How to Support Your Team through 6 Common Challenges

Key Takeaways

[Music] We've all seen the results of a team under pressure. Relationships can become dysfunctional and the work starts to suffer. We see demotivation, dips in productivity, mistakes, and drops in the quality. I want to explain what's going on when this happens and the solution. And I want to explain it using an example from my experience. I was working on a large high-profile project where everybody was working long hours and the days were getting just longer and longer. Everyone felt under pressure and that started to manifest itself as stress. But I didn't notice because I was too busy working hard until one of my senior colleagues suggested we go out for lunch. I didn't have a lot of time, but I decided it was a good idea to go out with him. Over lunch, he shared with me his concern that it had used to be a great place to work, but now it felt just miserable coming into work. And I had to admit, I had hardly noticed it because I didn't have time to notice it. But as soon as he said it, I recognized it was true and I realized immediately what was going on. On a paper napkin, I drew for him a simple diagram like this. Because there are two things that a team can pay attention to. It can pay attention to the relationships within the team and it can pay attention to the task at hand. And of course, a team that is giving a high amount of attention to both the task and the relationships is going to be a high-erforming team. It gives a lot of time to the tasks. It gives a lot of time to the relationships and therefore things get done in a harmonious and collaborative way. However, when the team is overfocused on the task because it is under a lot of pressure to succeed, it feels like a slave driving environment where you're being forced to work harder and harder and harder. And of course, under that kind of pressure, you just don't have the time to spend building and strengthening the relationships you have with the people around you. Under pressure, you become curt and short with people. You don't have time to do favors. You don't have time for idol gossip. You've got to get back to your work and get on with it. This is what had happened to us. The pressure of the looming deadlines meant we were working longer and longer hours. We were getting less and less sleep. We weren't taking proper time to eat carefully and eat well. And of course, the result was that we were starting to snipe at one another. We weren't being collaborative. We just had our eyes down and a silo mentality to get on with our own work so that we could get it done and get back at the end of the day. Of course, this isn't the only thing that goes wrong with teams. Teams can also find that there isn't enough work. And at first, that's great. We pay attention to relationships. We strengthen those relationships, and that fills our time. However, if there's not enough work for too long a period, well, we can find that those relationships start to turn toxic because we don't have a basis to build those relationships on because workplace relationships are built upon the work. So, we start to moan about the organization and we start to moan about each other. And eventually those relationships really do start to turn toxic as people find out what we've been saying about them. So it is true of course that if there is too much workload it puts a team under stress. But it is also equally true that if there isn't enough work the team is also under stress. A different sort of stress. There's a saying in English that the devil makes work for idle hands. We find things to do. And I often say that the best way to understand what's going on in a workplace is to ask yourself how you'd interpret it in a playground. And of course, kids that don't have enough to do will start to make mischief. And of course, if the relationships start to diminish, we can find ourselves very much in the bottom leftand corner of this diagram. We've gone from naval gazing, picking the fluff out of the corporate belly button, if you like, to a team that is completely rudderless without direction. There isn't enough work to do and the relationships are weak. Which means that when there is work to be done, we don't have a basis of good strong relationships to get the work done. Now, back to my example where there was too much work and relationships were starting to suffer. What I suggested we do is that we finish work early one Friday afternoon and we take some time out. We set up a barbecue on the beach and we invited the whole team there to share the barbecue and some beers. And of course at the end of the afternoon we went to the bars. We had some more beers and the next Monday morning the atmosphere around the office was tangibly different. We had started to rebuild the relationships. We remembered that we got on well with one another. We enjoyed one another's company. It was a huge and diverse team which meant that it was just a joy to work with that group of colleagues. And I would swear that by the end of the first week, we had recovered more time in increased productivity than we lost by taking the afternoon out. The team started to work well again together. Now, of course, if you've got the opposite problem and there isn't enough work, then as a team leader, your job is to find some work for your team to do to keep them occupied. Now, ideally, it is good, meaningful, worthwhile work. But if you can't find that, then find anything to keep your team occupied because if you don't, you will end up at the bottom left of the diagram completely ruleless, and you will then have to build the team back up. And of course, if you're going to do that, then the right way to do it is to start to build them up by giving them some work to do and help them to build the relationships through the work. Relationship building is not the first step in a team that has become completely rudderless. So if you find your team under pressure either because it has too much work or if it has not enough work, bear in mind this simple diagram and this simple assessment of what you need to do to move the team back to the high performance quadrant where the team is able to pay a lot of attention to both the relationships and the tasks. Under pressure, teams get stressed and team members get stressed. And therefore, as