As a Leader, Your Role is to Adjust the Temperature in the Room
We are well into the third year of a COVID impacted environment, and its toll on people continues to grow. There is no new normal that we can casually fall into. In fact, in many ways, additional concerns and pressures have crept into daily life. There are new financial concerns with inflation reaching record levels, world events continue to be tenuous and concerning, there are daily strings of domestic news that create tension, frustration, and fear. Everyone is being exposed to multiple stressors. In our retail environment, customers can be more challenging than ever. The business climate is pressed with staffing issues, worker relationships, sales volatility, out of synch supply chains, and more. In a nutshell, we are in a hot room and everyone feels the heat.
Understanding the situation at any given moment becomes increasingly important for leaders to manage what could already be seen as a tense situation. Adjusting the proverbial temperature in the room becomes another touchpoint that must be managed to maintain productivity, effectiveness, and in some cases, civility. Having a group of people at each other’s throats is rarely a recipe for highly productive, innovative, thinking.
At the same time, ensuring that critical issues are being addressed with appropriate urgency is also necessary in a fast-paced environment requiring rapid response and change. Leaders must continue to stay connected to which levers can be pulled based on the circumstances and available resources. It is a constant feathering of the accelerator and brake to manage the ‘temperature’ of the team and your overall business landscape.
As a leader, we must be both the thermometer and the thermostat (to continue our analogy). We do not have the luxury of being just a thermometer to report the temperature. We must anticipate the heat or cool and make the corrections to support the team. So, what can you do as a leader to, first, recognize the thermostat readings in a room? And, second, what actions can you take to adjust?
Leaders aren’t therapists and shouldn’t try to be. But people are coping with collective grief and trauma on a global scale, which means leaders have to learn and exercise new skills. 1
Stay connected to your people
While leaders may not be therapists, they do need to be in constant contact with their team to stay connected to everyone’s feelings. This can be the equivalent of ‘reading the room’ and ‘taking the temperature’. You may not be able to answer every question or solve every problem, but knowing how people are feeling currently is required of every leader right now. Most feel pushed to their brink, especially in ‘hot’ moments. Helping them to see beyond that moment in time can help to bring the temperature and pressure gauge down. Knowing when they need a little push is also important. Sometimes overwhelm can also manifest in paralysis. Work may stop or get pulled back because they are unsure of how to react or what to do in complex situations. ‘Warming them up’ to the next step and action to take also ensure that everyone is playing their part in pushing the business forward.
Identify options for relief
Taking time to review and understand all the things someone may be facing can be a good way to not only see everything at one time, but also understand it all in context. Just listing out the activities can be helpful for both the person you are supporting as well as for you (the leader) to see workload and activities grouped together. This allows for a better prioritization process, and possibly an elimination activity. What can be moved around on their plate, what can be pushed to later, and what can be removed. Make it a “now, later, never” discussion to help take excess pressure from the workload that may be building.
Excerpt from Harvard Business Review – Leading an Exhausted Workforce –
Stress has a cumulative impact. For the body and brain, there is no difference between deadline pressure, an argument with one’s spouse, financial worries, the dog that won’t stop barking, and the computer that keeps crashing. The patience, self-control, perspective, attentiveness, and wisdom to deal with these situations all come out of the same fund, psychologically.
And for a lot of people, that fund is in arrears. Even before the pandemic, “Americans were flirting with symptoms of burnout,” physician Lucy McBride wrote in The Atlantic, noting that we were “among the least healthy populations in wealthy countries. Diseases of despair — including depression, anxiety, PTSD, and addiction — were already rampant.” Since Covid, “every aspect of life has required added work …. we’ve had to juggle parenting, caregiving, and working without our traditional support structures.”
When you see stress levels elevating beyond healthy levels, your role has to be to identify that, and address how you can provide some relief to that pressure valve. Effectively turning down the heat in the room.
Taking care of yourself to take care of others
In many, if not most cases, you’re in that same room as your team and others you work with. If you are not prepared to help, then the temperature is going to have the same effect on you as everyone else. That will not be good for anyone.
Self-care is no longer a luxury, or something to believe is for others. It is an essential, and it is for every leader. If you do not take care of yourself, you will not be positioned to support others. That is a big part in being able to manage situations and make the decisions necessary for the circumstances you may find yourself or your team in.
Share your own ideas for how your team can engage in self-care. This may be new to them, and may also require some out of the box thinking. I would guess that very few Store Managers have ever had a District Manager advise that they should leave a little early for the day to take a walk through the park or to grab an ice cream cone with their daughter for the afternoon. But that may be precisely what is needed. Taking some pressure off, cooling the room, can help people come back with a fresh perspective and new energy to begin solving the problems they face more effectively.
There are many ways to interpret and connect the concept of ‘managing the temperature in the room’ to our business climate. It is about leading through a macro environmental feeling that your team and others are feeling at any given time. We must sense the sentiment and act accordingly. When energy needs to be applied to push for a more urgent response, then those levers must be employed. But also, understanding that when people may be at the brink of breaking, pushing harder will only aggravate the situation. Even in moments where urgency may be required, pausing, slowing everyone down, and reassessing is the wiser approach to take. No one can go full-steam ahead for an indefinite period of time. We all need breaks, we all need support, we all need to know that there are options. As leaders, our role is to be the thermostat ‘in the room’ that continues to monitor and manage situations, so everyone can be successful.
How do you stay engaged to ensure you can monitor and manage the temperature in your business?
Join other retail leaders in continuing their development journey with Effective Retail Leader.com. SUBSCRIBE today to receive leadership tips directly to your inbox and monthly newsletters that provide many tools to help further develop your leadership skills. JOIN NOW!
Photo by Moja Msanii on Unsplash