Ways to Motivate Your Team Through a Crisis with with Empathy and Authority

A crisis pressure-tests leadership and culture. New values form under the strain, and employees gain new perspectives on their organization and the people running it. Communication is the key to keeping them motivated and productive in a season of enormous distraction.

So how do you motivate a team when everything feels uncertain? You communicate more, not less, and you build every message around what your people actually need to hear. The five ways to motivate your team below have carried mine through more than one hard season, and they work just as well for motivating employees on an ordinary Monday.

In more than 30 years running this business, I’ve led through five financial crises. No matter how well you run a company, external forces will test you, your culture, and your resolve. Leaders are constantly processing the future, and your employees are watching to see how confident you are and how clearly you see the situation. They look to you for emotional fuel and signs that everything will be OK.

Five ways to motivate your team through a crisis

Five communication techniques have helped me build trust with, connect with, and motivate my team during high-pressure times.

Mix up your delivery channels

In the early weeks of one crisis, I sent out email memos, numbered so people could follow the thread. They carried situational information: where I was getting my news, what I was doing about the business, and short-term things employees could do to help. Some were instructional. Some had reflections in them. But all of them were sincere. Every time one went out, I got grateful notes back.

At the end of a particularly scary week of news, I sent out a video I recorded privately on Zoom. It was clear and measured. It had hope, but it was honest about what we were all hearing.

Let your employees ask questions

I soon realized it wasn’t enough to communicate out. I had to actively listen to what my employees had to say. Even if you think you know what questions are on their minds, giving them the chance to ask makes all the difference in how “heard” they feel.

We started an ANA (Ask Nancy Anything) process. I mean it, in terms of my commitment to transparency: I’ll answer any question from our staff. We use a polling tool called Slido, where employees submit questions and vote up the ones they want me to answer. Everyone in the company can see what’s on everyone else’s mind. They also know I’m willing to take the tough ones, or to admit that I don’t have all the answers. Don’t cherry-pick the easy questions. Employees notice when you skirt the issue that’s on all their minds. If you have a high-performing team, the questions will be productive and push the organization forward.

Side note: if you answer by video, keep your camera on and look straight into the lens. Let your team see the sincerity in your eyes, so they feel you’re speaking directly to them.

Tell stories

One of our company’s values is to let people know they belong here, and stories are a great way to do that.

During one crisis, my region issued shelter-in-place orders earlier than most of the country, and it scared people. The first Monday after that announcement, I carved 30 minutes out of our staff meeting to tell stories. In 32 years, this was the fifth financial crisis to hit our business through external forces. We told a story from each one and explained what we learned, how each crisis shaped our values, and how we came out stronger, different, but stronger.

In the week that followed, when everyone could have been distracted and unproductive, the team killed it. They redesigned four training products into a virtual format, which was no easy feat, and many stayed up late to get it to market and minimize the hit to our revenue.

Stories don’t just help people feel like they belong to something. They motivate, because they quietly communicate why someone’s actions have meaning and value. I wonder whether that product would have shipped so fast without the stories of resilience we told that Monday. That week was one of our finest hours.

Leverage symbols

Be on the lookout for new symbols that can take on potent meaning in a hard season. Here’s one that emerged for us. We hold optional internal bonding events on Zoom, and at one early in a crisis, an employee shared what she had learned that year from her son, who has Down syndrome. She said he had taught her to be brave, and she used the American Sign Language sign for brave. That sign became the symbol of the season, and we still end a lot of meetings with the gesture.

Recommunicate the vision

A strong, consistent vision helps your team feel like they’re building something great and heading toward their purpose. If you’ve been good at establishing that vision and think it will hold on the other side of a crisis, remind people of the longer journey anyway. You’re still leading them to the same place, you’re just navigating the adversity of an unexpected detour.

When you state and restate the vision, you provide stability and build trust, the two biggest factors in motivating people. At the end of one of my employee videos, I leaned way into the camera and reminded the team that we’re all still going to the same place, and that when we get there and look back, we’ll be proud of what we did in this season. Restating the vision doesn’t only steady people. It keeps them productive on the way there.

Leading isn’t for the fearful.

If you want a place to start, our free guide to motivating story types to guide your team lays out five story types built to move people when it counts. When you’re ready to build this into how your leaders operate, team training gives them practice motivating a team under real pressure. And for more on developing leaders who can hold a team together through anything, visit The Duarte Guide to Leadership Development.

A version of this article originally appeared in MIT SMR.