience that they’ve built that in ordinary times, they can look more fragile. But in a time like this, man, they have the skills, they know what to do, and they can actually be a real benefit to you at a time like this, as a leader.
Andrea: Which I think is really, really cool. It’s fascinating. And I hope that if you are somebody who has struggled with traumatic events in your life and you’ve learned how to navigate things, maybe you’re feeling a little more calm than the people around you. Then this is a really important time for you to step up and to step into that position of offering your calmness, offering your strategic thinking, and not being afraid to do that because other people might be falling apart in ways that you’re not. So, we really want to encourage you, if you’re that person.
Rosanne: Yeah. And the other thing that’s important to realize at a time like this is resilience is learned. Just like any other skill, some people might be more naturally bent in that direction than others. But I told my kids as we were sitting down, we were talking about this whole situation. Resilience is something that’s learned, and it’s learned in difficult times. And, so, the fact that you feel afraid or you feel like you’re falling apart or whatever, acknowledge the reality of that. Don’t pretend that you’re doing better than you are. Acknowledge where you are, but then recognize that: “This is where I am at the moment; but I can begin to take this apart, piece-by-piece, and I can start making positive choices. I can learn not to view this as the end.”
That’s a big part of resilience is no matter how overwhelming the situation feels in the moment, how out of control it feels in the moment – to realize seasons change. Seasons change – that’s something I say over and over to my children. Sometimes they last a very long time, but seasons change eventually. So, when you are acknowledging the depths of the grief or the fear or whatever, keep in mind also, “This is not the end. This is not the final word on this.” Seasons change – this will change.
Other generations in the past faced great trouble; every generation does to some point. I think what we’re facing right now, is going to be a very defining one in history for our generation. But we can meet it. We have the blood of those people who have survived pulsing through our veins. So, we can meet this challenge. It’s not beyond what we are made for. And so that’s something we really have to keep in mind. For leaders, that’s an important thing leaders need to call forth in themselves and in their teams.
Andrea: Mm-hmm. Absolutely, because the kind of the opposite of grasping for control is when you take a step back and you say, “You know what, I can’t be destroyed by this, ultimately. Me, as a spiritual human being, it may take my body, but it cannot destroy me.” I mean, if you’re able to have that kind of perspective that you cannot be destroyed, then you’re not going to grasp for control quite like you when you were thinking “I have to be able to manage all the details and figure all this out.” And, yes, we want to bring the best of who we are to the situation, problem-solve, and all those things. But there’s a difference between grasping for that control and allowing that sort of spirit of “I cannot be destroyed by this, but I will meet it head-on with all that I am.” There’s a difference between those two.
Rosanne: Absolutely. I mean, the reality is, all of us are going to die at some point. So we want to make wise choices, of course, we want to live as long as we can for ourselves and our families and all of that. But the reality is there is something greater beyond just the years that we have. We have the opportunity, by the time that we spend here, to leave a legacy that outlives us. And so, the person who lives this life in fear of being destroyed will not leave a positive legacy. They’ll leave a very selfish, self-oriented legacy. They will not be known for what they did for others, for the impact that they have that outlives them. They’ll have wasted their time.
And, so, it is important to use the time we have. And, obviously, we want to be responsible. We want to do healthy things; we want to make the most of extending as much of this time that we have so that we can use it well. But if we live it in fear of destruction, we’re not going to live it well. And, so, we have to think larger than that. We have to think with vision about what kind of legacy is our life creating right now, as we live.
Andrea: Mm-hmm so true. All right, so, we’re going to move into now the three things that we’ve identified as things that your team needs in this time of crisis. There are certainly other things but we want to highlight these three things as a trauma-informed company who works with leaders, who help teams to work most effectively and be the best that they can be. So, the first thing that we’ve already kind of touched on is this need to create space for people to be able to process, especially at the beginning.
Now, Roseanne, you really are our trauma specialist in this area. So, can you tell us a little bit more about why people need that space, particularly, at the very beginning? Space being permission to kind of step back and do what you need to do to process. Can you share with us why that’s a big deal?
Rosanne: Trauma overwhelms the systems. I mean, it’s a physiological reality. And, so, one of the things that you have to be willing to do when you are dealing with a traumatic situation, and, collectively as a nation and worldwide, really, because this is an unknown, there’s so much that we don’t know about how this COVID-19 is going to play out, we’re all dealing with a traumatic situation. And so, one of the things you do when you’re dealing with trauma, you get very basic. You make sure you get enough sleep. You make sure you take care of your body because what tends to happen is you’re so overwhelmed and disoriented that you kind of move from thing to thing, and you don’t do anything decisive. Your emotions are all raw, and so you have to re-ground, kind of, in your own body.
