A crisis isn’t really anyone’s idea of a ‘good time’ and many business leaders resign themselves to the work of struggling to get by and having to motivate themselves and their teams daily.

But what if I told you that your team could do more than survive during turmoil – that you could actually thrive?

The toughest times can make the strongest people and strong people make strong teams. And strong teams build strong businesses.

If you see crisis as an opportunity, your team and company can come out the other side even stronger and more resilient than ever before. If you build the right skills to empower your team, you’ll realize better overall results than you ever thought possible.

Your team will be more collaborative. Each member of the team will feel empowered to pursue their own personal and professional development. Relationships between team members and managers will be stronger. If you can master leadership during a crisis, your team will reap the benefits in times of quiet stability.

There are five things you need to focus on while leading through crisis to truly set the groundwork for record results:

#1) Strengthen Team Bonds & Enhance Company Culture

Your team likely feels a bit scattered, untethered, and insecure during times of crisis. Their routines have been toppled and their home lives are upended.

Because they don’t have a lot of certainty – or even predictability – about the future, they may feel like they’re treading water with no shore in sight. Their energy and motivation are sporadic, at best, and non-existent, at worst.

Of course, one person having an off day won’t drag down the business as a whole but an entire team? Feeling off-kilter for weeks or months at a time? Now that’s a challenge.

This takes more than going around a circle and sharing your favorite ice cream flavor in an effort to “get to know each other better.” Building strong team bonds is about creating a space where employees feel safe to speak up, to ask for help, to offer guidance, and to contribute what they can for the betterment of the group.

Throughout the duration of the crisis, what team members will be able to give will fluctuate and you need to foster a culture of flexibility and resilience to combat the potential downfalls.

Encourage collaboration so that when these output fluctuations crop up, you’re able to tackle them as a team. This will boost morale and camaraderie and will help ensure continued results no matter the short-term struggles.

#2) Give Your Team Their Power Back

Unexpected, sudden, and dramatic change can cause your employees to feel helpless, lost, and stressed. Perhaps you have felt the same way and are struggling to find ways to encourage yourself, much less your team.

These feelings are exhausting and demotivating which can leave you and your team’s output in the gutter.

First, you need to tackle your own inner challenges. You need to establish your own resilience and internal guidance. Once you handle your inner work, you can then pivot to focusing on your team’s struggles.

By working through their individual thoughts, and feelings about the events taking place, you can develop systems to give them a sense of ownership and control during a time when they’d otherwise feel at mercy to their situation. The more power they feel they have to make decisions and make an impact, the more they’ll be able to reconcile uncertainty and move forward.

Giving them feelings of control will help your team to step up and be motivated to help. Individual power leads to collaborative action.

#3) Fast-Track Your Communication

Frequent and thorough communication with your team will not only make sure you’re all the same page, but it will also make your team feel valued.

Sharing information, decisions, and challenges allows them to be part of the process. Your team doesn’t just want to hear the end-result of decisions from the top-down. They want to know the how’s and the why’s. They want to understand the reasoning behind different choices.

When they feel valued and included, they’ll perform better. They’ll feel like part of a community and will take pride in being on the team.

They’ll take a sense of personal ownership and responsibility for the direction of the company and how they can contribute to your overall goals.

Communicate as much as you can as often as you can through as many channels as you have available. Emails, video conferences, phone calls, one-on-one, or one-to-many. More is always better when it comes to communicating during a crisis.

#4) Celebrate Every. Single. Win.

A crisis is no time to withhold praise, appreciation, and gratitude – to yourself or to your team.

Celebrating every win, no matter how small, boosts morale. Individuals with stronger morale will have greater output and teams will forge stronger relationships with each other. Celebrating your team and their accomplishments gives them encouragement and confidence to keep working hard to contribute.

Congratulate yourself and your team each time you reach a goal. Express gratitude anytime a team member rises to the occasion, overcomes a struggle, or offers to help another project. Heartfelt, authentic appreciation boosts energy levels and bonding.

Keeping energy levels high will reinforce the forward momentum you’re building in your team throughout the crisis.

And if you get your giant ship moving in the right direction during times of friction, when the crisis dwindles and normal conditions resume, you’ll be gaining so much speed your team will be unstoppable.

#5) Encourage Continued Leadership Development

Putting your team’s personal and professional relationships first, fostering communication, and celebrating wins of all sizes is pushing your team in the right direction. You’re gaining momentum. You’re surviving – and maybe even beginning to see the signs of thriving – through this crisis.

