How to Maintain High Performance Through Rapid Change & Turmoil
GenAI is evolving at a rapid pace, the financial markets are volatile, and expectations are high as ever. Help your team manage anxiety and maintain high performance with signposting and structure.
If you have tried Barry’s Bootcamp or Soulcycle, you know these popular fitness classes focuses on high-intensity interval workouts to motivate people to achieve their personal bests. The key is to break up the high-intensity work. Most of us cannot maintain a sprint for 30 minutes. We run further and faster with 6 blocks of 5-minute sprints. Humans are not designed physically or mentally to sustain non-stop high performance. We rely on variations and breaks to help us go further.
A similar approach works well in leadership when facing a demanding work environment. Rather than simply encouraging yourself and your team to “just get through it”, bring in the concept of high-intensity sprints (with downtime) to help everyone go further and avoid burnout.
Uncertainty Leads to Burnout
When teams work long hours, they get tired. Tiredness when there is no end in sight creates anxiety and fear. “When will it get back to normal?” “Is this how things will be now?” “This is unsustainable. Am I expected to keep this up?”
Perhaps the workload is manageable on its own. But add in the ongoing stress caused by not knowing how long this period of uncertainty or high-intensity work might last may push us over the top.
Tiredness and stress also kill motivation, creativity, and confidence. The once simple tasks feel increasingly daunting. Mistakes and interpersonal conflicts become more frequent as motivation and confidence drop.
Morale drops as a larger percentage of the team becomes exhausted. There is decreasing tolerance for last-minute changes. Even the person who always “carries the team” quietly fades away and gives up.
This vicious cycle occurs not linearly but exponentially. One day, it felt like things were going okay. Then, suddenly, over a few days, anxiety and fear spiral, and everything falls apart.
Make the unpredictable, predictable
To prevent a team in the midst of handling a crisis or extraordinarily stressful situation from spiraling, create intervals of work with differentiated expectations. Your job as a leader is to create predictability and breaks when there may not be a clear end in sight and the workload is unpredictable.
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Here are the critical elements to creating a predictable structure for the team:
Give it a name: Give the moments of high intensity a name. We are firefighting. It’s all hands on deck. We are in go-time. Use the analogy that resonates with you and your team. By giving it a different name, you are setting the expectation that this is not the baseline or business as usual. There will be an end and a return to normal.
Create a visual separation: Make the moment visually different. Perhaps it’s a special Zoom virtual background. Perhaps it is a little character of Charmandar or a toy fire hydrant everyone keeps on their desk. Perhaps it is physically relocating together to a large conference room or rearranging into a different desk configuration. Adding the visual layer gives the brain a visual cue that this is different. It also signals to others that you are in firefighting mode.
Create an anticipated end: Give the sprint an end date. Even if you are not sure, put a stake in the ground. The brain needs to know how long something might last. A sense of “this may never end” creates unnecessary anxiety and dread. One of the most taxing aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the beginning was not knowing how long it was going to last. Once we had a line of sight to vaccines and for getting back to normal, the mental toll decreased. Perhaps you’ll decide to start another sprint when the previous one finishes, and that is okay. The key is to always have an end to look forward to.
Build in breaks: Create and schedule mandatory breaks during the day and week. Avoid encouraging people to “work through it”. The breaks do not have to be long — a 5 min dance party or stretching break; a 15-20 min lunch together without phones; a 15 min walk around the block around 5 pm. These moments give your brain and body a chance to recover and recenter.
Reward the finish line: When you reach the end of the interval, create a positive reward. It could be a cupcake or swag. It could be a silly “You did it” trophy or certificate. It could be a gift card for a bakery, a plant shop, or a spa. It does not have to be expensive. It just needs to exist so that the team has something to look forward to at the end. Reward the finish, even if you decide to run another race.
Each of these elements signals to our brain that this stressful moment “won’t last forever”. They create a positive moment to look forward to at the end of all the hard work. It is this knowledge of an “end” that holds the anxiety and dread at bay, allowing us to stay motivated and focused on the work at hand.
That’s all folks! I will be taking a week off with my family for Spring Break. See you the following week at 3:14 pm!
Yue