In a recent episode of The Positive Polarity, I had the pleasure of meeting with the host Dave Molenda who is also a #1 Amazon Best Selling Author and Speaker. It’s here that I shared key strategies on how you can utilize shared language, positive conflict, and connection to weather any business storm ahead.
Whether on a sailboat, in the workplace, or throughout life, I’ve learned there’s one critical mental health skill everyone must learn to encourage smooth sailing.
We must understand what factors around us are in our control and which are out of our control.
You have no time to debate whether something is in your control while navigating a sailboat through stormy waters. The whole crew’s safety rides on each sailor showing up focused and motivated.
That’s why as a sailboat captain, I must recognize which broader caretaking tasks are under my control.
If a sailor shows up visibly burned out for their time at watch, I must ensure their wellbeing comes first so the entire crew’s wellbeing won’t suffer.
What do you think would happen if I didn’t send that person down below for some rest?
Even one sailor’s lack of motivation, attention, energy, and cognitive function could lead to unthinkable disaster on the water.
Sadly, most corporate leaders never fully acknowledge that the mental and emotional wellbeing of their team falls under their realm of control.
Just like the sailor, one team member’s symptoms of burnout will create a ripple effect across the entire team. Not only will their own work suffer, but it will lead to further slowdowns and spread negativity throughout the entire workplace.
That’s why every true steward leader understands they’re at the helm of preventing burnout in the workplace.
You may have heard that employee burnout has reached record levels during the pandemic. Burned-out workers are not engaged in daily tasks, so this truly demonstrates the impact of preventing burnout in the workplace on productivity.
Plus, burnout spreads. Remote work environments prevent one team member from showing up to work visibly burned out and spreading the negativity to others. However, working from home also creates other stressors that workers might find particularly challenging. It all depends on the individual.
The same logic applies to every workplace, age group, and company: Prevent burnout in the first place and organization-wide productivity will skyrocket.
As a leader, it’s your job to prevent burnout in the workplace.
Specifically, preventing burnout in one team member so it doesn’t spread to the entire workplace – much like water that gets inside a sailboat.
I know what you’re thinking. “You’re saying it’s my job to watch every single person’s mental wellness, really now?” Yes. Leaders understand their role as the caretaker of everyone across their team.
It doesn’t mean becoming overly parental in everyone’s personal lives or emotions. It does, however, go back to understanding your own control over their mental and emotional wellbeing at work.
“But I don’t scream and punish people.” You don’t have to. Everyone struggles to meet the organization’s expectations and their own internalized work expectations that you’re responsible for enforcing.
You might be the kindest leader in the industry already, but you also must acknowledge your role as each team member’s psychological caretaker in the workplace.
Now you’re probably wondering how a steward leader could manage the mental and emotional wellness of each person across a team.
First, think about the negative emotions within your control as a leader, specifically stress and overworking.
Just like the captain of a vessel must promote downtime and diversion to keep the crew fresh and alert, a corporate leader must monitor the stress levels across their team – both individually and holistically.
Doing so ensures you can prevent burnout in the workplace by plugging the leak at its source, keeping your team productive and enthusiastic.
Start by learning the key signs of burnout so you can identify and gently rectify them as they arise:
Sometimes this involves placing a team member in a new role with tasks suited for them. Others, it means talking to them about realistic expectations for themselves and the importance of self-care.
Ideally, you want to avoid creating the conditions that drive someone to burnout in the first place. A steward leader also understands that, like burnout, all types of negative emotion and energy spread.
If a captain pointed out the weaknesses of each crewmate constantly, the whole crew would sail in a state of perpetual fear and despair.
That’s why another critical part of stewardship, and preventing burnout, is adapting a StrengthsFirst mindset regarding yourself and your team.
With strengths leadership, we take time to learn each team member’s unique strengths. Make it your job to encourage each person’s strengths and help them to partner up with people that can offset areas that they are less strong in – anywhere you can.