Along with organizational momentum, you’re building individual momentum.

Your team is learning how to take initiative, work together collaboratively, and develop their own leadership skills.

Can you imagine what would happen to your company if your entire team was made up of self-motivated, cooperative, innovative, idea-generating, work-completing professionals?

You’d have an entire organization filled with star players who work together for the benefit of the team. You’d be pushing new ideas and developing new products or services.

Your group would be able to communicate through tough times and express themselves in respectfully opposing ways.

Your company culture would be undeniably strong and new recruits would feel the company bonds instantly and be led through the best ways to contribute and be a part of the team.

Leaders are the biggest contributor to company success and if you set out to continually encourage your team toward their own leadership development, you’re going to have an organization full of self-directed, team-oriented players.

Crisis Looks Like Chaos But So Does a Seed Preparing to Bloom

Effective leadership during a chaotic and challenging time can help your business sustain itself during a crisis and thrive once the dust has settled. You can use this turbulent time as an opportunity to try new methods of communication and team development. You can experiment with new ways of leadership and empowering your team members.

Why wouldn’t you use this already-uprooted moment in history as a chance to try new tactics and pivot your processes? This ISN’T business-as-usual territory.

Might as well play around with new strategies to see what sticks and how your team can grow the fastest.  You can come out the other side of this with a team of self-driven leaders who find opportunities everywhere they look.

By implementing these five strategies, you can bring your team together to build a stronger, more resilient, collaborative environment than ever before.

As the CEO, you are the person your team is looking to as an example of how to respond to a crisis.

Building a resilient, agile, adaptive team starts with YOU. There’s no app or calendar that can do it for you. Resilience is an inside job. It starts within you, when you address your own fears and work to move through them. Then, it expands to your team.

How you react will influence how they react. Even the most minute statements or behaviors will impact your teams’ response. You need to maintain a sense of perspective, stay calm, and be an example of the resiliency you want your team to respond with.

This includes both what you say and what you don’t say. Communication goes beyond the words we speak or write. Your team hears the things that are left unsaid, they read between the lines, and they watch how your actions line up with your words. Be deliberate so that your team knows what you expect from them and that you are a partner through the storm.

Adaptability and agileness are traits of teams who communicate and collaborate well. How you foster these traits before and during sudden and dramatic changes will determine your ability to weather the storm and even thrive during a crisis. You won’t get through this alone, your whole team needs to be a part of the solution.

Here are the three most important things your team needs to hear from you during a crisis:

#1) “It’s Okay.”

We’re all human. Retain that human element of yourself. Don’t just push to keep working as normal, ignoring the current crisis. This will turn your team off because you are clearly out-of-touch with reality.

Acknowledge the situation for what it is. Be patient. Be understanding. Often, crises force us to act under pressure – and fast. We won’t always have all the information needed to make smart choices so we do the best we can with what we have. Be humble and show your team that you are doing what it takes to navigate the challenge as best you can and that there will be adjustments along the way.

Everyone responds to crisis, stress, and trauma in different ways. As a leader, you need to give your team a safe space to experience their version of events. Some employees will try to ignore their own emotional reactions to the crisis by burying themselves in their work. Then they’ll burn out and need to reset. Some will shut down at the beginning and need a push-start.

No matter how they react to the crisis, it’s your job to communicate to them that their emotions are okay, they’re normal, we’ll work through them and come out stronger on the other side. Those teams that weather the storm best, are flexible and bend to the wind rather than trying to stand firm only to be toppled over.

#2) “We’re a Team.”

Especially during crisis situations, we need community more than ever. Demonstrate to your team that you are just that – a team. You work together to overcome obstacles. Share the projects being undertaken across different facets of the company and show how those efforts will impact the organization as a whole. You are all tackling this together.

You need to show that you are an active part of the team – not a higher-up who is removed and shielded from the situation. As the leader, you need to be the one taking action and initiative. The act of delaying and not making a decision is always worse – logistically and emotionally.

Once a decision has been made, participate proactively in its completion. Be involved, be present, be available for your team, and work together with them to accomplish tasks.

Relationships are the strongest indicator of employee happiness. The relationships your team has amongst each other are important but the bonds between managers and their reports are the most critical. Strengthen these ties especially during times of crisis to build resilience, collaborative environments, and security for your team.

Reminding your team that their contributions to the results are appreciated and essential is important. You need to show them – daily – that their work matters. People who feel like they’re part of something bigger and delivering on more impactful projects will be happier and more effective.

