Management Material

Steering Through Uncertainty: Strategies for Inspiring and Re-Engaging Your Team

• Catherine Van Der Laan • Season 1 • Episode 57

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Unlock the secrets to revitalizing your team's passion and productivity with me, Catherine Van Der Laan, as we navigate the storm of today's workplace challenges. 

In this episode, I share my personal journey and the strategies that have transformed teams facing the threat of financial instability and job insecurity. You'll learn about the three-step process that can shift your team's focus from fear to flourishing—a method that has proven vital in my own leadership experiences during times of layoffs and reorganizations. Discover the importance of personal connection and how genuine engagement with both people and goals can create a resilient and motivated workforce.

Leadership isn't just about managing—it's about inspiring and aligning your team towards a common vision. 

This conversation goes beyond theories as I provide practical advice on managing stress, leading empathetically, and harnessing personal growth to build a proactive team environment. 

We'll explore overcoming the 'amygdala hijack', career mapping, and the immense value of helping others as a pathway to sharpen your own leadership skills. 

If you're ready to take the helm and steer your team towards a culture of engagement and professional progress, grab your headphones, and let's set sail together.

Book a complimentary management coaching conversation at https://calendly.com/catherine-vanderlaan/free-60-minute-leadership-consultation

Email me at catherine@managementmaterialcoaching.com to ask a question or get in touch.

Join our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/managementmaterialcoaching

Find out more about Management and Leadership Coaching at https://managementmaterialcoaching.com/




Speaker 1:

Re-engagement at work is all about re-engagement with people and goals that mean something personal to each individual. You cannot re-engage in work if you're afraid for your job, and that's all you can think about. Just you can't. You're afraid for your job and that's all you can think about, just you can't. You can re-engage at work once you rewrite your thoughts, start controlling your controllables and then start caring about and helping the people around you. That is how you do it. Welcome to Management Material. My name is Katherine Vanderlaan. I started my career at the bottom as an assistant and worked my way up to become the boss's boss in eight years and, man, I love management. Welcome back to Management Material. This is the podcast that helps people become leaders that other people want to follow. This podcast is for current managers, new managers, aspiring managers, leaders who want to be better leaders. This is where you learn to do that. Today, we are discussing how to re-engage your team at work.

Speaker 1:

This has been something quite often in the news, something that I'm seeing a lot of right now. Maybe it's just a Harvard Business Review, but not really. I've seen it in Fortune. I've seen it all over the place in the news. People, leaders, managers are having an engagement problem at work. I don't know if you feel that way, but over 80% of the workforce is having trouble concentrating and being engaged at their day jobs. This makes sense to me. We're in the middle of a subtle but real financial crisis. Here in Massachusetts, at least, inflation over the last two years has gone up by over 20% when it comes to common essential items, and that really that translates to people need $11,000 more every single year just to operate their regular budget. I know this because I also do a little financial coaching for people's personal finances. I keep track of that. I run a course called Financial Abundance that helps people learn to budget. But we're not here to talk about that. We are here to talk about how to engage people in the workforce. It's not really a surprise. I'm actually surprised when other people are surprised that their teams are not engaged. Over the last two weeks, I've talked about the mass layoffs across multiple industries. Of course, people aren't engaged at work. They're concerned about their jobs and their finances. They're afraid that maybe their job is next. It's basic psychology.

Speaker 1:

Engagement is about being with other people, making a difference in the world and aligning with a group behind a common goal with well-defined individual goals that fit within the group's vision and strategy. That's the definition of engagement. Okay, I wrote it myself, so maybe it's not 100% accurate, but that's what I think of as engagement. It's about aligning behind a common goal, knowing what your contribution is, being with other people and engaging with those other people. Now, of course, the Oxford Dictionary would not like that I'm using the word engagement in the definition of the term engagement, but here we are. If someone is massively concerned about losing their job, their financial security, they cannot think beyond themselves. Okay, look, I've done training with therapists and here's there's a sequence to this. You can think of it in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but that's multiple steps. Or you can just remember this three-step sequence.

Speaker 1:

The first sequence kind of your core of internal monologue when you have had or experienced a stressful event is to people have a negative internal narrative. Okay, so the first step to getting out of that and re-engaging is recognizing a negative internal narrative. Okay, so the first step to getting out of that and re-engaging is recognizing a negative internal narrative that you have within yourself. Okay, so getting out of ruminating, getting out of just saying negative things about the world, about your job, ruminating over things that you cannot control that are negative. Okay, so the very first step is recognizing what's going on. The second step is rewriting the negative internal narrative to something that's both helpful and true. Notice, I didn't say positive. We're not doing all that weird positive psychology woo-woo nonsense here. I'm really talking about taking your rumination of negative things and turning that into something that's helpful and true. Okay, we're going to get deeper into this. I'm going to tell you a story and we're going to go into how this works both for you and for other people. Okay, real soon here.

