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3 ways to lead with transparency and tackle underperformance at work

Employees grouped together
To best boost clarity in the office, establish connectivity amongst employees.

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  • No amount of collaboration will improve performance if a workplace is unorganized and dysfunctional. 
  • Clarity should be a guiding factor for leaders to get their team on the same page.
  • Encourage efficiency and show employees how their work contributes to larger company goals.

Over the past two decades, the time that managers and employees spend in collaborative activities has skyrocketed by 50% or more. But don’t mistake this increase in collaboration for healthy collaboration — that’s a far call from the reality.

Much of the collaboration that happens in organizations today is inefficient and dysfunctional. In fact, 20 to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3 to 5% of your employees, according to research by Babson College professor Rob Cross. 

Now that organizations are steeped in collaborative dysfunction, how do they course correct? As a leader, clarity should be your North Star metric.

Clarity is a precursor to both healthy collaboration and a host of other organizational outcomes. And it is one of the most powerful indicators of success in today’s organizations, especially as they become increasingly distributed. 

There are three fundamental drivers of clarity. As a leader, it’s important that you understand — and be able to measure — these key drivers.

Establish connectivity

Connectivity is the first driver of clarity. Work often happens through informal structures, rather than through formal organizational structures like roles, functional teams, and hierarchies. And so, collaboration cannot be understood by looking solely at these formal structures.

Instead, connectivity involves how your employees are connected through tasks, cross-functional projects, ad-hoc teams, goals, and different technologies across formal and informal channels. With employees oscillating between 13 tools an average of 30 times per day, according to research by my workplace Asana, connectivity is increasingly difficult to understand.

In advising hundreds of companies over the past several years and helping them understand how their employees are connected, I’ve learned that connectivity is often taken for granted and poorly understood by leaders. By leveraging new technologies such as work management systems, you can start to understand how your employees are connected. Mapping out your organization’s connectivity is the first step to understanding how work actually happens and is key to achieving organizational clarity. 

Provide visibility

Visibility is the second key driver of clarity. Visibility involves ensuring that your employees understand and are able to track how their work contributes to broader company goals, as well as your company mission. This understanding is ever fleeting in organizations today. According to Asana’s research, less than half of employees (46%) know how their work contributes to their company’s mission. Visibility breeds clarity and helps your employees understand why their work matters. 

Your employees also need visibility into their work output and they should have the tools to measure this output over time. Technologies that meaningfully assess workload distribution are key for gaining visibility into work output. This type of visibility will enable you and your employees to pinpoint when task, project, and goal performance are veering off track. And it will also empower your employees to adopt a data-driven approach to assessing their work performance, rather than merely going through the motions. 

Encourage efficiency

Efficiency is the final driver of clarity. By many accounts, efficiency is the new productivity. Productivity is output per unit of time, whereas efficiency is the best possible output per unit of time. Don’t conflate the two. As we embark on new ways of work, it’s no longer about executing the greatest volume of tasks — it’s about doing the right tasks in the best possible way. 

Efficiency is enabled by both connectivity and visibility. Peak efficiency happens when employees are connected across different tasks, projects, and geographic and functional silos. And it is fueled by visibility. Visibility into how work happens enables you to build workflows and integrations that leverage automation and AI to empower more efficient work. 

Efficiency is also a key precursor to effective work-life balance and a powerful antidote against burnout. When you empower your employees to produce the best possible work output, not only are they higher-performing employees, but they are less susceptible to burnout, thanks to their newfound clarity. Asana’s research has found that, among employees who feel burnt out, about one in three (29%) report feeling overworked as a result of a lack of clarity on tasks and roles.

Especially with the broader shift to remote and hybrid work, clarity is in short supply and high demand in organizations. This is underscored by the reality that employees spend an eye-popping 60% of their time on “work about work” — tasks like tracking down the status of work and duplicating work — rather than the strategic jobs that you hired them to perform. When it comes to the next era of work and empowering your employees for success, clarity is conviction. 

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3 mantras to help you rebound and refocus after a bad day at work

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To rebound against having a bad day at work, focus on progress rather than perfection.

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  • Anyone can experience a bad day at work, even if you enjoy your job and the people you work with.
  • To move forward after a bad day, try to make steady progress instead of aiming for perfection.
  • Focus your energy on what you can control and change instead of what you can’t.

