درسنامه تفسیری

Morale – Commentary

Hello this is AJ and welcome to the commentary for this months’ lesson; morale. Now, in the commentary let’s talk about practical things you can do as a leader. And we’re all leaders, you know, you might be a leader in your family. You might be a parent, for example, or even an uncle or an aunt or a grandparent. Certainly, the work world gives us opportunities to be leaders.

Even if we’re not a manager, even if your position is not directly leadership, you’re still working with other people, working within a team and so, when morale drops anybody, anyone not just the managers, anyone on a team can and should help to bring up the morale. This is leadership and you don’t need to have a title to be a leader.

Okay so, how do you do it thought? How do you do it? Let’s say, in the situation where morale drops right, this is the big tough thing, where the emotions of the group become negative or weak, how specifically can you start to raise the morale of your group, of your team? What are some techniques you can use? Let’s talk about it, very specifically.

Okay, the first one is connected to our interactive lesson, to that essay. So the first thing you can do, let’s say you have a defeat. You’ve lost, your team lost. In sports maybe you’ve lost the game or you’ve lost a few games. In business maybe you’ve had some kind of failure with your team, with your family, someone in the family, maybe several people in the family have had some serious problems and the morale drops.

1. The first thing you can do is to refocus on the strategic picture, the big picture, the long-term.

One of the big problems with morale and with teams in general is that people get lost in the short-term. So we have a problem, we have a challenge, we have a defeat in the short-term and we get too focused on the short-term and we start to feel like everything is hopeless, it’s terrible. And we focus so much on the short-term defeat, the short-term problems that we stop looking at the big picture, the long-term sometimes the long-term situation is still fairly good.

So, let’s say for example, in a business maybe in the short-term you lose some money.

Maybe you try something, you try an investment, you try a new product and it fails and you lose some money. And the morale drops, everybody feels terrible on the team, everybody involved feels bad and this can get worse and worse if you don’t stop it. So the first thing you can do is look at the big picture. Maybe the company in general is still making a profit.

Maybe the company is general is still doing fine, is still strong. So you need to remind everybody, hey look, we’ve had a short-term defeat, we need to learn from it but don’t forget the big picture. Don’t forget the longterm. In the big picture, in the long-term we’re still okay, we’re still doing fine. In a family, again, let’s say your family has a financial problem or some other problem. Everybody’s feeling terrible. Again, you can remind everybody of the big picture. Hey, we’re all still alive, we still have a place to live, we still have a roof on our head, we still have enough food, plenty of food. We’re okay. We’ll get through the shortterm problem. Remember, longterm, the big picture, we’re still doing fine.

Now, it’s even better if your team, your family, your team and your company, whatever, has a big mission, large inspiring goals that are important to you. This is why it’s important for your family, for example, to have a mission or values that are big, bigger than each of you individually, something very large that you believe in and live for. Because then you can again remind the team of the big picture.

It’s easy to see this in sports, so sports are a good example because sports are so simple.

So, let’s say a team loses a game. Well, if everybody on the team gets depressed and feels terrible and focuses on the defeat what happens? They get weaker, they play worse and then they might lose the next game and the next game, and the next game and the next game. When morale drops, the whole season can become terrible. So any decent coach will immediately raise the morale after a defeat. They’ll say, okay, we’re gonna learn from this defeat but forget about it.

Forget about the defeat. Let’s get excited. Let’s get focused on the next game. We’re gonna learn, we’re gonna win the next game. Remember, our big picture goal is to… win the championship or have a winning record… whatever it is. Right, so you gotta forget, you gotta get people to forget about the short-term defeats and get them focused back on the long-term mission. That’s one technique.

1. Another one is called reframing.

Reframing is a nice technique for raising morale. Reframing means just to change the focus. Like if you think of a camera or a movie, right, let’s say you’re taking a picture of something. You can reframe that picture right, you can take a picture from many different angles. You can be very close-up or you can be far away. You can focus on one part of the object or a different part of the object. You can focus on the background instead of the object. You could change the lighting so it’s brighter or darker. These are all ways of reframing. It means you change the meaning of the action. You change the focus.

So you can also do this with morale, with a defeat, with something bad that happens to the team. You can change the meaning, so instead of it being a disaster you say okay, this is a great learning experience. Look what we can learn and you find all the different lessons you can learn from it. You change the focus from defeat to learning and you have to communicate this many times very strongly. Remember, from the interactive lesson as the leader you have to believe in this deeply, you have to be a true believer. That’s the first step, you gotta reframe for yourself. You gotta convince yourself first. This is always true in leadership.

You must be the true believer, that’s always the first step before you use any of these techniques. Use these techniques first, then, once you’re feeling good, once your morale is high, then you use these same techniques on the team, on the family, on the group. So you reframe, you refocus them on something else. Another way to reframe, let’s say there was a defeat, but maybe some part of your performance, the groups’ performance was good. So again in sports you can imagine, let’s say, your team lost the game but your defense was very good.

