How to reduce anxiety in your team as a manager👇🏻
Our autonomic nervous system needs 3 things to feel safe:
1 – Connection
2 – Context
3 – Choice
1 – To strengthen CONNECTION, directly address moments of disconnection and have an honest conversation.
For example, “Adam, I feel we are a bit disconnected this week. Would you be open to having a chat to explore this?”
Or if you want to address this with humour first, “Adam, are we getting on each other’s nerves this week? Do we need to have a little bit of a chat?”
Humour is good especially if you’re doing this for the first time and you want Adam to feel at his ease.
2 – Make sure your people have enough CONTEXT to do their job and perform certain tasks. Context is information—what, why, how, when.
Explain why something is important.
Encourage them to ask if they miss important information. Who can they reach out to for help?
Do you remember the occasional maths problem at school that you couldn’t solve because you were missing necessary data? Can you remember your frustration and confusion?
That’s why context is important. Make sure you give your team the radius before you ask them to work out the area of the circle.
3 – Give your people a CHOICE when you can.
Our autonomic nervous system senses danger and activates a survival response when there is no choice.
For example, “I have these three available times for our Zoom meeting next week. Which one works best for you?”
“I have three projects which I think would be a fit for you. Shall we have a chat to see which one sounds more interesting to you?”
During the pandemic, connection, context and choice have become more limited so it’s important to have these at the back of our mind.
Can you do something today on any of these three areas for your team?
Loving you, Angelos