Conscious Leadership Scenario:
You’re faced with a turnaround situation in your organization. This troubled department is struggling. The morale in this division is very low. Do you slow down to figure out why the morale is low, and goals aren’t being met, let alone aren’t being set? The teams are just wandering the halls waiting for the day to end so they can go home and focus their attention in another direction. All creative focus seems to be a thing of the past.
Leadership Fail:
You walk into the situation and know that if you don’t turn this ship around and get the team tracking in the right direction your reputation in the industry will be tarnished. Everything you’ve touched throughout your career has turned to GOLD. You can start to feel your EGO take over. It’s slowly becoming more and more about you. Your timeline starts to rachet up. You start leaning hard on your Direct reports. Your mindset and subconscious communication become one of, “If you aren’t able to handle this task, we will find someone more qualified.” As time moves on your stress levels start to dictate your decision-making. Your EGO starts to rule your day.
Negative Affect on Culture and Organizational Performance:
Employee morale is a key element of any company’s culture and should be closely monitored. Workplace morale refers to the attitudes and opinions employees have about their jobs and is crucial to an organization’s success. Low employee morale will hinder a business from achieving organization-wide goals, and it can also lead to low productivity, increased employee turnover, and loss of profitability. There are several low employee morale signs to be aware of. Any one of these signs can be a direct indicator that employee morale is low and needs work.
- Poor communication with management and team
- Frequent absenteeism
- Excessive complaining over small matters
- Increased employee conflicts or fighting amongst staff
- Poor work quality
- Increased customer complaints
Conscious Leadership Solution:
The top transformational leaders use stress to their advantage. This is how they leverage stress to their advantage:
There are three distinctive ways to implement Conscious Leadership skills to use stress to your advantage. They are, “Connect with the heart, evaluate the weight of your decisions, and schedule decisions.”
#1. Connect With Your Heart.
Stress goes down when you connect to your heart. The people-pleaser in you forgets what you really want. You might stress over the approval of others, for example. Forgetting what you really want magnifies stress.
Go back to “Center Focus”. What does your heart want for:
- Team members?
- Customers?
- Yourself?
#2. Evaluate the Weight of Your Decisions.
Very few decisions are life or death, but stress makes them seem that way. Stress wants you to treat all decisions equally. Life doesn’t hang in the balance when choosing curly or steak fries. Stress wants you to forget that most decisions can be modified or undone.
Five Ways to Evaluate Decision-Weight:
- Consider long-term impact when evaluating the weight of current decisions.
- Acknowledge many options that will get the job done. There’s no perfect answer.
- Just make a decision and reel it back in if you change your mind.
- Reconnect with the big picture when small decisions seem daunting. Wandering and confusion mean you’ve lost direction.
- Delegate decisions to team members who are most impacted by the decisions.
#3. Schedule Decisions.
Stress tells you to wait. The longer it takes to decide, the more stress you experience. If you feel a little stressed about making a decision today, wait a day or two and you will feel more creative and evaluate and the different angles.
Divide Decisions Into Discrete Units:
1. In the morning gather information.
2. In the afternoon invite input from other team members.
3. Tomorrow morning – after sleeping on it – make the decision.
4. Sit with your decision for an hour or two.
5. Declare your decision to relevant people and get, “Buy-In” from your team
So, at TriSearch, we are here to help. For us, our purpose is leadership for a better world, and we are here to help you in showing up as the leader you need to be. We are here to support you globally. We are on this journey together. This is an invitation; an invitation to join us in creating a collaborative movement: the movement that is leadership for a better world.
Live2Lead/OneTribe
Travis
Vice President of US Technology Practices at 
share or leave a comment below