These are challenging times for leaders and employees. According to the Office of Personnel Management about 75,000 federal employees have accepted early buyout offers. There are also wide-ranging layoffs of probationary employees which the government Office of Personnel Management estimates at 220,000 people. And that’s just part of wave of fear that is sweeping through the workforce.
A survey by Robert Half estimates that roughly 30-percent of the U.S. workforce will seek new employment in the first half of this year. A Resume Builder survey indicates 87% of companies are expected to mandate full office returns by 2025. And that pushes against a workforce where 70% of workers feel underpaid, according to a study highlighted by Inc. Magazine.
Oh, and Artificial Intelligence, AI, is gaining traction along with a steady stream of stories about the number of jobs it will replace.
Bottom line, the people you lead are worried, deeply worried. As a leader, the way you communicate during this time may very well define your leadership. Remember, a lighthouse has its greatest value in the darkness and in a storm. And a light house shines the truth, not a motivational speech or a feel-good monologue.
Effective leadership communication isn’t just about delivering messages. It’s about creating an environment where team members feel safe discussing their concerns and ideas. If you don’t consciously create that environment, you may very well unintentionally create an environment where your people and their production spiral.
To create a productive environment in high stress times, you must be clear on where your people are emotionally, and you must help them move forward.
It helps to understand what I call the 7 Stages of Change Continuum:
1. Disbelief or denial
2. Emotional peaks
3. Uncertainty and Avoidance
4. Acceptance
5. Vision
6. Action
7. Integration
Let me take you through each stage so you can understand where your people are right now:
Disbelief or Denial
This is the stage of shock. What just happened? They did what? This feels like getting hit with an emotional taser. People can’t process a lot of information in this stage. They are stunned.
Emotional Peaks
As the impact of change settles in we tend to move toward an emotional peak: euphoria if the change is good (you just won the lottery) or fear and despair if there are massive job losses taking place.
Uncertainty and Avoidance
This is where most people get stuck in the change continuum. They fall for the trap of thinking, “I’ll never get used to this.” That thought married to fear leaves many people putting their head in the sand and avoiding even thinking about the change that is swirling all around them.
Acceptance
The first three stages are purely reactive. Acceptance begins the proactive side of the continuum. You don’t have to like the change, but you must accept it is real, it is happening. Once you do that then, and only then, are you empowered to do something about it besides merely worry.
Vision
Once you have accepted that change is or has taken place you can begin to form a vision of what you want to do about it. This is highly personal but extraordinarily empowering. This becomes your GPS destination. You must develop a vision to navigate change. What outcome do you want? One cautionary point: Your vision can’t be to go back to the way things were. You can’t do that anymore than you can go back to eight grade. You must move forward. What do you want that to look like?
Action
Once you have formed a vision, now you can begin taking productive action. Start off with a brainstorm list of all the potential actions you can take that move you in the direction of your vision. That is the key: action that moves you in the direction of your vision. The list here is nearly endless: update your resume, reach out to someone who has gone through this before, develop a strategy, learn a new skill, look for investors, get active on social media, develop clarity around your professional brand, make 10 calls a day to new prospects, etc.
After you have exhausted your brainstorm list, prioritize those actions from what to however many actions you have on your list. Here’s the key: always be working on your top priority. When you complete that, your second priority moves up.
If you want a tool that can help you do this, check out my course, The Brand Blueprint. It will help you develop both a vision and give you a tool to build your action plan. You can find it here:
Integration
If you take consistent action, focused on working on your top priority one at a time, you will not only move in the direction of your vision, but you will actually create your new reality, and that new reality will begin to feel as normal and natural as your old reality before the change happened. That’s integration.
There’s no timeline to get there. But if you follow the 7 Stages of the Change Continuum you will get there. And when you do you will be ready to handle more of life’s one constant: change.
Putting the Strategy to Work
To exercise effective influence, you must help your people recognize where they are in the continuum, and you must encourage them to take the next step in the direction of integration.
That means as a leader your messaging must evolve. You can’t just be a cheerleader.
In the first three stages of the continuum, you must demonstrate three things:
1. Transparency. Tell your people what is really happening—even if you don’t know why. Let them know this is real.
2. Empathy. Show real understanding, not pity, not outrage, not fluff. Show them you understand.
3. Direction. Point them in the direction of proactive side of the continuum. Point them in the direction of acceptance.
When your people are in the next four stages, this is where you become a lighthouse. Show your people the way.
4. Reinforce acceptance: Show them that you are dealing with reality, that this change is happening and that even if you don’t like it, you are accepting it.
5. Demonstrate vision. Show they your vision, the organizations vision. Encourage them to develop their own vision.
6. Get clear on action. What are you doing next? What should they do next? What are the priorities?
7. Integration: What will the new normal look and feel like. You don’t have to be perfect. No one can predict the future precisely, but we can know when we are heading in the right direction.
In challenging times like these, a key component to effective leadership communication is to increase the frequency of the communication and decrease the size of it.
Don’t wait until things calm down to release a 19-page white paper. Put out a one paragraph email today. Send a 60 second video. Hold a brief team meeting. Short and frequent are the keys.
In your communication, encourage input and feedback. That will help you understand where they are in the continuum and show you exactly what you need to do next to move them one step closer to integration.
I want to leave you with the image of a lighthouse in a storm. The lighthouse doesn’t give a struggling ship precise GPS coordinates. It doesn’t give the ship a long lecture. It doesn’t add to the stress and struggle of the ship. It doesn’t fight the storm for the ship. It gives the ship clear and consistent simple communication. Go in this direction. And the lighthouse trusts the ship’s captain to use his or her unique skill set to get there.
Be a lighthouse. Your people are struggling in a storm.