This type of caretaking in the workplace – placing each team member in the right environment to thrive – is another psychological wellness component totally within our control as leaders.
It’s much easier to set your team up for productivity and avoid any burnout when each person’s working in “their element.”
Becoming a steward leader with an eye to preventing burnout in the workplace doesn’t come overnight from reading a book or list of tips.
It takes dedication and time to change your mindset and communication style, especially the part that involves switching to the critical StrengthsFirst leadership.
A hands-on sailing workshop on the open water offers the perfect exposure to enhance your current leadership mindset and adapt the steward leader’s approach. That’s what we do at Full Sail Leadership, along with our comprehensive team-building program, to create a generation of steward leaders of all ages.
Join me and the Full Sail Leadership team for a workshop providing experience on the water and knowledge in the classroom. Sign up for a Full Sail Leadership workshop now! Or join us this Spring in the beautiful Florida Keys aboard the historic General Patton’s WhenandIf sailboat.
Fear can drive you to do disastrous things you’ll later regret. When we’re confronted with a challenge, our brain’s fight or flight response kicks in – our fear instinct.
We react irrationally without thinking through the full range of possibilities and consequences. On the open water, fear-based thinking is dangerous because it leads to fear-driven action. Fear that’s not addressed when the seas are calm inevitably leads to trouble when disaster strikes.
That’s why every experienced captain understands the importance of leading from faith over fear on his sailboat. Just like sailing captains, your steward leadership charts the course for either fear- or faith-based decisions at your organization. Today’s uncertain and treacherous waters leave no room for fear. One poor decision made from a point of fear can lead your company down a dark path from which there’s no return.
Unsurprisingly, today’s remote workers report heightened fear and other negative emotions: 54% feel worried, 46% report anxiety, and 62% say they’re stressed.
As leaders, we must prioritize faith in ourselves first so we can lead from faith in good times and bad.
As a leader, your job isn’t to bark orders, point out faults, and punish workers when they fall out of line or don’t meet expectations. The best leaders know that they must fill a role as caretakers of the soul for everyone across their team.
Your team already faces enough fear around every turn:
They don’t need more fear-based leadership radiating from your presence every time you walk by.
Instead, it’s your job as a leader to exude faith to and for your team. Faith that:
This faith over fear mindset allows you to become a steward leader who protects his team and creates a safe place for them to thrive. Steward leaders are caretakers: They ease fears, supply tools, and offer support so the entire team can function at optimal capacity.
It only takes one cataclysmic event for teams running on fear-based leadership to fall apart when it matters most.
Things like performance evaluations and meeting callouts do nothing but instill fear across every member of your organization.
When performance is judged by shortcomings, employees grow reluctant to speak up when there’s a problem they might get blamed for. Issues go unaddressed until they evolve into unavoidable roadblocks.
People point fingers to assign blame instead of finding the root cause of problems and working together to fix them.
Fear-based leadership leaves you in a constant state of reactivity.
Since you’re chronically focused on your team’s weaknesses and shortcomings, you end up stuck ten minutes in the past backtracking, fixing yesterday’s problems, and dishing out punishments.
Again, this reactionary thinking causes us to ignore a problem’s root causes. Instead of fixing our boat’s structural problems, we patch the holes and hope they don’t leak again – but they always will.
A fearful team operates from a defensive, and often hostile, disposition.
Your employees and colleagues show up to work every day worried about potential mistakes they’ve made that will be uncovered today and how leadership will react.
Everyone responds to criticism and complaints – even genuine ones – from a defensive state, seeking to avoid the full range of blame and its consequences. This leaves your team wholly distrustful of each other.
When a leader prioritizes faith over fear, their team trusts them – and each other. Your team will know you have their back and you’re invested in their best interest.
Faith-based leaders operate under the assumption that people are generally well-meaning and want to do their best.
Instead of punishing weaknesses, you uplift people based on their unique strengths. You celebrate their individuality instead of forcing them to fit into boxes.
Rather than operating in fear, employees become excited to share their accomplishments and take on the next challenge as a team.
This could translate into removing traditional performance evaluations, reassigning responsibilities for employees, and just adapting a supportive mindset overall.
It’s always easier to prevent problems from happening instead of cleaning up after them.
As every sailor knows, regular boat maintenance and cleaning are key to keep your vessel in top shape. Otherwise, something could go drastically wrong at the worst possible time.
When you run on faith over fear, you lead proactively. You look for conditions that might create rocky water ahead and chart a new course.
Proactively preventing problems means no one is ever assigned blame, punished, or fearful.
Fearful employees don’t speak up when something might go wrong. They’ve learned to keep their heads down and avoid making waves.
Steward leaders foster an environment where their teams trust each other.
With widespread trust, people feel comfortable voicing concerns, problems, and mistakes because they know they won’t be punished. They also know that the issue will be addressed appropriately without anyone losing their job or being put in the corner.
People need faith in both leadership and those around them before trust can build.
By definition, steward leadership makes you the caretaker of your team. Instead of promoting fears and exploiting weaknesses, it’s your job to lift up each individual worker’s strengths and create a trusting environment.
Effective steward leadership doesn’t happen overnight. People won’t suddenly trust you just because you’ve said something nice. It takes real actions, consistency, and time. Once your team realizes that you’re prioritizing faith over fear, they can learn to trust you. Next, they’ll start building trust and openness with each other.
That’s the goal and it’s the key to long-term success via steward leadership: the only caring way to lead and the only successful style for managing today’s uncertainty.
Are you ready to chart the course towards faith over fear steward leadership? Space is still available for our exclusive spring leadership workshop in the Florida Keys aboard General Patton’s historic yacht. Claim your spot now!
Resilience (noun):
/rəˈzilyəns/
The capacity to quickly recover from difficulties; toughness. (Oxford Languages)
In psychology, resilience refers to our ability to cope with mentally or emotionally challenging situations and swiftly return to our pre-crisis mental equilibrium.
Resiliency is an acquired skill – it’s not something anyone is born with. I would even argue that those who seem born into mental toughness are simply bottling their fears and emotions.
Instead, resiliency is something we build within ourselves as a response to crisis and hardship.
We’ve all had a task we put off for weeks because even thinking about it made us anxious. Once we finally commit to the task, we realize it wasn’t as stressful as we imagined. Next time, we jump into the same task head-on.
As a sailing instructor, I get to witness this process of resilience-building in newbie sailors on the open water.
High winds, choppy waters, and extreme heeling of the boat are frightening experiences for new sailors. Just imagine the fear and panic you would feel yourself.
For me, however, I find such conditions exhilarating, comforting even. That’s because as an experienced instructor, I have the trust, knowledge, and ability needed to manage the situation mentally and emotionally – I have resilience.
Building such resilience in the workplace is key to traversing the inevitable rocky waters every company faces. It’s how you learn from crisis and grow.
Over the years, I’ve learned that the high seas are the best place for building resilience. Sailing creates a situation where we face the perfect ratio of factors in and out of our control.
Specifically, sailing instills seven critical components of resilience:
A large part of resilience comes from understanding what we can and can’t control. For things we can’t control, we must trust the boat’s design, our crew, and God.
For things under our control, we must remain calm to make competent decisions and keep everyone safe. We must stay confident in our ability to cope with strength and dignity.
We need to uphold our own positive character and contribute to the team to the best of our individual abilities. Part of character also requires understanding each crew member’s unique character, contribution, and confidence.
Resilience isn’t something you can learn from a book or inspirational speeches. Resilience only comes from personal or collective experiences.
It’s so easy to judge people for making the “wrong” decisions in frightening situations. “How could they have done X? I would have done Y if I were in their shoes!”
The truth is that we never know for certain how we would react to a situation until we face it ourselves.
Every year, dozens of sailors decide to put themselves in crisis by signing up for the HOOK Race. Non-sailors would consider the HOOK Race a nightmare: It takes you over the relentless waters of Lake Michigan and Green Bay, through Death’s Door, and around Wisconsin’s treacherous Washington Island and Door Peninsula.
As the name implies, Death’s Door is no joke, even for the most experienced sailors. The hazardous conditions in this part of Green Bay have put hundreds of vessels out of commission – especially sailboats.
Death’s Door unique combination of wind direction, water currents, and rocks makes it the ultimate nightmare or exciting challenge depending on how you look at it.
This year’s HOOK Race was one of the most relentless ones yet. We faced wind speeds of nearly 65mph, torrential rains, thunder, and lightning. Winds tore the masts off seven boats and ripped the ails to shreds on several other boats.
Our boat made it to the end, so our resilience grew.
Every sailor who’s finished HOOK Race knows that once they’ve finished it, they have the resilience to take on anything – especially as a team. They walk away from the experience confident and armed with the coping tools they need.
No one wants to hear this, but your team must face crises and emergencies if you want to build the mental toughness, character, and confidence needed to persevere.
It’s not what you go through but how you handle it and respond.
People who have experienced crises in life and subsequently spent time in therapy will often say they feel prepared to handle anything life throws at them. Although they wouldn’t repeat the crisis if they had the chance, they’ll say the crisis made them who they are today.
Every organization needs to learn mental toughness and resilience across the workplace. On one hand, this is harder than responding to individual crises because you must build resilience in multiple people simultaneously.
On the other hand, everyone knows it’s much easier to cope with a crisis when you have a supportive circle around you.
The Qualities Every Team Needs to Build Resilience in the Workplace
Today’s workplaces don’t prioritize resilience-building. Instead, workplaces run on fear.
Read between the lines a bit and you’ll see fear lurking around every corner at most companies. Fear of economic turbulence. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of being reprimanded, demoted, or fired. Fear of losing benefits. Fear of fellow workers. Fear of leadership.
We already know fear is a horrible motivator in other aspects of life – it drives us to make irrational decisions, react without thinking things through, lash out in anger, and isolate.
Why then do we still allow fear to run our corporate life?
To build resilience in the workplace, teams need an environment free of fear where the following conditions are met:
These qualities are the secret to a resilient workplace that keeps them focused on the vision. Resilient workplaces have the coping tools and mental toughness to respond to crises swiftly and shrewdly. With this type of support, a crisis goes from devastating to a small blip in operations.
Resilience in the workplace and mental toughness comes from the top down. It’s your responsibility as a leader to build a culture of respect, trust, and honesty.
Approach leadership from more of a caretaker role – just like a captain at sea.
It’s the captain’s job to make sure his crew is fed, safe, connected, respected, and inspired. Today’s corporate leaders must prioritize the emotional and mental wellbeing of their team if they want to succeed.
Once a team’s well-being improves, job performance increases and everything falls into place. Then you’ll have a resilient team ready for the next challenge.
Don’t wait for an emergency to analyze the resilience of your team. Start building mental toughness and support for the next challenge today on the high seas. Our sailing workshops provide the perfect challenge for teams to communicate and support each other.
Browse the Full Sail Leadership workshop schedule now!
Respect: Everyone demands it but only the smartest leaders do what it takes to earn it.
Respect in the workplace starts at the top. If leadership doesn’t foster a culture of respect and dignity, why should team members feel compelled to reciprocate?
If you’re suffering from a complacent team and shriveling productivity, maybe it’s time to revisit respect across your team.
Millennials, for example, make up the largest generation in today’s workforce. When asked how leadership could improve their workplace, over 90% of working millennials said they just want their accomplishments recognized!
That just goes to show today’s leaders aren’t doing the bare minimum to earn their team’s respect.