#3) “We Take Care of Each Other.”

Again, this is another reason strong relationships are so important.

Taking care of your team means not just taking care of your own projects, but lending a helping hand to others. It means customizing support to best suit the team member in need.

Perhaps a coworker is experiencing a more challenging home life with their three kids as a single parent. You can offer help in the form of hiring childcare and/or giving extra time to complete the task or reassigning it entirely to someone who volunteers to take on the extra responsibility.

Take your team’s emotional states into serious consideration and share with them your genuine concern. Help where you can and be available to talk to about logistical challenges as well as emotional ones. This shows the utmost respect you have for your employees.

To be a true leader, you need to be more than a boss. You lead by example and by being an active participant in the process. Your people need to see that you’re human, you’re resilient, you’re flexible, and you’re dedicated to the team. If they see this from you, you’re sure to receive it from them in spades.

The Right Conversations Will Improve Employee Satisfaction & Coordination

In a crisis, most companies merely want to survive. With the right tools and systems, your organization can do more. Effective leadership will improve coordination by virtue of proper communication, relationships, and expectation-setting.

If you reinforce these three key statements and remind your team that everything is okay, you’re all part of a team, and you all take care of each other, you can come through the storm stronger than before. Your company can thrive during a global pandemic or any coming economic crisis.

The key piece in determining this success is in how your leaders LEAD.

Lead by example.

Lead with empathy.

Lead with strength.

Lead with teamwork and relationships.

Lead with humility.

While a global pandemic coupled with an economic uncertainty is an unprecedented crisis, there’s no shortage of other forms of disruption that can – and will – occur during your time as a business leader.

Learning how to lead in a crisis is not a course you take in college. It’s not a continuing education training offered at some workshop. You’re thrown off-kilter, you’re forced to communicate in new ways, to navigate new challenges. Even if your company was proactive enough to create an Emergency Plan, each time you have to use it, you have to refine it to fit the current conditions.

It’s something you have to tackle proactively, or, in many cases, learn on the go.

Business leaders are having to step up their game during COVID-19 and it’s likely you’re among those who have yet to face a challenge of this magnitude.

This is far from over. The longer it continues, the more impact the crisis will have on your team and your business performance.

We want to provide you with a guide, a crash-course, if you will, in leading during a crisis.

These are the five most important questions you need to be able to answer to pass the test:

#1) Am I Acknowledging the New Changes Your Team Has Been Thrown Into?

One of the biggest mistakes managers and business leaders can make is failing to outwardly acknowledge the challenges facing your team during a crisis.

Yes, we all know we’re facing a crisis. Yes, it should be obvious. But you still have to SAY it to your team and verbally acknowledge the difficulties you are all facing.

Showing your team that you are aware and empathetic of their sudden work/life shift makes them feel seen and heard. Failing to do so may lead your team to feel overlooked, ignored, and, eventually, resentful.

This simple action can shift your team’s thoughts from negative to positive. From pessimistic to hopeful. From tired to motivated. Sharing positive thoughts, gratitude, empathy, and understanding will breed more of this in your team.

#2) Am I Actively Focusing on Building and Maintaining Rapport and Relationships?

When we’re in survival mode, it’s easy to forget about those who are not in our immediate vicinity. Unfortunately, your team is no longer in that local circle.

As a result, it can be easy to let those relationships slide and focus more on what needs to get done TODAY and RIGHT NOW – and rarely do employee relationships fall into this narrow category. If this is the case, you’re heading into a stressful spiral that can easily be avoided.

Strong relationships with managers, specifically, allow team members to feel secure and valued. During a crisis, security can be all but lost. When everything feels out of control, having a strong community around you makes your team feel like an actual team – not just a handful of folks working on similar projects.

#3) Am I Communicating More Frequently and More Transparently?

In a crisis, less is not more when it comes to communication. More is more and you need to find the ways your team communicates most effectively. Regular and thorough communication can lift the stress of the unknown, it makes your team feel like they’re in the loop, and it ensures that everyone is on the same page.

Prioritize transparency. Find the information that is accurate and relevant and share it with your team by all channels possible. Hearing information once is unlikely to leave a lasting impact so sharing it multiple times in different ways is more effective.

I recommend a mix of communication styles and platforms.

Video meetings give you that face-to-face time that is so vital in truly understanding someone else and building those relationships we talked about earlier.