Speaker 1:

The third step is then engaging in the outside world more, so more thoughts are focused on others rather than yourself. That is called being a healthy individual. That last stage is usually where therapists try to get their clients to a healthy engagement with others and the outside world. If people are massively concerned about themselves and have this loud negative narrative about losing their jobs, they're not going to be able to be engaged at work. It's not rocket science, that's basic psychology. So what do we have to do as leaders and or managers of a team? What do we have to do to get people to be re-engaged? Let me tell you a story.

Speaker 1:

I went through a pretty large layoff at a company that I was in I'm not going to tell you which company it happened at multiple times and multiple companies, and this story is probably going to sound familiar to you because it's all across multiple, multiple industries. If you've been working in any industry within four years for at least four years, this will sound pretty familiar. There's a bit of a cycle to it. Now, anyway, we had a large layoff and reorganization. It took most of us by surprise. A whole office was shut down and we were just not expecting that. We thought there were key, key employees in that office. We were just almost nobody was expecting that there were very, very few people working on this reorganization plan and I didn't remember getting any hints. This whole office was shut down and given, I think, 90 days to transition out. It was either 60 or 90, whatever the regulation was at the time.

Speaker 1:

Now I listened to to every quarterly investor call to get some foreshadowing, some hint of what was going to happen, and it still took me by surprise. I thought maybe I wasn't paying attention. So I went back and right after this announcement that was made and wasn't really made in a nice way, but that's for another call or for another Zoom session or podcast. I re-listened to the last quarterly investor call. I downloaded, listened, played it and voila, all of a sudden I noticed that there was a mention of a reduction in force and expenses with two to three steps within the next year. And this is what I mean by foreshadowing or hints or anything. Usually the CEO and the chief finance officer would talk about these things with their investors in the quarterly investor call that was recorded. It was also played live. Sometimes I joined live, sometimes I just listened to the recording. Heckles up that reduction in force and expenses with two to three steps. If that doesn't get your heckles up, I don't know what will.

Speaker 1:

It seemed like we only just went through the first step, you know, elimination of an office, hundreds of employees being laid off, and that was only step one. So of course I started ruminating around losing my job. I started thinking about my team getting reduced, investment in my product lines dwindling. I didn't know what was coming next and at the time I was the product manager for the largest single investment in the company, the MVP. The minimum viable product hadn't been launched yet and we had no revenue to show for a bunch of spend in developing this product. It was like a kind of a suite of products and I was just. I was nervous for my job, I was nervous for that project. If they eliminated it, I thought they'd probably eliminate my position.

Speaker 1:

Now, most people, when they're nervous for their jobs, go into one of a few responses. I think everybody does this. Actually. Fight, flight are the two most common that people hear about, and then there's also freeze, flop or fawn, and it really depends on how you grew up and who you grew up with whether you have all or some more predominant one of these Freeze seems to be the most common and might just be the first of all the stress responses before gliding into another one, if you even get there.

Speaker 1:

Now. I went through, I went before saying that I hope you know I did a lot of research into this. I do have a degree in neuropsychology. I did at one point work for one of the top scientific publishers in the world, and so I'm used to reading a lot of research. When I was in college, my research assistant role was primarily creating a bunch of literature reviews, and if you don't know what those are, it's a summary of like dozens of studies along a single topic so that new grants can be informed? Okay, so that they're not redoing something that has been done. So that they have a baseline of understanding for whatever they're trying to do and figure out their hypothesis. So they don't redo stuff. So they don't anyway.

Speaker 1:

I couldn't find any statistics around this, but what I did find is that some people think that most people go into freeze first. It might be for a moment or it might be for a while. Is that some people think that most people go into freeze first? It might be for a moment or it might be for a while? Freezing is when your brain presses the pause button and stays hypervigilant. So it's waiting and it's watching carefully, it is noticing details until it can figure out what the next response is, whether it is fleeing or fighting or fawning or flopping. To make it and you as an extension of your brain, to make you safe again. Okay. So the brain's whole job is to be a predictive muscle and to make you safe, and what that really means for the brain is make you comfortable. So this can end up being a cycle for people where they're comfortable in something that's actually not good for them in the long term, but because their brain's whole job is to keep them comfortable and safe, so, doing what they know how to do and what they can predict, they end up in this cycle.

