Have you ever been in a team where you experienced the following?
- Overwhelmed with current workload.
- Lack of forward planning or clear strategy.
- Ongoing tension and conflict with other team members.
- High staff turnover.
- Employee absenteeism or lots of sick leave taken.
- Low productivity or morale.
Each of these examples are telltale signs of resilience issues. If you can relate to any or all of these, then here is a practical externalisation planning exercise that you can do in 30 minutes that will help you identify the causes and map out a practical way forward.
Clean up your MES
Our blueprint, which we call ‘clean up your MES’, is a tested technique which we teach in one of our popular workshops – Going from Stress to Strength.
MES stands for map, explore, and support. It’s a good way of externalising or downloading your thinking around what might be happening and gaining some fresh perspective. Then you can map out a strategy that will help you to increase resilience and deal with some of the trigger points that could be happening in your team.
Mapping the triggers and causes
Let’s look at map first. The map stage is essentially all about identifying the triggers and the causes. We’re talking about the stress triggers and then the causes or the drivers of those moments of stress. What we would really recommend you do is spend about 30 minutes reflecting and documenting all the things that you feel are triggering team stress on an average day. It could be many things that are doing this, but here’s an example.
Let’s say one stress trigger is up line task expectations, or what more senior people or supervisors are expecting of the team. There’s task pressure there. Perhaps individuals aren’t meeting deadlines and therefore causing some negative impact to other people’s responsibilities during the day. Once you’ve identified what those main triggers are, then we’ll move on to the causes.
This is where we once again write down and start looking at what we might believe are driving those stress triggers. Perhaps there might be lack of up line understanding of current workloads, which are creating an unrealistic expectation. That could be a driving cause. Or perhaps there’s some poor planning practices with certain members of the team or individuals, therefore, that’s what’s causing the deadline issues.
Exploring the situation
When you’ve identified what the driving causes are, you can move on to the next part of the process, which is to explore. Exploring in this context means we’re investigating what can we do about this situation, or as we like to call it, ‘solve or surrender’.
What we mean by this is that many of these issues can be resolved through a bit of creative thinking – this is the ‘solve’ part of solve and surrender. Of course, it’s also possible that after some brainstorming, you realise that there’s nothing within your power that you can do, or that there are external forces inhibiting a solution. Therefore, we take on a mindset of surrender. This might sound negative at first, but it’s not.
Solve
Where possible, think of different solutions that could bring about change or solve the issue. For example, if we take the up line workload expectations, perhaps we can meet with the particular people concerned and explore ways that workflow could be improved. We may be able to set new expectations, or create fresh boundaries and consequences for the individuals who aren’t meeting deadlines.
Surrender
When we get to the surrender stage, it can feel like having open-ended tasks on your checklist that are difficult or impossible to cross off. It can be an uncomfortable feeling. What surrender means is finding a way that we can gain emotional closure over things that aren’t able to be solved. So, let’s say there’s an issue that can’t be resolved, and it is what it is. For example, your marketing team wants to be known as ‘The Marketing Mavericks’ instead of ‘Marketing & Communications’. You’ve approached the leadership team and their response has been a resounding no. Therefore, we need to find a way we can support the team and ourselves with ways of diffusing some of that frustration. In other words, finding somewhere we can rest our mind and find closure. Once you do that, it creates some level of boundary with your emotions, which can help to reduce the emotional pressure. Additionally, it helps to offload it rather than allowing ongoing anxiety around things we can’t possibly control.
Support your people
The last part of MES is support. Support is about acknowledging hope and encouragement. It’s about people’s motivation and internal strength and trying to increase that. Because we know that when people feel encouraged, supported, and acknowledged, they’ll generally start to grow in their resilience. They’re able to move forward more effectively. Even in situations where they can’t do anything about a situation, and it’s an ongoing frustration.
The key real strategy here is to find ways to support the emotional weight of your team and create practical strategies to achieve this. For example, perhaps regular debriefs will allow your team to vent. Or perhaps you can point out a few things each week that people are doing well as individuals or as a team. This can go a long way in helping to build resilience levels. When we feel acknowledged, respected, and valued, it can help us to pick ourselves up, gain some light at the end of the tunnel, and give us the strength to keep moving forward positively.
How will you clean up your MES?
Using the MES strategy is an easy way to gain some mental clarity, to put some practical strategies in place, and build resilience in the team. We hope this has been of high value to you and that you find the ‘clean up your MES’ technique useful in approaching some of your team’s stress triggers, as well as finding some positive techniques to move forward.