Want to Get The Best Out Of your Team? Here’s How to Be a Conscious Leader

Great leaders are marked by how they act in times of uncertainty and crisis. Especially when we talk about these stressful days, what people need is conscious, continual, and courageous leadership, and your employees will never forget how you led them out of a crisis. As such, you will need to unearth the best solutions for your team to lead them out of the crisis unscathed. Here are a few ways conscious leaders can nurture high performers and maintain team effectiveness productivity and collaboration during the pandemic.

Maintain Clear and Constant Communication

As a leader, your words and actions have a higher impact on your employees than you believe. Especially, in these turbulent and stressful times, it falls upon you to help your employees cope with the mental strain, make them feel secure, put their unease to rest, and put their experience into a context where they can learn from it. In fact, a study found out that a majority of workers would rather hear about the pandemic and its future implications from their employer than traditional media.

It has never been more important for leaders to communicate frequently with their subordinates, check in on them periodically, maintain clarity and transparency in all their communications, and help employees make sense of all that is happening. Above all, you need to understand what your employees may be struggling with and offer them flexibility and support to make things easier for them.

Lead socialization Opportunities

Since most of your employees may still be working from home, it becomes more important than ever to instill a sense of camaraderie between your team and try your utmost to fill the social gaps left by a prolonged lockdown. Strengthening team chemistry can be as easy as taking out a few minutes at the start of every zoom meeting to engage your team in small talk, such as what TV shows they are binge watching or how everyone’s weekend was, exploring shared interests, or even reflect on everyone’s recent achievements.

Apart from meetings, why not initiate a more informal setup, such as a virtual water cooler channel where employees can host virtual parties, celebrate small wins, debate sports, or engage in office banter. With every one cooped up at home, bridging the distance between co-worker helps to uplift spirits and strengthen team bonds. 

As a leader, you can also offer a dose of inspiration to your downtrodden team mates by sharing your personal struggles and how you coped in that situation. By depicting your human side and your personal stories, you can be a frame for change and offer inspiration for people to act on.

Introduce A Culture of Accountability

A lack of accountability within a team not only kills individual team morale but also limits productivity within the entire organization in the long run. Individual employees need to understand their role within the organization and how their every action impacts the bottom line. Leaders need to clarify to each employee what they are accountable for delivering and what is expected of them. By setting clear expectations, employees know what they are responsible for and are clear on the deliverables. Not to mention, leaders need to constantly enforce a culture of accountability instead of having a one-off conversation.

Be A Coach

If you want your words to have a real impact, you need to switch from boss to coach! Instead of barking out orders or telling people what to do, it would be better to coach them in real-time. In fact, one of the most distinguishing features of great leaders is that they coach their team members and contribute to their team’s overall productivity and success.

Leaders act as mentors and establish communication between teammates, as well as nurture people to interact with each other.  They use weekly meetings as the perfect ground to discuss roadblocks and explore out-of-the-box to remove them and what role each employee can play in the process. Most conscious leaders are transparent with their teams and provide balanced feedback regarding what each team mate has done right as well as highlight areas that can be improved.

Support Inclusion

Lately, the announcement by Twitter CEO to offer people a ‘work from home forever’ option, was met by mixed reactions. Back in March, people were unceremoniously chucked into the remote working realm, and most people are only just beginning to adjust to the new norm. As such, it would be unfair to expect employees to suddenly come back to work, especially in the midst of a raging pandemic when most people are already anxious about their health and have to take care of kids at home.

However, if you truly want to empower people, you need to allow people to choose whether they want to come back to work or never work in an office again if they so wish, or perhaps work from home for an indefinite period until they are ready to rejoin. Leaders can conduct team meetings as well as one-on-one sessions with employees to see how people feel about coming back to work, and answer any questions employees may have about the benefits and risks associated. Through one-one-on conversations and team discussions, leaders can better connect with the circumstances of each individual employee and draft better strategies that support inclusion.