Leadership Culture

4 tips for Maintaining a Culture of Care When Stakes are High

2 min read

Jan 25, 2024 1:07:50 PM

Leadr CEO, Matt Tresidder recently spoke on The Tension Podcast to share his top lessons learned on his leadership journey.

Leaders, you’ve all been in a situation where the stakes are high. Whether it’s the economic climate, a customer-facing fail, a missed deadline, layoffs or something equally stressful. In those moments, it can feel like meeting the critical goal is against your people development and engagement efforts.

So how do you prioritize your people in those high-stakes seasons?

Here are your top 4 tips:

1. Be vulnerable about the worst-case scenario.

Managing vulnerability is tough. Matt has a saying, “I am 100% vulnerable with my wife, 95% vulnerable with my co-founder, 80% vulnerable with my leadership team, and 60% vulnerable with my wider company.”

While you don’t want to instill fear on your team, silence can be worse. Where communication is lacking, negativity fills the void.

To combat fear, vulnerably sharing the stakes of what will happen if goals are not met is actually the best weapon.

If your team knows that their budget, project, or job could be on the line, they will come alongside you to solve the problem at hand.

2. Bring in your leadership team.

If you’ve built your leadership team with intentionality, you have a variety of strengths, intellect, and perspectives at the top of your org chart. Use them.

Ask them to put their heads together to help ideate solutions to tackle the problem together. Bringing in your greatest minds gives them buy-in, builds trust, support, and engagement, and creates alignment quickly.

3. Don’t skip your 1:1 meetings.

In moments of chaos, it’s tempting to cancel 1:1s to focus on “what’s really important.” That’s a miss. Keeping in touch with your direct reports matters most during challenging times. It’s where trust is built and development begins.

Developing your people is always a top priority. They are the next leaders that will solve future challenges for your organization. Putting in the effort to train and develop them now will have multiplying impacts down the road.

Nothing erodes trust faster than missing the critical, consistent check-ins with your team.

4. Keep the main thing the main thing.

At Leadr, we keep our mission font-and-center using our own software. On the homepage of Leadr, every employee can see our mission: “Leadr exists to rid the world of bad leaders.”

This mission statement is the one constant to keep in mind and overcommunicate to your team when change or challenges arise. It’s why your team comes to work every day. Having that reminder there is critical to every person maintaining passion, alignment, and engagement even in a difficult season.

Take a look for yourself. Our 5-minute product overview shows you how software can help maintain a people-first approach to leadership in all seasons.

For more insights on leadership and caring for your team well in all seasons, check out Matt’s discussion on The Tension Podcast.