Embarking on the road to recovery

Chart your course

The greatest expeditions had only a hazy objective in mind; think Cook’s navigation of the South Seas or Amundsen’s search for the south pole. Yet despite offering nothing more than an unclear voyage with untold risk, they managed to rally people around them! Rally your troops by:

• Openly sharing what you do know about the direction. What are you vaguely heading towards?
• Acknowledging the variables and unknowns. Agree to consult with the team when obstacles and unexpected events arise.
• Setting clear short-term goals. You can’t know exactly where you’ll land in a year, but you do know the direction you need to head this week. Agree to constantly course correct and brief your team regularly.

Create your inventory

Once you have clarity about your course, you need to determine what kit you and your team require. Create an inventory by:

• Asking your team to reflect on what they need from you now and what they expect they’ll need further into recovery phase. Ask in a variety of ways multiple times to get a fulsome response.
• Understand that every individual within your team is going to need different things from you on different days. There is no blueprint for this. You need to create a swiss army knife of leadership skills you can reach for and deploy as required.
• Get your team to articulate what they need from each another. Develop expectations about how they’ll support each other, motivate each other, hold each other to account, communicate, socialise, ask for help, delegate and emotionally regulate.

Provision your kit

Once you’ve got the inventory list sorted you can go about provisioning it. Determine the skills and experience that is already at hand and identify what you’re going to need to procure. Make a plan to source missing resources through tools, training, coaching, reading etc.

• Employ online tools to support collaboration and communication. You might already be using some, but consider establishing more clarity about how and when they are used.
• Discuss boundaries around availability and the changed expectations that come with more flexible and asynchronistic communication and work patterns. Create nudges that help keep this front of mind for the team. Include work patterns in email signatures, sett OOO messages when logging off, disable email notifications when OOO etc.
• Find Ted Talks, YouTube videos, articles and webinars that address identified skill gaps. Encourage team members to share the resources they find and consider allocating specific time each week for team members, yourself included, to engage in development activities.

Remember to reorient

Fully provisioned, you can now embark on the journey! Your preparation will stand you in good stead but, like on any adventure, there’s bound to be a few surprises. All great expedition leaders constantly recalibrate their plans. Ask yourself daily:

• Is our goal the same as it was yesterday?
• What resources are we missing? How can we restock?
• How is the team travelling? Who’s lagging behind and needs support? Who’s been leading at the front and needs respite?

 Care for your crew

Checking in with your team members is critical. Avoid asking bland variations of ‘how are you going?’ as they’re unlikely to elicit a genuine response. Adopt coaching based questions including ‘what’s your focus for today/this week?’ ‘what hurdles can you foresee?’ and ‘what do you need from me to succeed?’.

The key to ensuring the emotional wellbeing of your team is to be consistent in your approach. Create a wellbeing strategy to schedule your informal touchpoints (every 1-2 days) and your formal check-ins (weekly) and stick to it. Amend the plan as you go for those who need more support.

Emotion sharing isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Creating a way for your team to share where they are at without going into detail can be a powerful tool. Consider a basic traffic light system: