Goodbye winter: tips on nurturing your green shoots

Winter is always a tough season.  Harsh weather, less daylight and the nagging feeling that there isn’t a holiday in sight.  It can often be the same at work –  but how can you shake off the winter blues, re-energise your team and inspire them to go out there and give their best all over again?

Now that we have weathered the worst part of the year and spring is upon us, how can you shake off the winter blues, re-energise your team and inspire them to go out there and give their best all over again?

Show the way
Provide direction – This is a great time of year to re-state the short, medium and long term ambitions for the organisation, so that everyone is clear about the direction of travel.

Make it Ronseal
Define clear roles and responsibilities – It is important that each member of your team understands what they are supposed to be doing, how their role fits into the bigger picture and how their personal contribution matters.

Get out of the way
Empower your people – it is so demotivating to be given all the responsibility for delivering a key initiative but none of the decision making power.  If you really want to motivate your team and inspire performance, let them take full responsibility for making something a success.   Of course you will need to carefully define the scope of the project, what outcomes you expect it to deliver and how you will be kept in touch with progress, but then get out of the way, let your team get on with it and watch the amazing results….

Role model
There is nothing more powerful than leading from the front.  If you are asking your team to up their performance or demonstrate particular behaviours, you need to be out there ‘doing the do’ yourself.  Make sure you are visible and available to offer support.

Begin a career conversation
What aspirations do your team have in the longer term? Do you know? Having a career conversation, which is separate from a performance management conversation, can be a real eye opener.  If done properly it can provide you with important insight into frustrations with current roles, a view on where your people aspire to get to, which will help you to plan your learning and development strategy and can help with longer term succession planning.

Recognition and reward
When your team go above and beyond how do you recognise this? Make sure you have a plan in place which sets out how you will recognise and reward performance.  This isn’t all about big bonuses – non monetary rewards can be just as effective.

Rebecca Brown
Head of Marketing
rebeccab@ninefeettall.com

I’m Becky and I am the Marketing Manager here. Starting at Nine Feet Tall was an important life milestone for me, as it was my first role after an 8-year career break to have my children. I have previously worked in consumer and sports marketing and have always enjoyed building, developing, and executing brand strategies. Having taken the time out to raise my three boys, I wanted to return to marketing and the opportunity at Nine Feet Tall was perfect. For me, working for a strong brand that punches well above its weight (or should that be height?!) in a values led organisation, with a team of fantastic people, and the flexibility of part time hours ticked all the boxes and I feel privileged to have this opportunity. I have been here a little over two years and have enjoyed all the challenges and opportunities along the way. My professional highlights are always when a piece of marketing activity leads to new business and personal highlights are the proper belly laughs with the team at our company days.