a team leader and a manager, you need to be able to spot the signs of stress and also to help them through it to move them from being stressed to feeling relaxed again and able to be productive. And that's what we're going to talk about in this video. I'm planning a whole course on stress and stress management. So, you'll need to wait for that for some of the more detailed advice. But I do want to speak briefly about how you can spot the signs of stress in your team. And the most important single sign is that something tangible changes and changes for the worse. It might be absences or people arriving late at work. It might be the type of conversations and the gossip we have starting to turn toxic. It might be more mistakes or lower quality of work. Or it might simply be people being snappish in the way they relate to one another. If you do notice these sorts of changes, then your first thought must be is the team under stress? And of course at that point you can start to look for distinctive signs of stress in individuals and in the team as a whole. And if you start to spot them, then you need to act quickly. And when you do act, there are four important things that you need to do. And there's a logical order to them as well. And the first is to try to understand the causes of the stress. And typically stress is caused by feelings of not being in control. There's a lot of things that we might not be in control of. And if you can find out what they are and then start to restore control, you'll be able to fix things. So the things to look for are feelings of not being in control of time or of workload, maybe of the physical environment. Maybe people feel that they're being put upon by the organization and are not in control of the flow of information that's coming to them and demands that are made of them. Perhaps people feel that they're being asked to do unreasonable things. There is a clash between what the organization appears to be expecting of them and their values or their expectations from the organization. So they're not in control of the culture if you like. Maybe there are poor relationships within the team or between the team and other people and therefore people don't feel in control of their relationships either. Or maybe people simply don't feel that they are in control of their lives. Too many choices are being made of them and they don't have the capability of doing the things that they want to do. assess the causes of stress and then at step two you need to address those root causes which is all about restoring control. Now where you can restore control to where it is primarily missing but sometimes that is not possible the organization may be for its own reasons exerting control on the individuals. It may be that there is a deadline that you you can't relax and therefore that might be controlling people but you can't fix it. Therefore, if that's the case, you have to give people more control in other areas. If there is a looming deadline, then give people more control about how they structure their work and how they structure their time to meet that deadline. Give them more control over the resources they can draw down. give them choices. The more control you give people, even if it's not necessarily in the area where they feel restricted, then the lighter they will feel in terms of stress. Of course, if stress has got serious, you may need, even if there is a deadline, to give people a chance to relax, to recharge their batteries, perhaps send people home early on a Friday afternoon, or do a social event with the team, something that reminds people that their well-being and relieving their feeling of stress is more important to you than anything else. And it should be because unless you can take away these causes of stress, then what's really going to happen is things will get worse and worse and worse and deadlines will be missed. Quality standards will drop and mistakes will get made. Once you've started to address the root causes of stress, it's time to move to step three and to deal with that in parallel, which is to treat individual cases with compassion. Speak to each individual. Find out how the stress is affecting them and to the degree that it is affecting them. You need to help them to find their way through. If people ask for more time, if they ask for more resources, if they ask for help in any way or perhaps favors, do the best you can to accommodate them. Be compassionate as well. simply trying to find solutions for people isn't always the way to relieve stress. Sometimes people just need someone to listen to them and to hear their their troubles and for them to unbburden themselves. So make yourself available for that. And finally, step four. Once you've started to properly deal with stress and you can see things getting back to the way they should be, it's time to think about the long term to find ways to build resilience in your team so that stress has less of an effect on people. This is partly about giving your team more control over its work as a whole and setting up processes and procedures which reduce the stress imposed upon the team. But it's also about giving your team the resources to make themselves individually resilient. Team resilience of course is about having enough capacity to take up the slack. But there's very rarely the opportunity to have significant additional capacity within a team. So it must be about giving people the personal resilience, the extra capacity to take on more work if they need to. This is about helping people to understand the importance of rest and relaxation and good food and good exercise. Making sure that they have the routines in their life that will make them as resilient as possible to stress. And it's also about giving the team the routines to talk about stresses, to talk about workload, and to talk about how they're feeling so that you can pick up the early warning signs of stress before they start to affect team performance at all. Without a doubt, as a team leader and a team manager, helping your street, helping your team to cope with stress and to overcome it and to restore themselves to a resilient status is a core part of your [Music] role. Change can be stressful, but it also brings with it its own distinctive challenges. And with change an almost constant part of most modern