Michael Erath says leaders should build trust through personal check-ins and an open virtual office, then create clarity with a rallying cry, identified levers, and daily accountability. He shows how Traction Hub used town halls, webinars, and Slack to do this.
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Hi, everyone. I'm Michael Erath. And today I'd like to talk to you about two things that leaders can do during this current crisis to help their organizations emerge stronger and more cohesive. A lot of this is based on things that I've picked up from studying and reading Patrick Lencioni's work, attending some of his webinars, and thinking through leadership in a time of crisis. The first of those things is to focus on building trust. It's a difficult thing to step back and do sometimes when we're anxious and fearful and concerned about what's going on. But as leaders, it's imperative that we are constantly trying to build trust. And doing it in a time of crisis is more critical than any other time you could possibly build trust. So I want to share inside of that two things that you can do that cost you nothing, just a little bit of your time that will help you build trust with your teams. First, the first of those is to make intentional time to check in on your team members on your direct reports, and I mean make intentional time on your Calendar, contact them FaceTime, get on a zoom call with them, but somehow where you're actually face to face or you can see each other's face and check in on them very personally on how things are going with their family, how things are going, working from home, how are things with their kids and not in school or homeschooling or whatever is happening within their situation and just really connect on an authentic human level. That will go a long way in building trust with each of your direct reports. And the second is to open a Zoom meeting when you start your day. And as you're working from home, share that zoom link with people on your team and let them know that while you're working from home, your office is virtually going to be open and they can just pop in anytime, ask you questions, check in on you, or share thoughts, work through issues, anything they need. So it's a way for you to connect face to face over technology and be present with each other and be available to them. Those are two ways that you can build trust right now, even while you're working from home and separated from each other. The second thing to focus on is creating clarity. And so as leaders, it's important in times of crisis, when there's not a lot of clarity and there's lots of confusion and disruption, to focus on what is our rallying cry as an organization that will help us get through this and emerge stronger and more cohesive. Once you think through and understand what that rallying cry is, and I'm going to give you an example in just a moment. What are the levers that you have to pull in order to achieve that and make that rallying cry happen and accomplish it? Once you understand those levers within each one of them, who's accountable for for that lever, who's got to be the one working on it? What do they have to do on a weekly basis and a daily basis to win the week and to win the day in terms of advancing us towards our rallying cry? So as an example, here at the Traction Hub, we realize that our rallying cry, the way that we emerge from this crisis stronger and more cohesive as a team, is to make this a time of community and collaboration. So everything we do right now, we're focused on focusing on how to build more of a community and collaborate better within our company, with our clients, with other people in our community that we think we can help. So we're doing things as far as pulling specific levers, like shifting to high end technology to run better sessions, to run better strategic sessions and meetings with our clients virtually with whiteboard cameras, lots of interactive tools that make for great meetings. We've started implementing town halls where we bring in our clients and other parts of our community and we work through issues together. We learn and we solve things and we grow together as a community. Through these town halls. We've brought in subject matter experts to run webinars on things like the CARES act and loan programs that are available under those. We've launched this YouTube channel to try to get information out there and things that will help people within our community. And we started a Slack channel so that members of the Traction Hub community and our clients can connect with each other and collaborate in real time and very quickly and share resources and information. So those are just some examples of how you can create a rallying cry. Get clarity on what you can do, the levers you can pull to succeed in accomplishing that rallying cry, and create daily and weekly activities around making that happen. I hope this has been helpful. If you like what you're seeing on this channel, please subscribe. Our goal is once or twice a week to put some content out that we think will be helpful and valuable to entrepreneurs, not just through this coronavirus, disruption and crisis that we're going through, but long term, even beyond that, as we all work together to run better businesses and ultimately achieve our dream.