Speaker 1:

I don't know if that sounds familiar to you at all and that's not really the point of this. We are going to get into re-engaging your team. It's really important to understand the psychology of this so you can take care of yourself and your team. Remember, you have to put your own oxygen mask on first before you can help others, and so I'm giving you this psychological explanation for all of this so that you know the mechanism, know what's going on. You know that layoffs are giving you a stress response because it is a traumatic event when people lose their jobs. Whether it is affecting you or just affecting the people around you, it does end up kind of triggering this stress response of freeze, fight, flight, flop or fawn. So I'm not going to get into the other responses, you can look those up yourself. But what I want you to know is that this means you have to regulate your own emotions first before you can help your team and be the leader that people want to follow. So yes, this is going to come back to re-engaging yourself and your team. This is how you do it.

Speaker 1:

First, I found the best way to work through an amygdala hijack, which is when stress hijacks your brain. To go into one of these responses. The best way to work through it is to follow these three steps. Number one take some deep breaths and recenter yourself in your physical center I mean like think about your stomach and where your stomach is, your core and breathe 10 times. So that will usually release some of the stress in your body and help you start to emotionally regulate. It is a physical thing, okay, and physically in your body you've had this stress hormone, cortisol, released throughout your body, and so doing a physical activity of taking 10 deep breaths and thinking about your core which usually means you end up tightening it up and then loosening it up helps release that stress.

Speaker 1:

The second thing that I do is I think through what I can control. So you can control yourself, your performance, you can control your attitude, you can control how you respond to others, you can control your emotions. That's what you're doing right now. You are controlling your emotions, or that's what this is for. You cannot control whether you keep your job, or at least not right now. But you can control how you spend your money and your time. So think about what you can control. Then step number three is come up with a two-pronged approach to take care of yourself. That means you continue to do your job really well, and here's the second prong. You make connections and stockpile money in case you end up being laid off. So you end up controlling your controllables so that you have a plan B in case something else happens.

Speaker 1:

Now that you've taken care of yourself and having a plan that you're following, you can turn your attention to your team. They're probably going through the same or similar emotions that you are, and here's how you re-engage your team. And here's how you re-engage your team Number one you listen to their concerns. You have a real empathetic conversation and then start problem solving with them. Point out, just like we just discussed, point out what they can control and help them focus on changing their internal monologue from negative thoughts to helpful and true thoughts. See how this is all coming together. Help them focus on what they can control, just like you did. If you want to make it personal and tell them how you refocused, then tell them okay, then make it personal. That usually ends up with a stronger engagement, a stronger response from people. When you make it personal, Then help them create a career map.

Speaker 1:

I call that plotting your path. That's one big, big big thing that I teach new managers to do themselves and with their teams on an individual basis. You help them talk about the career that they want to have and then plot how to get there. This activity so plotting your path, your career path, plot how to get there. This activity so plotting your path, your career path helps them think about their controllables. It helps them solidify into that second stage. Okay, it solidifies them into that second stage that I was talking about, where you refocus on helpful and true beliefs. So they think about their controllables, they start plotting their paths and the attention ends up being away from those negative, ruminating thoughts.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and then step three is focus on who they can help while they're getting into their own career path. Now, subtly, you might've noticed that I just brought you through those steps. Okay, and so recognize this that the more people they can help, the easier it will be for them to get to where they want to be. Translate that to yourself the more people you help, the easier it will be for you to get to where you want to be. So, thinking back on your team and the people that you're helping, now that you have regulated yourself, what can they reasonably do to be present with the people around them? What projects can they jump into and support? What will be a win-win for them and their professional development and the team as a whole? What can they stop doing? What do they need to start doing? Usually, after some sort of layoff or when companies are hunkering down, there's a reassessment of roles and who does what. So get them involved and engaged in that. Don't just tell them what they need to do and not do, and see how they fit within the group again. How can they contribute to someone else's growth? That's key. That is key.

Speaker 1:

Those steps are how you get people to re-engage at work, those from changing their internal monologue from negative and self-focused to then thinking about their controllables, plotting their career path and helping people along the way, because helping people is where you get to where you want to be too. I know you've been listening to me for a while now and I apologize, but this is really important and it's important to know the psychology of it too, when I'm talking to leaders in organizations and maybe they don't really have a team. They're individual contributors. Yet, you know, nobody reports to me. I don't know how I can even start these conversations and I want to let you know that you don't need to be a team lead to do this with the team that you work with. If you are working in a corporation, you work with the team. If you work with people, you work with the team.