Even if you’re passionate about your job, get energy from the people you work with, and believe in your company’s mission, you can experience a bad day. Maybe your morning starts off with a handful of hiccups and your productivity and focus are disrupted. Or maybe you had to deal with a frustrated client or customer who said something that made you angry.

No matter the cause, let’s face it, we’ve all been there. But what differentiates having a bad day from being in a full-blown funk are the tools to help you move forward. For me, the secret to recovering from a bad day are these three simple mantras:

1. You can do anything, but not everything

This quote is a David Allen gem, and was my computer background for three years. Especially at this time of year, there’s a tendency to try and cram a year’s worth of work into just one quarter. People feel that they have to take on more to prove their impact and exceed goal expectations while simultaneously planning for the next year.

Truth is, you’ll make more of an impact and avoid losing focus if you shorten the list. My colleague Sam is a pro at this and had our entire leadership team complete an exercise documenting our “Short List.” It’s a list of five things you’re focusing your time and attention on, three omissions, and at least one thing that’s bringing you joy. If it’s not on that list, then it’s not getting done, because if everything is important, then nothing is important. My guess is your list is too long – shorten it and deepen your focus, you’ll be less stressed already.

2. Progress, not perfection

We recently had a virtual event for our women leaders at HubSpot around growth and gratitude. One of the most impactful takeaways was the notion that strengths sometimes end up being your Achilles’ heel.

Sound familiar to any fellow perfectionists? I have high standards of myself and others, and sometimes that desire to do exceptional work can create undue pressure and stress.

So if you’re at all like me, take a step back. Ask what balls you can actually afford to drop so you can give yourself permission to drop the need for perfection. If you’re stuck, make time in your calendar to celebrate progress against the small wins – doing so will ensure you focus on the good stuff, not just all the work yet to be done on the way.

3. Control the controllable

Last year was the year of the uncontrollable. Truthfully, 2021 hasn’t looked much different. When you have a bad day, it can be really easy to focus on the things you can’t control – be it a global pandemic, weather, other people’s behavior, you name it.

Given that, one of my mantras to get out of a tough patch is to ask what elements of a solution I have control over. Often, that includes my response, resources at my disposal, or even just setting expectations on when or how something will get done. Instead of focusing on the countless things you can’t control, remind yourself of what you can, even if that starts with a nice deep yoga breath.

I was a big fan of the book “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” growing up. In it, after having a tough day, the protagonist suggests the best solution might be to move to Australia. I won’t lie, I’ve thought about following his advice a few times in the last few years. But escaping a bad day can be as easy as acknowledging its toughness and changing your mindset. Here’s hoping a sunny outlook for you is just a mantra and deep breath away.

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3 bonding exercises to help strengthen your team dynamics amid the Great Resignation

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Scheduling game nights is one way to improve team bonds at work.

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  • At a time when workers are quitting in record numbers, bonding activities are important to strengthen company culture.
  • Some companies schedule regular ‘anything but work’ check-ins to connect on a more personal level.
  • Game nights, trivia contests, and welcome lunches can also help improve team dynamics.

It’s cheesy, but it works.

So says Frank B. Mengert, founder and CEO of ebm, a North Haven, Connecticut-based benefits and HR tech company, about his company’s weekly video call, known as “Friday Vibes.” The one rule: You can talk about anything but work.

These unconventional meetings – ebm’s sometimes involve games like Two Truths and a Lie – have helped reduce turnover in the company since they started them in May 2020. At a time when employees are quitting in record numbers and rotating through workplaces without ever meeting coworkers in-person, such bonding activities can potentially improve team dynamics, says Timothy Golden, professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Lally School of Management and a longtime researcher of remote work.

From Inc. 5000 CEOs, here are three ways to forge bonds between team members in your still-virtual workplace.

1. “Anything but work” check-ins

Consistency is crucial to Friday Vibes, Mengert says. Every Friday at 4 p.m., anywhere from half to all of ebm’s 47 employees hang out on one Zoom call and chat about non-work topics or play games, especially with new hires. Most Friday Vibes go over the allotted time, he adds. Serious topics like mental health come up sometimes, or the team might spend the whole hour discussing types of cars they’ve driven before.