workplaces, the ability to help and support your team through change is fast becoming a core skill for any manager and team leader. In this video, I want to look at what you can do to support your team through change. Of course, one of the most useful things you can do if you're going to support your team through change is to understand how change works. But that is, I'm afraid, outside of the scope of this video. So, I will put some links below in the description about how change works. And that will put into context the simple guidance I'm going to give you in this video because it's drawn from a deep understanding of how change works. And if you've seen any of my videos on that, then you'll recognize the steps which I'll highlight as we go through. Step one starts with the recognition that when change starts to happen, people don't often see the need for it. And therefore, to a certain extent, they deny it's even happening. So, of course, step one is about helping people to see the need for change. The reality is that most people aren't aware of the drivers for the changes that are going to happen in their organization. They haven't seen the warning signs that senior management have seen. They're not aware of changes in legislation or changes in technology that are going to affect their work. And therefore when the organization starts to impose changes their first response is why I don't see why we need to change. Therefore you need to help them see what those drivers are. Otherwise they will simply resist the change by refusing to engage with it. Make it clear to people what's causing the change and why it's a a totally responsible thing for the organization to do to create these changes to respond to those external drivers. Now once people recognize that change is necessary and it is going to happen, their responses tend to be emotional. They tend to get angry or upset or frustrated or bitter or simply scared. So step two of course is to help people to deal with their emotional responses to change. And the worst thing you can do is to say, "Look, there's no point in getting angry. Don't get upset. It's not my fault. It's going to happen anyway." Because as soon as you tell someone not to get upset, not to get angry, not to be frustrated, not to be scared, it just amplifies their response. That is the wrong approach. The right approach, of course, is to give people the time to be angry, to be upset, to be scared, to be frustrated. So make time to listen to them. Let them express their anger. Let them express their upset, their frustration, and their fears. The more they talk through what's going on in their mind and in their emotions, the more they'll be able to process it and move out of the emotional stage into a more resilient, more rational stage when they can engage properly with the changes that are actually happening. Now people are rational. The third step is to help people to understand exactly what changes are going to happen and the reasons why they are appropriate. This is about finding all of your skills in explaining things and to listening to people as they express the bits they don't understand and respond patiently to help them to understand fully. Once they start to understand the changes, their next concern will be what about me? So step four is to help them to explore the implications of the changes for them. How will the changes affect their particular situation and what are the options that they have going forward? Explain to them the benefits for them. Explain to them the things that won't change or won't change very much and be absolutely scrupulously honest about any disadvantages that the changes will create for them. Some people will come to embrace the changes. They will see that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages or they will see that it doesn't make a great deal of difference to them and they will be fine with it. They will explore what it really means to them and then they will come to accept the changes. Others however will recognize that the changes overall will disadvantage them. Now they have a difficult decision to make and your role at step five is to help them to make that decision by giving them whatever guidance support that the organization offers to help them to make that choice and to help them to thrive beyond the changes and that choice may be a very difficult one. It may be to step away to disengage with the organization. The worst thing that can happen of course is that you end up with people staying in the organization but feeling bitter and frustrated by the changes that have happened and resentful of the people who made them happen. So we can think about step five as being supporting the people who want to stay with training, support, guidance, coaching and mentoring and step six as providing the support for the people who decide that the changes are not right for them and they need to make a bigger more challenging decision. If the changes really aren't right for them, you need to help them to see that and explore what their alternatives really are. And often when organizations do make substantial changes, they do make allowance for this and recognize that they will have to help people through those changes. Change can be a hugely stressful time for everyone. And don't underestimate the impact it will have on you. Not just on your need to support other people and the effects that will have on you, but on the fact that you yourself are going to be going through the same changes as your team will be going through. The only advantage you may have is that you might find out about it just a little bit earlier. But you will be working through the same emotional responses and thought processes as they are. With change as common as it is, you need to understand this stuff and you need to be prepared to support your team. And these six simple stages will help you do that. Teams don't always run smoothly. You can get conflict within your team and conflict between your team and other teams or outsiders. And as a team leader, it can therefore fall to you to support your team through this conflict. So in this video, I want to look at three ways that you can act to support your team through conflict. [Music] There are three broad roles that you can play in supporting your team through conflict. And as we go through