Regular text communication whether through email, Slack, text, or through a messaging service is a quick and efficient way to share.

Voice calls can also quickly clear up otherwise muddy waters.

A few things to keep in mind for each of these communication methods:

• Video conferencing is novel but can suck up time and energy quickly. Keep your meetings short and sweet so your team doesn’t lose enthusiasm for them.
• Text is great but lacks the tone and body language of other methods. Always assume the best intentions of others and if something has the potential to be misconstrued in the faceless, voiceless channel, pick a different avenue to communicate that need.
• Phone calls, like video calls, can get out of hand quickly and a lot of your team members may resent them. Keep them short and sweet, more like a walkie-talkie conversation rather than a big long, reconnect-with-your-long-lost-cousin conversation.

#4) Am I Aware of External Forces Impacting My Team’s Overall Wellness?

Each crisis is going to throw new curveballs your way. During the initial wave of COVID-19 we’re seeing schools shut down, communities lock up, and grocery store stock dwindle. These have minimal impact on your office (except, of course, that everyone is working from home all of a sudden) and yet they have a massive impact on your team.

External forces are always vying your team’s attention and during a crisis, they scream louder. You need to be cognizant of these factors and express to your team your empathy surrounding them. Work together to find solutions to those external factors that disrupt the most and patiently navigate the rest as a unified force.

It’s important to realize that your team is under a huge amount of emotional stress on top of their regular work challenges. Do what you can to reduce this stress – even if the only thing you can really do is acknowledge that it is there.

Leaders need to understand – and accept – that they can’t control everything. We need to instead focus on creating a semblance of routine and organization so that your team knows what is expected of them and what they can expect from others. This will shift and pivot but having some order in their work will help reduce the overall disorder they’re facing for the rest of their lives.

#5) Do I Have a Clear Vision for the Future?

Pre-crisis, your future goals may have been laid out as many as five or ten years.

During a crisis, sometimes all you can do is see the day in front of you. And that’s okay.

You need to stay focused on the business’s vision and adjust daily to marry the demands of the moment with the needs of tomorrow.

Your team is reacting based on your actions. If you’re scattered and incoherent, the work they produce will be too. If you’re patient, understanding, and hard-working, they will emulate that.

Express appreciation for where your team is now and the work they are doing to get your company where it needs to go. Keep the team motivated, but don’t put the pressure of the organization’s future on their shoulders.

Balance adjusting the sails to the day’s winds to stay on the path to your goals. Focusing on the future while rooted in the present can be just the guiding force your team needs. It can also give back that sense of control and predictability they have lost during the crisis.

Be deliberate and empathetic in addressing these five critical questions.

An unexpected disruption is the ultimate learn-on-the-job skill and how you navigate tumultuous situations can make or break your organization and your team’s trust.

Take care of your people and the work will take care of itself.

Times of crisis lead to unforeseen challenges and one of the biggest hurdles CEOs and business leaders are facing right now is the unprecedented levels of remote work needing to be managed.

There’s no real playbook for going from leading an in-house to a remote team nearly overnight.

As with any sizable shift like what we are experiencing now, this comes with its own growing pains. Communications with your clients or suppliers along with internal dialogue, project management, meetings, and all of the daily tasks are now being handled in a new way. Your team is fighting to regain a semblance of normality and control while still getting their work done, but in a brand new way.

I want to share seven of the most common mistakes we see leaders make when managing a remote team so that you can avoid making them (or redirect if they’re already being made) and set your team up for success.

Mistake 1: Trying to Glide Into Business-As-Usual Without a Rest or Reset

Even if your industry isn’t directly impacted by the crisis, your team is reeling from the effects – perhaps even unknowingly.

You need to take some time to reset your own mindset and then those of your team before trying to return to regular levels of productivity. The first thing you need to do is get a clear idea of where you’re standing. Get a lay of the land in the new world of remote work and how your organization fits into it.

Be patient with the output of your team and your managers as they maneuver the changes. Ignoring the impact and expecting everyone to perform as they would in-office immediately is a recipe for failure and will breed distrust amongst your employees.

Give yourself and your people the time and space to get their bearings. Then navigate through the changes as a unified force.

Be flexible with new ways of doing the same work and new systems and timelines based on everyone’s work-from-home needs.

Mistake 2: Not Setting Your Team Up for Success

In order to perform its duties, your team needs the right tools. These are easy enough to manage when the team is centrally located in your office, but abrupt changes causing the entire company to work remotely? That’s a different story.

