How can you as the leader retain your level of confidence even in challenging times?

The reality is that when you’re under stress and in uncertain times, it can test the resolve of many leaders to remain confident. Both about the short-term viability of the production environment, and the long-term success of the enterprise.

Here are a few tips to help you as a leader, even in stressful times, retain your mojo, your ability to get things done.

The first tip is to focus on what you can control. In most cases, this is going to be the next 24 hours ahead of you. As you focus on the day ahead, or the production shift ahead of you, it will keep you from worrying too much about the longer-term future that might be more uncertain than the next day ahead of you. Focus on what you can control. It will help you retain your confidence level.

The second tip is to be positive and focus on the gains being made, as opposed to the losses. It’s very easy to be in a victim mindset where you start thinking about how good things used to be instead of the small incremental gains you’re likely to see even during difficult times, especially as things  start to turn around.

And the third tip is to keep moving forward. If you keep moving forward, you will not always be thinking about the past. This is the new reality; a new phrase we’re using. When you keep moving forward, you’ll be more successful in helping your department, your team, and your whole company get to the next level in this new reality.

Currently live, in person training can be a bit of a challenge, both in terms of the COVID-19 situation, but also just in general with economic conditions, and social distancing which might go on for several months. As a result, we’ve launched several new initiatives which may help you and your leadership team keep your confidence level and your mojo moving forward.

The first initiative is called Leader Boost. Leader Boost simply means  we can do either a one-on-one session for one of your key leaders, or we can do a Leader Boost session for your entire leadership team at one of their regular meetings. That could be as little as 15 or 20 minutes where we present some ideas, or show you how to take some of the ideas your team may have already learned from us and look at how to apply it in the new reality. Those little booster sessions are designed to get your leadership team staying positive and motivated moving forward.

The second initiative is Stress Resilience. You may have seen some information come out that my colleague Brad Coulbeck and I did with two videos on stress. They’re recorded, they’re ready to go and you could share them throughout your organization. We have several different pricing tiers depending on how big your organization is. And of course, if you want the free version, you just have to go to our blog, and you’ll get a mini version that’s for free. You can license this Stress Resilience workshop and put it out to your organization to help everybody become more resilient, currently and going forward.

The last thing that I want to mention is we’re launching several virtual and remote instruction options. Our instructors can present to your group without actually physically having to be present. Our instructors present live via video and in your team classroom you can have your local HR, training , or operations person lead the team through activities and exercises.

Your team will still receive the very high-level learning experience they’ve been used to. The advantage about coming in remotely is we don’t have to get on an airplane and travel to come to see you, so as a result we can do those sessions in much smaller increments. In a 90 minute to two-hour session, we can deliver one module, have your team receive the learning, and then spread out the training over a period of time.

These remote instructions with local facilitation options are available as one option, and we are also launching several new virtual only options. With this option, everyone would have their own computer screen and interact with us as we teach them the leadership skills they need.

It starts with a conversation like most things. And if we can help you at all, please feel free to reach out to us. Hang in there and you’ll be ready for the challenges that come ahead in your leadership journey.