Inspiring and enabling your team through business briefings

By Isobel Rimmer 

This month we’re running a series of webinars for a global tech company – it’s part of their Covid 19 response to support remote workers.

When it comes to virtual meetings, it turns out that, on average, they’re spending 20 hours a week in them. Alongside that, research from LinkedIn and the Mental Health Foundation showed that in lockdown, people were working an additional 28 hours a month.

That’s nearly a week! Evidence enough that we’re ‘zoomed’ or ‘teamed’ out. We have to make the time we spend with our teams, really matter.

Inspiring your team meetings

Meetings are essential if we are to connect, share, take action, assess progress, check on individuals’ motivation and wellbeing, and stay up to date. When we’re remote, even more so.

One of the biggest challenges any leader faces is to be brave enough to abandon a practise that’s served them well in the past. But given that leadership is about how you choose to behave, and that the best learners (Kouzes and Posner, The Leadership Challenge) make the best leaders – here are some ideas you might want to try. Even if it means dropping some old habits.

To inspire others, we need to know what matters to them – their values, desires, motivations, their hopes and dreams. We need to understand their fears and concerns too. In all our busyness, are we spending enough time just listening and getting to know our people better?

The pandemic happened to us but what happens now is up to us. In this fog of uncertainty, we need to find ways to create a shared sense of destiny. Focus on future goals.

Ask each team member to identify one problem that they could tackle – and where they feel they could make a difference. Something that’s important to them, personally. Keep the timeline to 30 or at most, 60 days.

The act of problem-solving – along of course with the benefit of something being sorted – matters. We are motivated and encouraged when we see a result, and when that happens quickly. We dig deep when we can see the finish line in sight and even sprint to cross it.

To enable team members, it helps to have a structure. ‘HALP’ is a simple tool to use to check-in and share progress, foster collaboration, and bring your teams together. It’s also time-efficient and fair. Give everyone a time limit (3 minutes airtime is tight but doable and focusses the mind – but you can give a little longer) and with video on, if virtual, and if that’s possible.

HALP stands for ‘highs’, ‘actions’, ‘lows’ and ‘plans’. We developed it for a software start-up where the VP wanted to keep her team connected, inspired, and focussed when they couldn’t be together.

Highs are the things that are going well. Things that we’re pleased with, the progress we’ve made. We start with the highs because it’s all too easy to forget just how much good stuff we’ve actually achieved. Start with something positive, don’t default straight to problems. Whining is neither an inspiring nor an enabling strategy.

Actions are what I’m focussed on this week – maybe next – the short term, here and now stuff. Activities that will be happening as part of my role and in solving the problems that I’m working on. Sharing these allows for greater understanding and a sense that ‘we’re all in this together’. It helps build understanding, trust, and collaboration.

Lows are the things that are getting in the way, getting me down or taking me off course. Software problems, system issues, lack of resources, a difficult customer, a lost sale. Sharing the lows as a team can help me course correct or find someone with the skills to help. It’s cathartic to offload too.

But remember, you’ve only got 3 minutes for your entire HALP so you can’t get stuck in the weeds or become a moaner. No one is inspired or enabled by neg ferrets. But as a manager, you also get a sense of potential problems ahead and can put time aside for that team member.

Plans are the longer-term activities – things that I’m working on this month or this quarter. They’re important but not so urgent. Having articulated my ‘lows’ I can focus some of my ‘plans’ on how to sort them out. Sharing plans make sure that the team is aligned and on the same trajectory.

In times of crisis, it’s natural to want to control, to direct, to hunker down to survive. But to enable our teams to achieve and exceed what they’re capable of, we have to foster collaboration and build trust. We have to let them work things out for themselves and provide greater autonomy and appeal to what they want the future to be.
HALP can help.

Prepared by Patrick O’Brien

About the author

Isobel Rimmer is the founder of training and development consultancy Masterclass Training and author of new book Natural Business Development: Unleash your people’s potential to spot opportunities, develop new business, and grow revenue.

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