How To Sustain Your Energies, Motivation And Performance Through Tough Times

The deepest reservoir of energy comes when what we’re doing is contributing to our being

In the face of a protracted period of economic challenge and uncertainty, leaders are going to need to find new and enterprising ways to keep themselves and their teams motivated to battle through. In that we’ve been through over a year of the pandemic, people’s energies, mental health and motivation have already been strained. And, for leaders, this will become an ever more pressing and strategic problem as the hardships and problems stretch out.

Even for those lucky enough to work in a company with positive results through this pandemic, the issue of staff motivation remains crucial because the impact of the pandemic has been all-encompassing and has touched everyone on a personal level. Your business may be doing well, but at a minimum your customers will have been impacted. More dire, your employees will inevitably know people who are not doing so well, whether it’s their parents, friends or kids.

Leaders have had a habit of living in some form of ivory tower, entrenched in the day-to-day grind of headquarter meetings, but away from the realities of the terrain. Even if leaders can read about or intellectually grasp the level of trauma, they are typically far removed from the real challenges. Given today’s prolonged isolation and the probability that remote work will become a bigger feature of the future of work, leaders will have to make some serious adjustments.

When we continue to hear calls for greater transparency and authenticity, the common thread for leaders is that they will need to bring themselves more plentifully to work. As a result, it is imperative for you, as leaders, to be more acutely self-aware on three levels: (a) your sense of self; (b) your own energy levels, and (c) your willingness and ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of your teammates and colleagues. I learned in the early years of my career that leaders were expected not only to provide the vision, but to be the Chief Energisers and to oversee the execution of the strategy. In today’s context, leaders need to act differently. Where the climate for business is likely to stay tough, as leader, you will need to dig in to assess yourself, better understand your intrinsic motivators and gauge your own energy levels on a regular basis. In doing so, you can be more intentional about what, how and when you’ll need to recharge your own batteries before attending to the team in an appropriate manner. Once you’ve learned to listen to your own emotions and energies, you’ll be more present and adept at understanding your colleagues’ thoughts and feelings.

Being strategic is always important, but when the times get tough, there’s no choice. As a key principle, leaders will need to use their limited resources to best effect. These resources include most emphatically your people and time. Your role – especially in remote working conditions – is to be a steward of your team’s time and energy. It may seem unwarranted to hammer on about being strategic, but it is a much-overlooked role to make sure that the strategy is well understood and shared throughout the organization. With decentralized teams, it’s even more important to reinforce the strategy and to keep people on track as the supervision is now diffused with less frequent informal updates. Not only must the team optimize their resources against the plan, it is also important that the team feel that what they are doing matters. At a first level, this entails ensuring that everyone knows how they are contributing to the company’s success. Secondly, and increasingly important, people want to know that what the company does matters at a higher level than purely satisfying the bottom line and remunerating shareholders. During this sanitary -- and existential -- crisis, many more people are re-evaluating what matters and are seeking to do things that are meaningful.

When executives talk about people being their most precious resource, I tend to hear the eyes rolling. The perceived gap between what they say and do saps energy. What counts is whether their people believe and feel that they are contributing, that their voice is being heard and that have the agency to be the best versions of themselves.

Every company is filled with people busily working. It’s the nature of busy-ness. A lot of doing.  But, the deepest reservoir of energy comes when what we’re doing is contributing to our being, at a personal level. That’s when the individuals in your team are bounding from their bed, working with a steely self-driven determination and feeling that what they’re doing is worthwhile. When work is fulfilling and you feel that you are, in some small way, contributing to make the world a bit better, then you’ll more readily tap into your discretionary energy. That goes first and foremost for you, the leader. Spreading that sense of belonging and purpose throughout the organization is what it means to be a custodian of their time and energy. In doing so, you elevate the debate, boost the energy and solidify the team’s sense of cohesion.