A couple of months into the pandemic, the team at Burlingame, California-based gaming and strategy research firm IDG Consulting started to look a little haggard, says CEO and president Yoshio Osaki. The 11-person company went remote in 2018 but over time, IDG employees lost an element of interpersonal connection. “We were our own little islands,” he said. When the pandemic hit and people started going through lockdowns and additional childcare stress, Osaki finally realized that since the company went remote he had been checking in on what people were doing, not how they were doing. And morale seemed to be taking a hit as a result.

That’s actually pretty common in a remote environment, Golden says. People tend to be more task-oriented than relationship-oriented, so managers have to find ways to rebuild interpersonal trust and rapport virtually. Osaki’s solution was to implement a 30-minute mandatory non-work chat every other week (it’s since expanded to 60 minutes).

The calls provided fun bonding time, but some turned less lighthearted. Osaki realized that some employees needed additional help and added an annual $1,000 self-care stipend to make it easier to pay for things like therapy. He learned an employee had back pain and bought them an ergonomic chair. Another had gotten into building computers, so they bought him some tools, and he ended up building one for their data scientist. And beyond the insight on employees’ needs, Osaki said, “We saw an increase in productivity as well as creativity.” In sum, starting the chat has been an important factor in making 2021 a record year for IDG’s revenue.

2. Gratitude sharing

Telling your employees you appreciate them seems like obvious advice – but helping them do it in structured ways helps you keep from losing them, according to Keegan Caldwell, founder and managing partner of Boston-based Caldwell Intellectual Property Law. Every Friday at noon, employees share whom they’ve been grateful for over the last week.

“What we found was this was the most important meeting for us to have,” Caldwell said. He started it three years ago, inspired by his 12-step recovery process and his ability to make it through the associated challenges. Since then, he estimates, it has improved retention by 10%.

For Boston-based Winthrop Wealth and CEO Max Winthrop, it’s about the “small wins.” On their morning call, the team has the option to share their tiny victories, like putting in extra effort to help a client’s family after their spouse died. The company started it after doing a workshop in the fall of 2020 with self-actualization and sharing activities – and Winthrop hasn’t lost an employee since. It also helps him keep perspective as a leader, he said: “The small contributions add up to the greater success.”

3. Games and experiences

Every month or so, employees at government IT contractor Kech play bingo and Pictionary, compete for who has the cutest pet photo, or speculate about how they would survive a zombie apocalypse. Chris Carpenter, the Williamsburg, Kentucky-based company’s CEO, and cofounder, likes to mix it up. Her company, which operates call centers for government services, had high turnover before the pandemic. But she says she’s managed to keep a core group of employees by adding fun and human connection into their workdays.

Most events come with prizes, and Carpenter estimates she spends $2,000 on gift cards a year for the winners. She organizes them herself and regularly gets messages from employees asking when the next game will be.

When it comes to games, pick something that is collaborative rather than competitive to boost organizational cohesion, says Sean Newman, a visiting professor at Rollins College and senior vice president of operations at London-based financial services firm Aon. And try to use bonding activities or games to build up relationships between specific employees. “To the extent that your games can show the manager really cares and establish that relationship… it can be a real positive outcome for retention,” he said.

Games and more elaborate, planned events can help avoid the dreaded Zoom happy hour, says Jonathan Conelias, CEO of Boston-based ReElivate, which provides virtual experiences for clients, including Amazon and Google. His advice: Try to plan something special and interesting that gives employees a shared experience to refer to, like an escape room.

Lauren Greenwood’s company, YouCopia, which is based in Chicago and provides organizational home goods for consumers, simply does welcome lunches on the first day for new hires with three weird questions for everyone else to answer. (The meals were virtual for part of the pandemic but are now in-person for smaller groups.) If you’re too busy to organize creative bonding activities – or it’s just not your thing – hire someone to handle it, she advises.

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Everything you should know before hiring private contractors for your business

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Hiring independent contractors instead of employees can save you 15 to 30% on payroll taxes and benefits.

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  • Hiring private contractors can be tricky when it comes to properly filing taxes and worker’s comp insurance.
  • If a contractor functions like a full-time employee, misclassifying them which invite hefty penalty fees.
  • If you operate in multiple states, adjust your policies to follow the state with the strictest laws.