It’s important to foster a culture of respect in the workplace where everyone feels valued and accountable. You can’t create a conflict-free team – nor should you try – but you can encourage healthy team conflict based on trust and respect.
Imagine a ship where the captain doesn’t respect the crew and the crew doesn’t respect their fellow sailors. Sailors would ignore commands, neglect to share vital information, and lead the vessel to danger.
A lack of respect ripples across your team, dragging down productivity and engagement while creating negative conflict.
People don’t respect someone who hands down orders and disappears until it comes time to enforce them.
When a lack of respect plagues your workplace, trust disintegrates. Workers don’t trust each other nor their leaders. Major symptoms arise like:
Amazing leaders don’t think of themselves as parents managing children or tsars controlling subjects. The best leaders consider themselves the stewards of their team.
A steward is a caretaker. A steward leader doesn’t try to control their workers – he or she invests in their wellbeing. A steward leader knows respect should be mutual and earned. They lead by example, hold themselves accountable, and encourage honest discussions.
Respect starts at the top. As a leader, you’ll have to earn the respect you wish to receive – and it all starts with trust. If workers are used to being neglected, ignored, and punished, it will take some time.
Chronic trauma from negative conflict is sticky and people develop unhealthy coping methods to avoid future negative conflict. You’ll have to work tirelessly building trust to break down those coping strategies and foster widespread trust.
Conflict-free workplaces don’t exist. Even if an organization appears conflict-free, that only means people’s voices are going unheard and neglected. A conflict-free environment means people have stopped speaking up.
Positive team conflict is vital. People voice their grievances and concerns with respect and the team addresses them together. People aren’t shouted down or punished for speaking their minds.
Fear is a tricky emotion. When people feel unsafe in their surroundings, their brain triggers fight-or-flight mode. Rational thinking shuts down, giving way to emotion-driven decisions.
Over time, fear erodes a person’s sense of safety. People can’t exist in fight-or-flight mode forever. Instead, their brain adapts with learned helplessness.
They say and do things to avoid trauma and conflict. They repress their true emotions.
To reverse these problems, your team must feel psychologically safe. Only when people feel psychologically safe will they feel comfortable enough to voice ideas and address grievances.
When there’s no conflict, it means problems are bubbling below the surface just waiting for a spark to explode. Think of a shoal that goes unseen by a sailing crew who is inattentive to the nautical charts and GPS. Both lead to disaster.
No one cares about meeting organizational goals – and why should they if the organization’s leadership doesn’t value their contribution?
When team members feel valued, appreciated, and respected, your organization can focus on addressing problems and growth.
Positive conflict digs you out of the reactive cycle. People feel invested in the wellbeing of the organization because leadership is invested in their individual wellbeing.
It all starts with trust. Think of the last time someone wronged or betrayed you. Whoever it was no doubt had to earn back your trust. Maybe they didn’t change their behavior and never earned your trust back.
Leadership must show why the team should trust them. As we all know, just saying you’re sorry is never enough unless you make changes to show it. That’s why trust and respect must start at the top.
It’s a positive cycle: Positive conflict breeds respect and accountability which encourages positive conflict.
When people have the entire organization’s best interests in mind, they voice concerns, problems, and ideas freely. People are held accountable – both for their good behavior and bad.
When team members and leadership are held accountable for mistakes AND recognized for achievements (with respect), that encourages trust.
Trust and respect don’t happen overnight. Sailors must spend time learning with their fellow crew making mistakes, building communication, and growing.
The same is true of team building. Fostering a culture of open communication, respect, accountability, and positive conflict takes time. Leadership must first earn trust and respect.
Full Sail Leadership lets you chart the course towards growth and psychological safety on the open seas. Our workshops slash turnover rates, absenteeism, and poor productivity in a hands-on exciting environment.
Find out why a day on the water with Full Sail Leadership is exactly what your team needs to start its path towards growth!