With trauma, there’s a sense of almost like your mind separating from what’s happening with you physically because what’s happening is so overwhelming that you can’t take it in. And that can play out as denial. That’s one way it can play out. It can go into depression, and you can try to kind of separate from that feeling of out of control by feeling sad. It can do a lot of different things with different people. But the way to respond to trauma, the first thing you need to do, is to give your body a chance to recover from the emotional assault. Your brain actually processes trauma as if it were a physical blow, OK?
So, you need to really take care of sleep. You need to be sure you’re staying hydrated. You need to be very gentle with yourself, not expect a lot of productivity initially. You need to get your basic systems for living in place, where are you going to be for shelter. What plan are you going to have for taking care of your family – those things are going to need to be the priority. If someone is having to switch from working at the office to working at home, they’re going to need some time to get that set up and kind of wrap their minds around it.
A lot of parents right now are not only having to juggle the difference from working at another location to moving home for work, but they’re also having to deal with the fact that their children are all of a sudden doing school at home. And I’m a homeschool mom; I can tell you what’s happening right now is not homeschooling.
I have homeschooled my children their entire – from the time my oldest son was in kindergarten – he is a senior in high school this year. What is happening right now is not typical homeschooling. If those of us who are homeschooling and used to homeschooling – who have chosen our own curriculum and have done all the things and are used to it – are struggling with this new norm of not being able to go out, of the kids not being able to do classes with other friends, co-ops activities, all of those things. We’re struggling with that. Believe me – I have great empathy for those of you who are thrown into this with curriculum that you did not choose and trying to set up technology so that teachers can teach you online. God bless them, my heart goes out to them. That is such a big challenge to have to make that kind of a switchover from a classroom setting to an online setting, just like that.
So, give yourself space right now. It’s going to be disoriented. It is not going to be highly productive. Don’t expect of yourselves or your team the same standards of productivity that you would normally expect during this time.
Andrea: Because actually processing and doing this work of giving yourself the space to sort of internally process this – and externally too perhaps – that actually is productive. It’s productive toward the end of getting to the point where you can do more for work.
Rosanne Moore: Absolutely. And I would say during this early time, if you are used to meeting with a counselor and you can do that online with your counselor, do that. If you have not previously felt the need of a counselor, you might need one now. And, so, that can be really helpful. Journaling can be extremely helpful. Just the act of putting things on paper to sort out your thoughts can be extremely helpful. But you’ve got to give yourself the mental space for your brain to come down off of that fight or flight, fawn or freeze response of trauma and to be able to settle back into logical thinking again
When you are in a trauma-based response, your body does not respond with logical thinking, it can’t. It’s a different part of the brain. So, the emotional part is turned on. The logical part is turned off. Know that with your kids too. If you’re seeing big emotions from your kids, you can’t reason them out of them right now. You have to calm the emotions before you can address logic. And so, you have to do that with yourself first.
Andrea: I wrote a lot about in my book because I had this tendency after a traumatic birth with my son, I was responding to things with anger a lot, instead of tears. And what I realized through the process of like, kind of processing all of it, and going through it and getting to the point where I found some significant healing – is that I have to allow myself to feel the sad things that come along so that they can kind of pass by. It’s sort of like waves of emotion. If I keep trying to contain these waves of emotion, it really becomes a storm inside of me.
And, so, through this whole process, I have been crying quite a bit. Not everybody is a crier, but I do cry. I cry a lot more now than I used to because I realized how beneficial it is to me. And, so, when a song comes on that reminds me of something, you know, I feel sentimental, I feel like the world is not as it should be. My son is missing out on something; my daughter’s missing out on something else. This is not the way I pictured their childhood; this is not the direction that I wanted to go with the business right now, and I had other things, as I am being confronted with those thoughts – if the emotion is coming up inside of me, I allow it to come out. And I don’t do it in front of other people for the most part, but I do find a space where I can allow that emotion to come out so that it is out. So that it has “exited the building,” if you will.
Rosanne: And it’s exiting your body as well because in tears, stress chemicals are released, and if you don’t release those, they stay in your body, and they produce a toxic load in your body that damages your health.
Andrea: Absolutely.
Rosanne: So, it’s very important that if you feel that urge to cry, find a place where you can do it. Find a place where you can do it; it’s really important.
Andrea: And then after you allow it to go, you don’t keep feeding that emotion. So, you don’t go back say, “OK, now, that felt kind of good. What else do I really feel bad about right now?” You know, you don’t want to continue to feed it, you just want to allow it to be what it is and allow it to come out and then move on. Go find something else to think about at that point. That doesn’t mean you’re in denial, it means that you have processed a moment of grief, and you’re moving on, and you’re going to get something done until you need to process the next moment of grief. So, this is another way in which we need to give space for ourselves and for our teens to be able to process especially right at the beginning.