Jessica Stuart learned the hard way the risks of relying on independent contractors. In 2016, her Washington, DC-based production company, Long Story Short Media, filmed in 40 states and hired local crews for each project. The next year, it got slapped with an insurance audit, requiring Stuart to get proof from each of her vendors that they all carried workers’ compensation insurance – or be on the hook for back payments.

“It took us down this massive rabbit hole,” she said, “looking at: Is it 52¢ or $100 that we owe to Montana, because we filmed there for two days?” Many companies rely on employer of record firms – like TriNet or NPI – to avoid headaches. But if you plan to handle compliance in-house, here’s what to know.

Know your ABCs

Federal and state worker-classification laws vary widely, so consult with a lawyer who’s well-versed in the rules everywhere you operate, said Tracey Diamond, a labor and employment attorney at law firm Troutman Pepper. In some states, independent contractor relationships are subject to the “ABC test,” meaning you must show that a) the contractor’s work is not under your company’s direction and control, b) it is outside the course of your company’s usual business, and c) the contractor has an independent business to do that work.

Beware the permalancer trap

If a contractor works for you full time and has no other clients, and you’re exercising control over that contractor’s work, it’s time to consider reclassification, said Craig Gehring, cofounder and CEO of MasteryPrep, a test-preparation company in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that employs about 50 staffers and 150 contractors.

“Let’s say we have this person who’s writing items for us every day, and they’re following all our guidelines, and they’re coming to all of our company meetings. They’re just an employee at that point,” Gehring said. “Let’s not try to figure out how we can color outside the lines.”

Gauge your risk tolerance

Hiring independent contractors instead of employees can save you 15 to 30% on payroll taxes and benefits, said Richard Reibstein, co-head of law firm Locke Lord’s independent contractor compliance practice. But if you’re caught misclassifying, what you’ll owe in back taxes, benefits pay­ments, fines, and federal penalties could easily obliterate those savings. And that’s if you don’t get sued. If you operate in multiple states, Gehring advises mitigating that risk by tailoring your policies to the one with the strictest laws.

As for Stuart? Well, she’s found that strict compliance has been well worth the cost. Her company still hires contractors, but it now has 27 full-timers on its staff. Monthly overhead has more than doubled since 2016, but profit margins have also increased. “It was an investment,” she said. “But in terms of the trajectory of the company, we’ve grown exponentially ever since.”

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6 tips to make work meetings more productive and valuable

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If meetings interrupt your progress, try asking which meetings actually add value to your team.

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  • If you lead meetings at work, it’s important to ensure they’re concise and make the most of everyone’s time.
  • Provide an agenda, clarify action items to stay on track, and recap what needs to get done.
  • Check in with your coworkers to ask which meetings they think are the most valuable and productive.

If you are like most business owners, you start the day by reviewing your calendar and seeing how many meetings you have for the day. Often, there are quite a few each day, many of which are marked as urgent. This can be a total productivity killer – not to mention a mood killer as well.

In fact, meetings are one of the first things I go over when I start working with a new business coaching client because it takes up such a huge portion of their day. When I find a client who is struggling with the constant barrage of meetings and interruptions, we go through a series of questions about the meetings that they hold. Questions like:

  • How many meetings do you have on an average day?
  • Do you have to be present for all of them, or are any of them able to be passed off to one of your team members?
  • Do all of the meetings you currently lead or participate in add real value?
  • Or have they just become a dull routine?
  • Which ones really add the most value?
  • Which meetings could be canceled, or made less frequent, or shorter?
  • Which meetings need to be added or extended?

1. Always plan your meetings in advance

If you don’t have an agenda, don’t hold the meeting. The chances of you going off the rails and wasting time on things that don’t create value are very high. Instead, postpone the meeting until you can dedicate a bit of time beforehand to lay out the agenda.

2. Start strong

Start on time and start strong. Jump right into your agenda, and get to the point. Everyone’s time is valuable and if you spend five or ten minutes of each meeting getting warmed up an hour or more might be wasted a day on small talk.

3. Stay focused

It’s easy to get sidetracked. It’s more difficult to stay on task but well worth the effort. Follow your agenda, and if you do find yourself on a tangent, write it down as a future action item and address it at another time.

