The Pulse of Your People: Optimizing Workplace Support During Crisis and COVID. An Interview with Nick Smarrelli
/If you don’t understand your people, what motivates them, what scares them, and what they need in order to stay engaged in the midst of an incredibly challenging work season, you aren’t leading well.
As Nick Smarrelli, CEO of GadellNet Consulting declares, “It is a people game” and “Psychology always wins”. Nick shares tips and tactics on how to motivate and get the pulse of your people during crisis and COVID in our conversation.
You can find the Handle with Care: Empathy at Work podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. And you can listen to the interview here…
Nick Smarrelli, CEO of GadellNet Consulting
Here are three key take-aways from my conversation with Nick…
As a leader, you need to be consistently making time to get the pulse of your people. Pre-pandemic, Nick said that he spent about 5% of his time checking in. Now, the number is closer to 40% of his time. These check-ins inform GadellNet’s decisions about pivotal work moments like when to ask people to go back to the office. How much time are you setting aside to purposefully get the pulse of your people.
“Psychology always wins”. I love and deeply resonate with this line from Nick. The way that we train people often doesn’t align with this reality, that leaders spend most of their time managing people. A knowledge, an interest in the inner workings of your people will allow you to hire the best talent, to motivate your staff, and to troubleshoot problems as they come along. Is a deep knowledge of people, of their psychology, a value in your organization? How much is this awareness present or absent in your leadership team?
There is a particular stress that leaders feel at all times, but especially within the dimensions of a global pandemic. In the midst of these pressures, Nick shares with vulnerability with his team, but he has also found it to be immensely helpful to have an external group that “gets” and understands what he is going through as an executive and can support him along the way. Do you have a group of people that you can be real with and that can help you as you lead?