them, you'll find that you will have an increasing level of involvement in finding the resolution. And the first of these roles is what we might call the conflict coach. As a conflict coach, you're helping people to assess their situation for themselves, to assess it objectively, and to identify the right solutions for them, to help them to put together their ideas and make their plans, and to reflect on how the conflict is evolving. Your role as a conflict coach is to help people to understand what's going on and to make choices that will work for them. The second role you can take is that of a mediator. The job of a mediator is to help the conflicting parties to properly hear one another to engage properly and as far as possible to make objective assessments about what they believe and what the other party believes. It's partly about keeping people apart when the conflict is too hot and it's partly about bringing them together so that they can work on resolving it. A mediator is someone who helps facilitate the process of resolving the conflict. The third role is that of arbitrator. An arbitrator also works with both parties to the conflict. But the difference is that an arbitrator needs to work on understanding the situation for themsel. They need to be able to listen to both parties and weigh up the strengths and the weaknesses of each perspective to assess them against objective evidence and to start to see their way through to a fair resolution. Once you've determined what a fair resolution might be, perhaps even the right solution to the conflict, your next role is to work with all the parties to help them to recognize that that is the appropriate way to go. Ideally, you want to win over all the parties to the conflict to your proposed resolution. But often the role of the arbitrator can be to enforce a resolution on the parties. Whether you're acting in the role of a conflict coach, mediator, or arbitrator, there is a fourth role that you must always play. And that is the role of referee. And the role of referee is to make sure that people play by the rules. In this case, we're talking about the rules of courtesy and respect. respecting one another and respecting the cultural norms within which people are operating. And this can be particularly difficult if the parties in conflict have a different cultural background. So in order to act as referee properly, you need to start to appreciate the different cultural backgrounds and what the cultural norms are for each individual because sometimes the conflict can arise from a mismatch in their understanding of one another. You may agree or you may disagree with one or other of the parties to the conflict. The primary responsibility you have though is to ensure that right or wrong they express their views in ways that are respectful and appropriate. You must not allow any of them to start to behave in ways that are disrespectful, abusive or discriminatory or in any other way inappropriate. And if they do, you've got to reflect your disapproval by offering an appropriate sanction for that. You must certainly call out all behaviors which are inappropriate and are leading to an escalation of the conflict based on behaviors rather than on an objective assessment of the situation. Even if you choose not to get involved in the conflict yourself as coach or mediator or arbitrator, I don't believe as a team leader you can ever duck the role of referee. If you do choose to get involved, then decide the right level of your involvement. The minimum involvement is to support the parties personally in understanding their own situation and making their own decisions. that can rise to facilitating the conversation or even to taking a position yourself and perhaps enforcing [Music] it. A big part of the way that I see my role as a team leader is supporting the development of skills, knowledge, and the talents of the people in my care. I need to support my team for learning. And that's what we'll talk about in this video. To me, supporting your team for learning means seven things. First, get to know and understand each person and their priorities, their talents, their knowledge, their enthusiasm, their goals, their objectives, their aims in their career. This is about making time to get to know your team members as individuals so that you have the basis to provide the support for their learning going forward. Secondly, allocate work that meets people's needs, their need to grow and develop. This means allocating the right work, but also making sure that the work that you allocate them stretches them just a little bit in new directions or further in the direction that they want to go. Work that doesn't stretch them will not increase their learning, their knowledge, and their skill levels. Third, create opportunities for people to learn. You can create formal opportunities and informal opportunities. Formal opportunities are things like training courses and formal work shadowing or placements. Informal opportunities include things like reading, conversations, seminars, and the opportunity to try out new stuff, delegating extra work. The fourth way to support your team for learning is to create or to commission a training needs analysis for your team. This is a survey of what each individual needs and indeed of what the team needs as a whole. The training, the coaching, the support, the development that will help your team and your team members to become better at what they do. It is a formal document and it is usually lodged with the human resources or personnel department of your organization to help them to commission the right training and the right interventions to support the teams throughout the organization. For your team, you need to work with your personnel colleagues to build a plan to fulfill the training needs and to fight for the budget to do that. Sometimes you will find that individuals within your team have needs that don't fit within the wider pattern for the organization. So you have to advocate for them to find support for them to do the training that they need so that you get the better team. My fifth form of support comes from you. You need to be prepared to guide to mentor and to coach your team members. Fundamentally, as a team leader, that's your job. And by guide, mentor, and coach, I mean three specific types of intervention. A