4. Give everyone a chance to speak

Beware of one or two strong personalities hijacking your meeting. This includes you! A simple trick to give a voice to the quieter participants is to give them a moment to “jot down” their ideas, thoughts, or input to be shared with you later.

5. Clarify action items as you go

Got a long meeting and don’t want to miss anything? Flag all-important action items as you go, including:

  • Who?
  • Does what?
  • By when?
  • To what standard?
  • How to close the loop?

6. Recap after the meeting

After the meeting is over, send out a meeting recap email outlining the action items and discussion points that were covered in the meetings.

If needed, put the recap into your project management software as well.

Above all else, be consistent with your actions. A calendar full of pointless meetings is nothing to aspire to. A calendar full of well-planned out value-added meetings that will help propel your business forward is.

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How to create a business LinkedIn page to boost your company’s credibility

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Creating regular content and having an aesthetically pleasing page can boost your company’s LinkedIn presence.

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  • In order to create the best LinkedIn page for your business, aesthetics are key.
  • Posting regularly and interacting with comments with keep your followers interested.
  • Plan your content calendar in advance to be ready for relevant holidays or industry events.

If you own a business, you should own it on LinkedIn. You need a business page to help market your business.

Having a business page on the professional networking platform helps boost your company’s credibility. It’s an extra step that shows you mean business and you’re serious about your company.

If you don’t have a business page yet, or you do but it needs some attention, here are some ideas for getting that page going and taking it from good to great.

Make it look good

You need a logo and a banner or cover image. Otherwise, your page just doesn’t look complete or professional. You have to figuratively hang your shingle on LinkedIn. If you don’t have a designer, head over to DIY design sites like Canva, and stock image sites.

Next up, fill out all of the fields that will tell people about your company: Tagline, Company “About,” Website, Contact Information, and Specialties.

Post content regularly

You need to give people a reason to go to your page. Content is the way to do it. Content doesn’t have to be original articles, but those are great – and you should definitely include them in your LinkedIn content plan. Other content you can include on your page: short posts or so-called status updates, videos, polls, and photos.

If you’re posting videos to Facebook, why not also post them to LinkedIn? If your business lends itself to photos, and you are already posting to Instagram, then it makes sense to post your photos to your company’s LinkedIn page. You can also post events to your business page.

Enlist help

Building and maintaining an engaging LinkedIn business page is a job for more than just one person. I will confess that my own business LinkedIn page is not as robust – a corporate word that I hate – as it could be. I need to take my own advice here and enlist help. That said, you need to have more than one person in charge of your company page.

What that means is having more than one-page administrator. Page administrators can mine LinkedIn and your company for content to post. They can also invite people to follow the page and, of course, engage in any discussion that ensues.

It would also help to have an internal communications plan that invites others in your organization to share from the company’s LinkedIn page and even write content for it. You might have people on staff who don’t have time to write a regular blog or regularly write for their own LinkedIn page, but who do occasionally want to contribute content to the company’s LinkedIn and then share that content to their own profiles. Encourage contributors within your company.

Make a content plan

I believe writer’s block largely comes from not having a plan. Thinking of the content that you want to create for your business page is a whole lot easier if you plan ahead. It’s too overwhelming if you are on a deadline to post something.

You need direction and purpose. You need a content calendar. And you don’t need to wait until January to start. Start now. Map out a month of content, or a quarter or a half year. Ask yourself things like, what holidays are coming up? What seasons? Not just winter, summer, and fall but also back-to-school or football season. What industry events are happening? What’s in the news? What should you write, post, or create, and when should you write, post, or create it?

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3 things you should discuss at every mentoring session

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Mentorship sessions can be more effective when focusing on areas of improvement.

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  • David Finkel is a business author and CEO of Maui Mastermind, a business coaching company.
  • If you’re a business mentor, Finkel suggests regularly checking in with your mentee to help them grow.
  • Focus your advice on what needs improvement and create action items for future meetings.

As a business coach for more than 25 years, there is a lot to be said for learning how to tap into your network of colleagues to learn new skills and help get past business hurdles. Having a mentor is one of the main ways that some of the best business owners have been able to scale and grow their businesses, and it would likely help you do the same. And for many, the opportunity to return the favor is something that they aspire to do in their career. Whether that is taking on a mentee in your industry or helping a key team member grow in their position, there is a lot to consider. One of the most important things that I always encourage others to think about when you first start out, is the structure in which you will hold your meetings.

