How to lead when everyone is tired
The difficult part of leadership is often not setting direction. It is keeping things clear when energy is low and patience is disappearing.
Most change programmes seem to imagine everyone starts with a full battery.
They don't.
By the time a big change reaches the difficult middle, people may already have spent months dealing with uncertainty. Teams have been reorganised. Roles have changed. People have left. New priorities have arrived before the old ones disappeared.
And all the normal work still needs doing.
This is when leadership can go wrong.
Energy drops, so leaders try to create more of it. More meetings. More messages. More urgency. More enthusiasm.
Usually, people don't need more noise.
They need things to become clearer.
Clarity becomes more valuable
Ambiguity is expensive when you're tired.
If someone has plenty of energy, they can work around an unclear brief. They ask questions, chase decisions, join another meeting and work out what somebody probably meant.
When they're already stretched, every one of those things takes a little more out of them.
So remove decisions where you can.
What are we actually trying to achieve?
What matters this week?
What can wait?
Who decides?
What are we no longer doing?
That last question matters.
Leaders often add priorities far more confidently than they remove them. Eventually everything becomes important, which is another way of saying nothing has been prioritised at all.
The decisions don't disappear.
They simply get pushed down to everyone else.
Don't perform optimism
People can normally tell when things are difficult.
They know the deadline is tight. They know the team has lost two people. They know the new system isn't working properly.
Standing in front of them and insisting everything is going brilliantly doesn't create confidence.
It creates distance.
You don't need to become miserable either.
There is a useful middle ground between doom and corporate cheerfulness.
Things are difficult.
Here's what we know.
Here's what we don't know yet.
Here's what we're doing about it.
And here's what I need from you.
There is something reassuring about a leader who can describe reality without being frightened by it.
Protect the important work
When people are tired, leaders have to become better filters.
A new request arrives.
Does the team really need to deal with it now?
Another meeting appears.
Does everyone really need to attend?
Someone senior has had an idea.
Does it automatically become everybody else's emergency?
Leadership isn't simply passing pressure down the organisation as efficiently as possible.
Part of the job is absorbing some of it.
That may mean saying no. Moving a deadline. Cancelling work. Making a decision with imperfect information rather than asking six people to investigate it further.
It may occasionally mean disappointing someone above you so the people below you can actually finish something.
Calm is useful
None of this is particularly dramatic.
That's probably why it matters.
When a team is exhausted, they don't necessarily need a leader to give the speech from Braveheart.
They need someone who knows where they're going.
Someone who can decide what matters.
Someone who will tell them the truth when things are difficult.
And someone willing to stop unnecessary work reaching them.
When energy is high, people can compensate for a surprising amount of organisational mess.
When energy is low, they can't.
That's when leadership should become clearer, calmer and quieter.