Lockdown 2020 series: Leading your Observers
We’re half way through the first proper week. At this point each week, I’ll flick out an idea about leading people who are in the state we’re focusing on.
So, to Observers. In Monday’s post, I suggested people in this state are not quite ready for this change and probably feeling a bit sideswiped. The result is that they step back, and you might see fight, flight or freeze from them.
If you’ve done the work early this week to spend time engaging with your people, you’ll have a grasp on what it is that Observers might be feeling a bit off-balance about. That early conversation might have focused on things like digging into what’s worrying them, answering any questions they’ve got about how the team will set up and keep connected, or what the actual work looks like over the next few weeks.
In some cases, it might have included the prospects of ongoing employment – a tough and testing possibility right now.Hopefully you’ve sent messages that signal you are available, you care about people taking care of themselves and those close to them first, we’re still an intact team, and that each person has plenty to contribute.
One quick point on communication and how often you send those signals: A couple of leaders I’ve talked with this week have wondered if they are overdoing communication and connection. I reckon you can’t overdo either of those right now - and if I’m wrong about that, your people will tell you. This is a really interesting time because the heat is on you right now as a leader to fire up your skills in creating and maintaining belonging (ie, communicate and connect), and dial down your delivering stuff skills. Your job is to go hard on wellbeing (including of yourself) and let your people take care of delivering.
Engaging Observers – control and security
Giving Observers space to create some control over what they can control is a great way of helping them feel secure. Remember the young fella (his name was Tatsuya) who threw stuff at me on day 1 in Japan? Within a week, my co-teacher, Yumiko, had discovered that he was obsessed with numbers and patterns. She asked him to set up the activity shelves in the order we should do them during the week. One simple task that was a chore to us and meaningful to him gave him a sense of control over his environment and meant that he was making a contribution. Given that Observers will be scanning for threats and doing everything they can to keep a semblance of status quo, ask them to bring that quality to play in contributing to how the team is setting themselves up. They might focus on things like:
Good team habits we already have that we can make work remotely.
Finding potential glitches in the way the team is proposing to work remotely, and come up with improvements.
Becoming the expert and go-to in the team for whatever area is causing them most concern (eg, maintaining good connection, protocols for team meetings, how we keep a sense of momentum going on important work).
Whatever they contribute to, you’ll be asking them to stretch a little. You’ll be helping them move from an exclusively Observer state, to starting to try out things we’d see in the Participant state. That might be uncomfortable for them, so be kind and supportive too. And keep a close eye on how they are responding. The simple truth is that, at this time, the best place they can put their attention might be on themselves. Aisha Ahmad has written a great piece about this – I reckon we’d all do well to keep that top of mind.