Authentic Leadership: What your team needs right now is you
Today marks 9 full months of telework for me, my company, and much of America. It’s cliché, but March 13 seems like a million years ago and also just yesterday. And with several months of the worst of the pandemic still in front of us, it’s time to level up as leaders. But I don’t mean reading another leadership book or listening to another podcast.
I’ve heard colleagues and leaders say that they know that the ongoing pandemic isolation, stress of managing Zoom-schooling, financial challenges, and health care concerns are affecting their employees’ and team members’ mental health. Yet at the same time, they don’t know how to bring up these sensitive and personal topics in a professional setting. As a psychologist, I’m probably more comfortable talking about suffering being part of the human condition than your average businessperson. But I have a radical idea of what it is that your team members may need — and it’s not for you to tell them how to clinically manage their pandemic-induced depression.
Your team members need you to let down your guard and just be you. Not the you who has carefully cultivated a professional persona over the years. But the you who just can’t get up the energy to decorate for the holidays this year even though you know you “should,” the you who is really bummed that you haven’t gotten to have a proper girls’ night out in close to a year, the you who had no idea that you could take this few showers each month and still attend professional work meetings on camera. In my opinion, it’s ok to share some of those details even in a professional setting like a team meeting — the rules are different this year (and I personally hope they stay that way).
Be authentic. Be you. I think the biggest gift we can give our team members right now is to show them that they are not alone. I recently shared in an email to my team that my husband had been hospitalized briefly with COVID last month (he’s 98% recovered now, thank heavens). I mostly wanted to do it as a public service announcement to encourage them all to stay strong with their mask-wearing and social distancing as pandemic fatigue continues to set in, as well as to recommend that they all have a working thermometer and pulse-ox gizmo at home. But the cool thing was that it also stimulated a number of backchannel emails and even phone calls from staff that I don’t usually hear from on a personal level. By sharing myself and my life and being willing to disclose a few personal but appropriate details, it made it ok for my team to share a little more with me. I hope that went a little way toward helping people feel less alone at a time where we are all more isolated than ever.
Yes, you should know what online mental health resources your company provides; yes, you should be ready to tell someone how to access the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) in your system; yes, you should have the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline/Veterans Crisis Line number (1–800–273–8255) programmed into your phone in case you ever need it. But more than that, maybe just try to have a couple of authentic conversations this week where you let your guard down and let your team know that things aren’t perfect for you either. You can be grateful for what you have and grieve what you are missing at the same time. And if they talk, listen. Sometimes you can even ask if they are just needing to vent or if they are asking for your help in problem-solving. A lot of times, a nonjudgmental ear that is willing to hear about the inanity of managing word problems for a Zoom-schooled kindergartner while spilling coffee directly into the work laptop and managing challenging client demands at the same time can go a long way.
Have the courage to be authentic and to open up and show your humanity. For my team’s holiday gathering this year, since we’re not going to have the traditional holiday party, I asked them if they’d like my husband (a talented professional chef) to give them a live cooking lesson over Webex. I got a resoundingly higher response rate to that offer compared to the number of my team members that I normally see at the corporate holiday party! There might even be some of them who are just curious to see what my messy kitchen looks like, and that’s ok. My husband will probably say something goofy where I will cringe, and that’s ok, too. I’m even inviting both my boss and my mother-in-law to join the videoconference for a little added unpredictability!
And you know what? At the end of that 90 minutes, even if something happens that embarrasses me, we will have had a real, shared experience as humans, not just as coworkers. I don’t know about you, but that’s what I need these days — more genuine connection in this time of mandated distance. I don’t have the energy to have a curated exterior right now — fortunately, I think that my colleagues and team members just need me to be me.