So today I wanted to share with you a meeting outline that I use when taking on a new business coaching client or mentee, or when coaching a key team member for growth.

1. Check in on key action areas

This will vary depending on who you are working with, but the formula will stay the same. Each and every time you meet with each other, you begin the meeting with a check-in on key action items that were left to do at the end of your last session. If they have been unable to take action, delve further into why and address it head-on.

This could look something like: “Casey, last time we talked you said you were going to write up the job description for your new assistant. How did that go?”

2. Troubleshoot and problem solve

Once you have touched base on the action items, the next thing you want to discuss is any problems that they are currently experiencing and talk through some solutions or next steps. Be careful not to just “solve it” for them. Instead, help them brainstorm solutions and offer ideas when necessary.

If they say, “I’m struggling with X, how can I handle it?” Help them define the problem, clarify what a solution would need to do for them, create options that would meet these success criteria, and then help them think through and pick the best solution to start with. Also, help them clarify in advance how they’ll react if their solution is or isn’t working, so they can adjust based on what happens.

3. Create action items for the next meeting

The last thing you want to do during a mentoring session is make sure that you capture progress and notes, and create action items for the next meeting. Try to capture action commitments clearly in your notes so that you will be sure to have them front and center next time you talk.

Recap and numerate these action commitments at the end of each coaching conversation. This will help enable a clean hand-off.

“Sophia, let me recap what you’ve committed to doing before our next call. Two items. First, that you’ll … And second, that you’ll … Did I get that correctly? Great, I’ll make sure I circle back with you during our next meeting.”

Which then, of course, leads us to number one for our next meeting. Using this formula, you will be able to hold your mentee accountable and start to see real growth and development during your time together. Good luck!

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How to strengthen your self-confidence and personal leadership skills at work

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Solidifying your personal values is critical to developing leadership skills

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  • Business leaders should prioritize their personal development with as much focus as they support their employees.
  • To strengthen self-leadership, be confident in your own judgement and solidify your personal values.
  • Be a lifelong learner, and celebrate small successes to build team confidence.
  • See more stories on Insider’s business page.

Most business leaders focus first on providing guidance to their team, but neglect self-leadership as equally important. In my experience, many entrepreneurs rely too much on the perspective of a trusted advisor or try to emulate a competitor who is getting attention. Personal leadership is setting your own direction and making real decisions first.

For example, no one really believes that Elon Musk is following someone else’s lead as he charges ahead with Tesla, SpaceX, and other initiatives. Steve Jobs famously is quoted as saying, “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.” Of course, this kind of leadership has a big risk, since you have no one to blame if you get it wrong.

The challenge is how to develop that self-leadership in every aspiring entrepreneur and business professional role. As a mentor to many entrepreneurs, I don’t believe that it is only a birthright, and there are several key strategies, including the following, that you can learn and practice which will lead to success:

1. Give your own judgment a high priority in decisions

I’m not suggesting that you not ask for or ignore other views and data, but simply use these to incrementally bolster your own judgment and confidence. Then make the decision your own, before you use it to lead the team. Over time, your self-worth and your leadership performance will increase.

Getting lots of input on important issues is always a good idea. It can help you be right when, without expert help, you might fail. But it can turn into a flaw if you’re depending on other people’s opinions because you have no confidence in your own judgment.

2. Solidify and demonstrate your personal values

Strong values lead to a perception of a strong character, which is the essence of a strong leader. A real business leader must have a set of guiding values and morals, which set your reputation in the mind of others and improve your self-leadership perception. You can’t be a leader without values.

Every person and every company needs a set of core values. Each opportunity and leadership decision should be looked at through the lens of these core values or you will create unnecessary self-conflict and failure with your own self-leadership.

3. Increase your own knowledge in areas of interest

Focus on becoming an expert in relevant areas rather than relying solely on other people. This may mean attending industry conferences, taking college courses, or reading some key books. The more you know, the more self-confident you will be to make your own leadership decisions.

In many cases, the challenge may just be your ability to market yourself, and what you know. It may be time for you to start your own blog, write a book, or volunteer as a speaker at public events in your domain. Make sure everyone knows your expertise.

