During an Activation bootcamp, a cohort of leaders workshopped the challenges they were having reducing their teams’ overwhelm. Here are just some of the early solutions they implemented.
During an Activation bootcamp, a cohort of leaders workshopped the challenges they were having reducing their teams’ overwhelm. Here are just some of the early solutions they implemented.
Modern Mentor is hosted by Rachel Cooke. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Hey, it’s Rachel Cooke, your Modern Mentor. I’m the founder of Lead Above Noise—a firm specializing in activating workplaces. Helping you discover ways to amplify performance AND employee engagement. Together. We do leader bootcamps, keynotes, and Pulse checks. Just let us know what you need.
OK. By now you know I have a crush on this idea of Activation – this finding and implementing of simple strategies to help our teams deliver great work, develop new skills, connect with team, purpose, and customer – and to thrive – to feel well, recognized, and balanced.
So when Edward – a senior leader in a professional services firm – called a few months ago asking for help with a “911 situation” I was pretty sure Activation would find its way into the conversation.
Spoiler – it did. Edward was feeling real concern for the reality at work. His teams seemed straight up overwhelmed – they were all running around frantically, in and out of meetings, dropping balls, missing deadlines, arguing, and generally just failing to smile.
“Results, culture, it’s all feeling bad right now. And I know our team leaders mean well. But they too are overwhelmed, and frankly not really sure what to do. We’ve gotta turn this ship around.”
So we came in and ran an Activation bootcamp for a cohort of team leaders. And some kind of awesome things happened.
If you or your organization is struggling with overwhelm, let’s see if any of these outcomes have some intel to offer you…in service of finding some relief!
The boot campbootcamp begins with the basics. Leaders have to understand the four pillars and why they matter. These help formulate more meaningful questions and conversation with their teams.
When we kicked off this bootcamp, leaders were skeptical.
“Yeah, our teams are overwhelmed. But we don’t have any control over the volume of work and priorities being pushed down to us.”
And that’s where I convinced them otherwise.
Through our conversation together, these leaders devised a set of questions they asked their teams. They collected problem spots, opportunities big and small, and we turned insight into action and experiments and learning as we went.
Here are a few of the challengesof challenges that we tackled, and the actions they ended up taking.
This is, of course, one of the most common complaints in so many workplaces these days. Employees are drowning in so many meetings, they have no time to actually do the work being discussed in all the meetings. So yes – balls drop and smiles vanish.
Now, while leaders may not be able to control how much work is being handed down to them from above, they did discover some changes they could make. And they did. As a cohort they agreed to…
Employees were saying, “We’re not sure what’s most important. Everything feels urgent.” And as they say, when everything’s important, nothing is important.
So what were leaders able to do here?
When processes are slow and decision-making is bottlenecked, it impacts results but also creates a lot of frustration. So where could leaders help ease the burden here?
Here are some choices they made together:
Seems counter-intuitive that overwhelmed employees would want to focus on career development. But it turned out some of their overwhelm was coming from boredom – a sense of “I’m doing the same thing over and over but getting nowhere.”
So leaders responded with a few new ideas:
An activation bootcamp isn’t just about quick fixes. It’s about giving leaders the tools and strategies to infuse ease into the system. It’s about creating accountability to ensure these changes stick. And it’s about connecting leaders with their cohort peers and their teams, encouraging more regular and open dialogue.
Change doesn’t happen overnight. It’s the small, consistent steps that make a difference. By listening to their teams and taking action, these leaders are creating a better, more sustainable work environment. One tweak at a time.
Join me next week for another great episode. Until then, visit my website at leadabovenoise.com if your workplace could use an activation boost – a bootcamp, a keynote, a Pulse check – you choose. You can follow Modern Mentor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Find and follow me on LinkedIn. Thanks so much for listening and have a successful week.
Modern Mentor is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. It's audio-engineered by Dan Feirabend. Our Director of Podcasts is Brannan Goetschius. Our Podcast and Advertising Operations Specialist is Morgan Christianson. Our Digital Operations Specialist is Holly Hutchings. Our Marketing and Publicity Associate is Davina Tomlin.