So, Rosanne, we talked about the need for space, but teams also need truth. They need to be able to be honest about what they’re actually confronting and what we’re going to do to meet that challenge. Can you talk to us a little bit more about that?
Rosanne: Absolutely. A mark of good leadership is that you trust your team enough to be honest with them about what’s being faced, and you call them to action based on the reality of the situation. You don’t make promises that you’re not going to be able to keep, that you know can’t keep. Honestly, it’s kind of belittling when you try to hide from your team what’s happening because the message you’re sending is “I don’t believe you’re up to this.” And the reality is, if you’ve done a good job of building your team, this is an opportunity for them.
I had to apply this with my son. My oldest son, like I said, is a senior in high school this year. So, we began talking about moving – he has been part of a high school co-op, where he would go for classes two days a week, and then the rest of the time he did his assignments at home – they had to move to classes online and I fully supported that decision. And as more and more restrictions have come down in our state, one of the things that I had to say to him was: “Honey, you’re not going to be going back to co-op. You’re not going to have that for the end of your senior year. I’m sorry.”
That’s a big loss for him, but it would have hurt him worse if I had made it sound like: “Well, maybe it’s going to work out, you know.” If I had strung him along or minimized it or said, “No, we’re not going to do that. It doesn’t matter anyway because you’re getting to do stuff online.” If I’d minimized the loss, or minimized the reality of the situation, both of those things would have been unfair to him. But because I was just honest with him, and I had to say: “Look, what I can tell you is you’re not going to be going back to co-op for the rest of this year. However, this thing, we don’t know yet how long it’s going to last, how long these restrictions are going to last. But we know at some point, everybody’s going to come out again. And at that point, I promise, we will celebrate your graduation. We will find a way to celebrate your accomplishments, even though it’s not going to look like what we originally thought it was going to.”
So, it’s going to be really important for leaders right now to be honest about the situation, to be honest about what you’re confronting because of the situation. And then to be honest about what you’re doing to meet that challenge. They also need to hear that – not simply like, “Yeah, it’s really bad,” – but also, “This is what we’re doing proactively to meet this challenge, and this is what we’re asking from you in response to this challenge.”
Andrea: People need a plan. They need to know what that plan is. I mean, that’s something that my husband and his business did this week was, they took a step back and they said, “OK, what are we gonna do?” We all kind of conferred: “This is how we’re gonna handle this crisis. And at least for the time being, we know that this is the structure that we’re going to move under.” Then that was communicated to the rest of the team, and though there might be differing opinions on what should happen, at least there is clarity for people in knowing, “OK, so this is what they’ve told me that I can count on for my benefits. This is what they’ve told me I can count on for my time off if I happen to get this disease. They are doing everything they can to, you know, maintain our business and keep things moving forward.”
So, they have the need for space to process, the need for the truth so that they can confront the truth and meet it head-on. But there’s also a need to be released. Your people have a need to be released. I think one of the things that we immediately kind of do is we tend to operate in our zone of, you know, sort of our box. This is what I have been told I should do. This is my role. This is where I fit. That can be confining anytime, but especially in a time when we need to be able to think beyond where we were before. We need innovation. We need vision. So, being released to bring the best of who you are and who your team is to this situation could be a game-changer.
Rosanne, you can talk a little bit about that, and then I’ll throw in my example.
Rosanne: Yeah. So, I think it’s really important at a time like this to say, “We know what we’ve been used to. This is the situation we now have – we’re open to suggestions if you have ideas.” So, in some industries, the leadership may already have a plan, and it may be a matter of communicating, “This is how we’re asking you to pivot.” And it may be that all that you need to do releasing them from doing things the way they’re used to, you’re asking them to pivot. In some situations, a leader may need strategic ideas and it would be important to open things up and say, “You’re used to doing this. What else do you see yourself as being able to bring to the table in this situation? What other ideas do we have here?”
And I realized it depends on the role the person is playing in the company, as far as how open you’re going to be to letting them bring change ideas. But I think it’s really important to realize in times where what has been working no longer works, for whatever reason – and right now it’s external reasons – that the greatest innovation takes place. This is an opportunity. We can either see it as an absolute disaster, setback, whatever, or we can see it as an opportunity.
The other thing, I think, we have to be able to recognize is part of releasing people to bring the best, most selfless part of who they are to this challenge, is realizing there are going to be people who are grieving in the weeks ahead. They may not be sick themselves; they may have lost someone, and they’re going to be grieving. And so as a team, being released to stand beside somebody in a compassionate way and not just being frustrated by the stress of the situation, but bringing the best, most selfless part of who they are to this challenge in a very human capacity, as well as a work capacity, is going to be long-term team-building, long-term good for your company.