4. Demonstrate integrity and strong ethics in all activities

How you communicate informally and spend your time is as important as the decisions you make as a leader. People expect their leaders to act with personal integrity in their private life if they are to be followed in public decisions. Be open and transparent with the people around you.

Personal and business ethics are more than just obeying laws. You can be perceived as dishonest, unprincipled, untrustworthy, unfair, or uncaring without breaking the law. Ethical leaders often do more than they have to do and less than they are allowed to do.

5. Display personal leadership often to build momentum

The more you use your newfound leadership ability, the greater your satisfaction and confidence will be. People around you will recognize that energy and follow you more willingly. The result will be a self-fulfilling prophecy of quicker and better leadership, for you and for your team.

6. Celebrate every small success to build team confidence

Many entrepreneurs I know wait for that big event to celebrate their leadership. It’s actually more important to capitalize on all the small successes along the way, to build your momentum and everyone’s confidence in your leadership. You need this to weather the hard times.

In my experience, no title or amount of money will work as a substitute for self-leadership, or get you perceived as a business leader. In this very competitive age, with the current high rate of change in the marketplace, it behooves you to maximize your self-leadership, and be perceived as the business leader you always wanted to be. It’s never too late to learn and improve.

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Employee burnout is on the rise – here’s what companies can do to help

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Battling burnout should be a top-down approach.

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  • Nearly 70% of US workers reported their burnout got worse during COVID, according to a survey from Indeed.
  • Companies can help by encouraging employees to prioritize rest and put their well-being first.
  • When leaders normalize unplugging and taking time off, employees are more likely to do the same
  • See more stories on Insider’s business page.

Earlier this year, like so many other companies, my workplace heard loud and clear from our employees that they were feeling exhausted, disconnected, and burnt out. Sadly, this wasn’t a surprise.

The pace of high-growth organizations is often unsustainable. In a recent survey, nearly 70% of US workers said their level of burnout has worsened throughout the pandemic. My workplace responded by introducing a few days of rest and new initiatives to normalize taking breaks and prioritizing wellness. But steps like these aren’t enough – employees everywhere still need more balance and less burnout.

That’s why companies need to invest in long-term changes to how they operate in order to truly battle burnout. While my workplace hasn’t banished burnout for good just yet, we have discovered strategies that are helping employees prioritize rest and minimize stress. Here are three to consider bringing back to your organization:

1. Be vulnerable with your customers

To respond to burnout, companies like Bumble have given their staff a week off. I know what you might be thinking: That would never work for your organization, right? You have customers who depend on you – they’d be livid if you were offline for a week.

We were worried about this, too, before implementing HubSpot’s annual “Week of Rest” and so we proactively communicated to our customers why we were taking time off as a company and what to expect from our support staff in case of emergency. We braced for hundreds of angry replies but instead, we got the opposite.

Our customers were thrilled that we were investing in our people’s well-being, asked how they could implement the same benefit at their company, and even said they were proud to work with us. This was a good reminder that when customers invest in your product, they’re investing in your people, too.

So if you’re adopting initiatives to prioritize employees’ well-being, proactively let your customers know. It helps set expectations for how they can work with you, but it also gives them transparency into your culture, values, and priorities.

2. Prioritize deep work

When was the last time you had a few hours to dig into a strategy document, plan ahead, or think creatively? If you can’t remember, you’re not alone. Jumping from Zoom meetings to Slack to email barely leaves time for lunch, let alone productivity.

That’s why we adopted a “No Internal Meeting Fridays” rule. This ensures we’re taking care of our customers and candidates by continuing external meetings, but that we’re creating space for our employees and leaders to do deep work.

The goal isn’t to cram meetings into every other day of the week, either. It forces us to ask the million-dollar question: Can this meeting be an email? By having an operating system that values intentional work over time-in-meetings, people have more time to think, create, and reflect.

3. Set the tone at the top

Building a culture of flexibility and balance only works if employees feel empowered to use it. That’s why your leadership team needs to be leading from the front in battling burnout.

For example, when we had our global “Week of Rest,” our executive leadership team fully unplugged. If you tell employees not to work but then spend the week racking up tasks, emails, and assignments for them, you’re missing the point.