Each employee will need different tools in order to be successful in working in the same role from a new location. These tools will not just be based on their work requirements, but also their personalities. Whether this is something simple like improved WiFi or cell signal, remote access to servers, communication platforms like Slack or Zoom, or more robust project management technology, the tools will differ based on access and needs.

You have systems that worked previously, so, by all means, start with what you have, but also be open to augmenting as necessary. The processes and tools you perfected for in-office use may not work as well in the new remote environment. Be open to testing and adopting new technologies so your team can function at its highest level.

Mistake 3: Ignoring the Importance of Rapport, Relationships & Company Culture

In an office, there are ample opportunities for small talk and relationship-building. When working from home, these small-but-important relationship interactions need to be intentional to keep team bonds strong and morale high.

The success of the company depends on the employees within the company. Keep a finger on the emotional connection of your staff through strong relationships. Strong relationships are built on trust and authenticity. Especially between coworkers, the human aspect of work is key. You didn’t hire a bunch of robots, let their personalities and unique lives shine through.

The relationship with the primary manager is the biggest contributor to employee engagement. Make sure this bond is solid. Having strong ties with their manager can give your employees a sense of job security and faith that their work is valued. Especially in times of crisis, you want staff to feel appreciated.

Company culture isn’t built on ping pong tables and kegerators. It’s built on mutual respect, trust, playfulness, and the relationships between staff. These relationships are built through intentional interaction.

Mistake 4: Not Communicating Enough or Effectively

It’s easy to let regular conversations slide when everyone is working remotely. It’s easy to make assumptions about what’s being done, how, and when.

When it comes to communicating across a fully-remote team, less is not more. More is more and more is better.

Encourage your team to share how they’re feeling and what’s working and what isn’t. Talk about each project and task in detail, even if you’d glaze over it in-person. When we’re working from different places, we need to spend more time making sure we’re on the same page.

Having open lines of communication will lead to better job satisfaction and potentially innovative solutions as new problems arise from the shift.

Mistake 5: Prioritizing Productivity Over Job Satisfaction

Happy employees produce more and better work.

During a crisis, the true reasons your employees took the job with your company will come into play. Satisfaction looks like different things to people with different priorities. It can also come in handy to know some of the intricacies of each employee’s personality.

Knowing what each team member needs to feel motivated, will help you deliver on those needs. Staff who feel like they’re making an impact and are part of something bigger than themselves will bring their best. Take time to figure out what makes each team member tick. This is more critical now than ever.

Mistake 6: Ignoring the Impact Home & Family Life Have on Work

Especially when working from home, personal life can have a significant impact on your people’s work output.

It’s important to be aware of this and empathetic to all the personal stressors that may impact your team’s performance. Children are out of school and not everyone has a partner or a babysitter who can wrangle the kids. Someone in the family – whether in the same home or states away – may have come down with COVID-19 and that employee may be distracted with concerns about their health. Being stuck in one space, either alone or with roommates or family, can wear on a person.

Ignoring the impacts of home-life will breed resentment and your staff will lose trust when you only focus on work and productivity.

Support your team in taking the time they need to secure a stable and comfortable home environment.

Mistake 7: Focusing on What You Need Vs. What You Have

It’s easy to get stuck on what needs to be done and to obsess over your team’s work output. During a crisis, when it feels like everything is out of your control, you may feel like the only thing you can influence is results.

If you find yourself obsessing and nitpicking over what isn’t happening, take a step back. Notice what your team is doing right now despite the chaos. Always come back to gratitude when you feel yourself spinning out. If you’re stressed about production, your team will feel it even if you don’t say anything specific.

Spend time acknowledging the wins of your team, including creative solutions and excellent work that is already being produced. Not only will this calm your own nerves, but it will also boost morale and energize your people.

Focusing on what you do have, what is going well, and what you’re proud of will keep you and your team revved for the next project.

Transition Into Remote Work Smoothly

By avoiding and correcting for these seven mistakes, your team will feel valued and motivated like never before. You’ll be able to build and maintain a strong company culture and ensure engagement and productivity.

Each of these mistakes and their solutions feeds into each other. Appreciating your employees and their work – publicly and privately – will lead to stronger bonds and better output.

Acknowledging the unique challenges placed on each team member by the crisis and giving everyone space and tools they need to adjust will build trust and confidence.

If you take care of your people, the work will take care of itself.

Need help addressing the needs of your team now?