Andrea: Absolutely. So, when it comes to releasing people to be who they are, that is one of the bedrock themes of our business. And what we do with teams and what we do with leaders, one simple example would be when our kids came home from school, and now we’re going to be at home for a quarter of the year, longer than what we would have been. And the question became, “How are we going to do this? All of a sudden, lots of ideas popped up on the internet, on Facebook, on Pinterest, whatever about how to handle this with our kids, and there are a couple things that I took into consideration. And I think that this applies to teams as well, first of all, the stage or the situation of your team now.
So, when my kids were little, I would block out time, and I would sort of make a schedule for the whole day, or I’d make a list of things that we were going to get done every day, that sort of thing. And as they’ve grown, that has become less of an important thing for us to do, not just important, but it’s almost important that we don’t do that too much. We don’t want to over-schedule because my kids, in particular, one of them likes the schedule, one of them likes routine. One of them needs more freedom to be able to do things. So, she might need a list of things to do for the day, or we can discuss, “OK, so what are the things that would be most beneficial for your mind, body, and soul today?” But she wants the freedom to be able to accomplish those things within a broader range of time.
And she will get them done, and she will do them with joy. And she will do them with more precision and more efficiency. She’ll just do better job if she’s given the space to be able to do that. But our son, on the other hand, would prefer to know exactly what he’s expected to have the same jobs every day, to know what he’s going to be able to expect for a fun activity that day that sort of thing.
So, what I’m saying here is that we need to kind of know our teams, know the people, individuals, especially if they’re working from home now and ask them, “What do you need to be able to accomplish the things that you need to get done?” “How can I help with that? Instead of coming up with, you know, a very strict set of rules or how they’re going to be at home, instead being able to say, “What is it that you do need in order to accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish?”
And people will fight for you. They will fight for your organization. They will do the best that they can when you believe in them and when you are fighting for them. They know that. They believe that. They want the best for the organization because you want the best for them too. And when they’re given the freedom to be able to do that, they’re going to rise to the occasion.
Rosanne: Absolutely. Yeah, I have four children that I homeschool. And I have three different plans for how we do that. Two of my children basically, follow one plan. One goes to a co-op. The other has a completely different plan because we have to do what’s going to bring out the most productivity. You have to ask yourself, I think: “What is the ultimate goal that I’m trying to accomplish?” And then from there, what’s the best way to get people to achieve that?
Andrea: That’s right, because if the goal is for you to have control, then they’re not going to be able to achieve that for you.
Rosanne: Right.
Andrea: If the goal is you grasping for control, then you’re not going to get what you want. You’re just not going to get it. So, we’re saying, “Look, take a step back.” So much of this is about releasing control. It is about putting yourself in a position and a heart position in a position with your team where yes, you will bring the best of who you are. You’re going to bring your own strategy and clarity about what the new normal will be for your team and that sort of thing. But if you have that energy of grasping for control, people will feel it. And they will resist it, and they will resent it. And it is very likely that, again, it will feel like things are harder for everyone if you’re grasping for control. It will end up being energy and resources spent on things that won’t help and the level of trust in your organization with both your team and your customers, that’s going to diminish.
So what does it look like when you actually do give people the space to process and meet their need for the truth and meet their need for being released to be able to bring the best of who they are to this situation? Well, there’s a lot of really good that can come from that.
Rosanne: Absolutely. Releasing control is not abdicating leadership. We’re not suggesting that you should be passive. You want to be assertive – you just don’t want to be aggressive. Aggression is not going to help your team function well.
Andrea: Yeah. So, what do you get when you do that? Look, your team is going to be healthier and they are going to eventually be happier, perhaps even in this moment. They’re going to trust you more. They’re going to use resources more efficiently. If they’re given that space, even though you’ve given them extra space, and maybe it feels inefficient for now, eventually that’s going to come back around and really show up as efficient. People are going to bring that innovative problem-solving energy to the things that they’re doing. And ultimately, you’re going to have more goodwill with your team and with your customers. Instead of grasping for control, you release and you give people the things that they really need.
Well, we want to close off today just by saying we care about you. We are so sorry that you’re having to confront this. We’re sorry for the world. We don’t know what’s coming in the future. But we do know that we are here to do whatever we can to help you. So, if you would like to have a conversation about yourself and processing these things for yourself, or if you would like to have a conversation about how to help your team, please reach out. Go to voiceofinfluence.net, hit the contact button and send us a message. We would love to visit with you and do what we can to help you in this time of traumatic crisis.