Speaker 1:

Helping people re-engage at work is how you show that you should be a team lead and how you grow into becoming a leader. Doing this is how you show you should be a team lead and how you grow into becoming a leader that people want to follow. Now, another thing that I hear a lot when I'm talking to people about re-engaging their team you don't know how to do this with myself, let alone other people. How could I possibly do this with other people when I don't know how to do it with myself? I'm not engaged at work. I'm just trying to find another job First.

Speaker 1:

I want to say practice makes progress. Try it with yourself first and just attempt to help the people around you. Write it out, if you have to write out those steps and care. That's the very, very first thing is just care, care about the people around you and attempt to help them. You'll learn a thing or two. You'll learn a few things actually along the way. That will help you grow in the right direction. Don't think that I just knew how to do this. I'm going to finish my story here in a moment. But just if you don't try, you won't grow. So try it, try it and practice will make progress. Okay, let me tell you what happened to me and my team. So I was super concerned about losing my job and I didn't know these steps yet, the thing that I just taught you. I didn't know how to do.

Speaker 1:

Thankfully, a colleague of mine and I won't mention her name, but she was right next door to me and I adore her. I adore her. She is now director, but it took a few more years, maybe like seven or eight years after this incident, for her to become a director. Anyway, thankfully, she knew these steps intuitively. She just cared, she was willing to help, she stepped in and she listened to my concerns. She could see my anxiety, she could see that my stress levels were super high and she just wanted to help. She ended up through a conversation, she redirected me to think about what I could control, and to me it was my budget, my spending, the work I was doing, my attitude. And it reminded me. She reminded me that people were watching and we needed to both be leaders out there. We both had similar job titles, if not the same one, I think, just similar at the time, not the same one. I've really looked up to her and still do, as a mentor and a friend. She's wonderful and she, yeah, she reminded me that people were watching and we needed to be leaders out there, whether we thought we were yet or not. It took a few conversations with her and at least a couple of days.

Speaker 1:

I can be pretty emotional, and I was pretty emotional at the time. I was actually pretty angry and until I could redirect my own thinking, the most I could do for my team at that time was listen to their concerns, and actually listening to their concerns helped me realize what my controllables were and create that two-pronged plan. But until then I had nothing more to offer and so that's what I did. So, after listening to them, I started controlling my own controllables, I started controlling my budget, I started controlling my work, the projects that I was leaning into and my attitude changed to refocus on giving to the people around me and making progress in my own career. That was a big focus for me at the time. I started helping people plot their career paths. I got like way into it with my team on an individual basis and we came up with frameworks and structures that actually are used to this day. We integrated personal career strategies with plans to get there for each person on my team and goals that we could track together. Our team became even more interconnected and we eventually became one of the top performing teams in the company.

Speaker 1:

Now what we didn't do is we didn't talk to the company and say, hey, we're all talking to each other about our careers and we are all planning on how to get promoted and plot our careers together. No, we say that to the whole organization. People were talking to different departments about that. We were talking to each other about that and I think primarily they were talking to me about that in confidence, and so I didn't. If anything was in confidence, I didn't relay it to anybody else, but if they opened it up to the team, then we talked about it all together and guess what? That team was so engaged, so engaged. We all ended up re-engaging in our team because we supported and cared for each other and our individual careers. That was really what it was. So here's the bottom line Re-eng at work is all about reengagement with people and goals.

Speaker 1:

That means something personal to each individual. You cannot reengage in work if you're afraid for your job, and that's all you can think about you can't. You're afraid for your job and that's all you can think about it, just you can't. You can re-engage at work once you rewrite your thoughts, start controlling your controllables and then start caring about and helping the people around you. That is how you do it. So go, go, take care of yourselves.

Speaker 1:

Guys, it's hard out there for you and your colleagues. If you're trying to be a leader people want to follow, then take the steps we just talked about for yourself and then help your colleagues do the same. All right, take all of those steps for yourself. If you need to give this a re-listen, give this a re-listen. And if this kind of thing sounds great to you and you want someone to actively work through this with you and you're looking for, or you're looking for, training for your team leadership training, that's another way to get people reengaged. Okay is leadership training. They feel like they're making professional progress because they are. It's real professional progress For individuals at your company or yourself or your team. Schedule that complimentary consultation with me below. I have a link right in the show notes and I'm happy to meet you and make sure that you and your team are going in the right direction. All right, until we meet again. I will see you in the next episode.