Similarly, leaders should practice leaving loudly, using Slack statuses to signal that you’re with family or taking a break, and prioritizing your own time to rest and recharge. It’s critical we’re normalizing unplugging and mental health by walking the walk ourselves.

We learned the hard way that burnout gets worse before it gets better. Uncertainty has only made burnout even worse, so I wish I had made deeper changes earlier to our operating system to address them.

If you’re struggling to get buy-in or alignment on long-term burnout initiatives, just remember that your people are your strongest asset. Investing in their success long-term is investing in your company’s and customers’ success long-term.

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How to have difficult conversations at work without being confrontational

Two coworkers having a conversation
Having difficult conversations with coworkers can be challenging. There are ways to make the conversations effective

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  • Having difficult or sensitive conversations with coworkers can be stressful.
  • To keep the tone productive rather than confrontational, approach the meeting with trust and compassion.
  • Prepare what you want to say, listen openly and with empathy, and ask questions to reach a compromise.
  • See more stories on Insider’s business page.

All of us have been on the receiving end of a difficult conversation at work, and many have had to deliver a hard message to others. Unless you are totally inhuman, none of these are painless, and we all wish we had some way to make them more meaningful and more effective. We all want to feel good about our work and relationships, and we want others to feel the same way.

During my many years in business and as a consultant, I have struggled with this dilemma myself and tried to offer clients the insights they needed, but never had a good answer. Thus, I was pleased to see this topic addressed well in a new book, “Can We Talk? Seven Principles for Managing Difficult Conversations at Work” by Roberta Chinsky Mauson.

Mauson is a recognized thought leader on improving employee engagement and has consulted with many top-tier companies and achieved some great results. I agree with her principles for approaching any conversation at work, especially difficult ones, and making them positive and productive, rather than emotional and confrontational. Here are some highlights:

1. Build confidence by trusting yourself and the other party

Build your confidence first and present your side of the conversation in a way to keep the other person engaged and open enough to really hear your thoughts. You also need to take some time to build a trusting relationship with the other person before jumping in and speaking your mind.

The best way to build your own confidence is to solidify your purpose at work and focus on results around that purpose. It’s hard to be confident in what you’re doing if you’re not sure why you’re doing it. When you show confidence, people will trust and follow you.

2. Find clarity by making your point clearly and listening

If you want others to hear you loud and clear, be direct in your communication, choose your words carefully, and stick to the facts. Enter all discussions with an open mind, park your assumptions, and listen deeply. Remember that what someone else hears is dependent on their perspective, not yours.

Too often, the main objective for people who are about to enter a tricky conversation is to get it over as quickly as possible. With that as an objective, you won’t make your point clearly and you may not listen. Practice your message ahead of time and stick to it.

3. Demonstrate compassion by being empathetic and understanding

Empathy and compassion are the impressions you display of how well you understand or feel what the other person is experiencing. These include not only the words spoken but, more importantly, your nonverbal cues and body language. Usually it helps to slow down your speech rather than speed up.

4. Demonstrate curiosity by asking questions rather than shutting down

Being curious and asking questions to learn more about a particular situation shows the other party that you’re interested in what they have to say and helps to move the conversation forward. Be sure not to cross the fine line between coming across as curious versus sounding judgmental.

5. Find compromise and earn respect by respecting others

When seeking common ground, focus on the “why,” keep your eyes on the prize, be open to all alternatives, and be willing to make concessions. Try to make the outcome a “win-win” rather than a “win-lose” result. Always be respectful of alternate views and perspectives that do not match yours.

6. Show credibility, as your word is only as good as your actions

Credibility isn’t a trait you are born with. Rather, it’s something you earn day in and day out. It’s your behaviors that matter – not your intentions. Remember that people don’t work for companies, they work for people they trust. Improve your credibility by being consistent and owning your mistakes.

7. Display courage by navigating the obstacles despite fear

Courage is the determination to move forward despite the fear. The sooner you are able to deal with discomfort, the easier it will be for you to initiate a high-stakes conversation. Not taking action is never a solution, but not every conversation is worth having. In all cases, summon the courage to stand up for yourself.

As you can see, there’s a lot that needs to go into handling a challenging work situation when your goal is to have a productive discussion and you need to continue to maintain a relationship with the other person.

Since these principles often take time to have an impact, you need to start your thinking and focus now.

Read the original article on Business Insider