guide gives support and nudges and tips and little bits of advice. A mentor shares their experience. It's a much more robust and rigorous approach than simply helping out from time to time. A mentor will meet with the person whom they mentor and discuss what's coming up and share their ideas and their experiences to help the other person to learn from the benefit of the mistakes that you made. A coach on the other hand will listen to the challenges of the person that they're supporting with the intention of asking good questions to help them to understand their situation better and to ask further good questions to help them to find the best solution or the right way forward or a new thing to try. So the difference between a guide and a mentor on the one hand and a coach on the other is that guides and mentors to different degrees provide their own advice whereas a coach listens, asks questions and helps the person to find their own solution. The sixth thing you need to do is to be prepared constantly to give high quality feedback at appropriate times and in an appropriate way as a means of supporting reflective learning. We learn best when we understand our own experiences and the implications that they have. And of course, a good quality leader will be able to help me to do that. And finally, I would say your seventh and last of my list responsibilities is recognition. To recognize and to celebrate the learning that is taking place in your team, both for individuals and for the team as a whole. This will reinforce that learning and reinforce the commitment to it. As a team leader, your team's learning and development and growth is your responsibility because an important part of the role of a team leader is to prepare the team to manage when you, the team leader, leave. This means having one or more members of the team that are ready to step up. And those that are ready to step up, but perhaps don't succeed in competing for your place need to be ready to take on another role. The team leader that leaves their team in the same condition that they found it has not been a leader. They've simply been a custodian of stagnation. [Music] The final challenge for me in managing remote teams is to take care of the welfare and the well-being of your team members. And it's particularly important because the more common option of a quiet chat is off the table. You can't do that when you are remote. And it's also much harder remotely to spot those subtle warning signs. So what can you do? I think that looking after people's welfare and well-being is the toughest part of leading a virtual team, especially when people start to feel themselves under pressure. And I don't have any easy answers because there aren't any. I do however have seven simple tips to help you. The first is to remain observant. Take every opportunity to look to see if you can spot any changes in behavior, in demeanor, in performance. Some of these will be insignificant. So don't jump on every tiny change. But as soon as you start to see a pattern, as soon as you start to be suspicious, it is possible that changes can be significant. Tip two is to monitor team morale as well. Look at the way that people interact with one another. Look out for the signs of praying tempers or relationships breaking down. Third, constantly assess the load that you're placing on team members and the expectations you're putting on them. Are they reasonable and are they having adverse effects on individuals? And fourth, take a real interest in every individual. Schedule regular onetoone conversations. Make sure you allow plenty of time and make sure both you and they are in a position where you can talk confidentially if you need to. Start it in a light-hearted manner unless you have a reason not to, but be very sensitive to signals that you need to go a little bit deeper and change the tone of the conversation to a more serious one. Fifth, ask people to raise concerns. Obviously, invite them to raise concerns about themselves with you, but also ask them confidentially to raise concerns they might have about their colleagues. Don't discuss those concerns beyond getting the facts. Don't make any commitments to them, but build up a picture that will allow you to intervene if and when you see it is appropriate. Sixth, keep well-being on the agenda for your regular team checkpoint meeting. In every meeting, just ask if everybody's okay, if everybody's got any concerns, if there's anything on the horizon that people think may affect the welfare of the team or concerns them that it's going to be a stressor that you need to be aware of. And if in doubt, act proactively to head off any stressful situations or concerns that you might have about well-being. Be generous in helping people out. Offer people time off. Make it easy for people to ask for help when they need it. Because any loss in productivity that you have by being proactive in inviting someone to leave work early or take a personal day is going to be a far less disruption than if stress becomes an issue. It can affect morale. It can affect performance. It can have long-term impacts on the availability of team members. Plus, of course, if team members are aware that you have their welfare at the forefront of your mind and of your concerns, then they will trust you as a leader and they will work that much harder and more diligently for you. Contrast it with the opposite. If people really don't think that their welfare is of interest to you and that you're not prepared to go out of your way to relieve them of stress or to make life easy for them, then not only are they going to get more stressed, but they're going to feel they owe you less loyalty. I started this set of eight challenges of remote team working with trust because it is absolutely fundamental and is what everything else is built upon. And I've ended it with welfare and well-being because this is the capstone. It is the one thing that if it goes wrong, everything will fall apart. So, make everybody's well-being your primary concern. Please do give a thumbs up if you value this video. There'll be loads more great management courses content, so please do subscribe to the channel and of course hit that notification bell so you don't miss any of it. I look forward to seeing you in the next video and in the meantime, keep learning.