Let’s say basketball, maybe on a basketball team the shooting was really terrible for your team, but your defense was good. You still lost, but there was a good part of your performance. This is another way to reframe, you focus the team on the good part. You say look, okay yes our shooting was really bad .We’re going to learn from that, we’re going to practice that but hey, good job on defense, really strong defense. Very impressed by the defense and you reframe, you refocus people on the things that were good, the things that were positive. So you’re reinforcing, you’re making the positive part stronger.

Another thing you can do, and sometimes it’s necessary is that sometimes on your team there might be only one person or maybe one or two people who are destroying morale, and this is more of a long-term thing. When there’s a defeat, like everybody can sometimes lose their morale and drop that’s normal, so you start using this technique. So you focus them on the big strategy, the long-term strategy. You reframe, you refocus on some part to learn from or something that was positive.

But, there’s also the problem of long-term morale, because sometimes there are individual people who are toxic to morale. They’re poisonous, they’re just always negative all the time.

They’re constantly complaining, even when you win, even when you do well, they start looking for negative things. They start complaining still. They’re always destroying morale.

What do you do about these people? This is an important part of being a leader.

Well, if possible, if you have the choice get rid of them. Fire them from the team or the company or transfer them to someone else. If they’re on a sports team cut them or at least, don’t let them play, make them sit on the bench. But if you can just cut them, get rid of them. Get rid of them. That’s the simplest way to deal with people who constantly have bad morale, who are constantly being negative and bringing down the team’s morale.

Now sometimes it’s not possible. In a family, for example, if your son or daughter is just negative all the time, you don’t want to get rid of your child. You may want to but you can’t, so in this case you need to change the tactic. You’re gonna have to break this pattern that they have. Some people develop a negative pattern and you gotta break it.

Now, what are some ways to do that?

1. One way is through humor and playfulness.

This is another important tactic that a leader can use. You can use this in general with anybody, but it’s especially good with these kind of very pessimistic people, these people who are constantly negative, constantly bringing down the morale. Use humor, laugh about the defeats, right? If they’re being really serious about it, oh this sucks, etc. just laugh about it. Make the situation light, even if it is a terrible situation, it doesn’t matter.

As the leader, you show hey, it’s not that serious. Joke about it. Laugh about it. Joke and laugh about their reaction, if they’re being very negative and they’re really, oh this sucks, playfully and in a nice way don’t be mean to them, but playfully laugh about and joke about their negativity. Say oh my gosh, Mr. Negative, oh gosh and laugh about it. Just say c’mon, cheer up it’s not that big a deal. Make it a joke. Make it a game. You need to lighten up the attitude and if you think this is impossible it’s not impossible. If you read books by people, for example, who are in wars okay? They’re fighting and dying, people are dying and being killed. You’ll discover that there’s a lot of humor, a lot of these guys used humor to keep their morale high.

So, even as their friends are being killed, as they’re enduring all kinds of terrible, terrible suffering, they would use humor, sometimes black humor, kind of a dark humor, but still humor was very important to these troops, just to get through these horrible situations, to keep their morale high and not just kill themselves or not quit. So even in the most terrible situations humor is important. So it’s so important for leaders to laugh and lighten up when your team gets too dark, too negative, when the morale drops too much, sometimes you just need to get them to laugh and play.

Take a break from whatever you’re doing and do something fun, do something playful, get people laughing and smiling again and then you can start using these other techniques like reframing, focusing on the positive, focusing on learning, that kind of thing. And the same is true, like I said, when you’ve got someone who’s very negative, who’s stuck in a negative pattern. Get rid of them if you can, but if you can’t, constantly tease them and joke with them.

You gotta break that negative pattern they have and humor’s a good way to do it. Teasing and humor, you have to do it in a way that doesn’t make them feel bad, so you’re not trying to insult them. You’re doing it in a playful, fun manner, in a way that shows you care about them, but also shows that you’re being too serious, you’re being too negative. You need to relax and lighten up. So joking and humor, very, very important.

The next technique, a very, very strong technique. After you get people to laugh and lighten up a bit, to relax a little about the situation that helps to raise the morale immediately. Then you use reframing and focusing on the big picture, that raises the morale a little more. And once you’ve got the morale raised a bit more, even if it’s still negative, still low, the next thing you want to do is counteract as fast as possible. As soon as possible you want to take a strong aggressive action. You want your team to take a strong aggressive action, to counteract the situation.

You see, when people just sit around after defeat they feel terrible. But, if they quickly take an action to correct the situation they’ll start to feel strong again. Now, here’s the good thing about counteracting, you don’t have to completely change the situation. You don’t have to win a huge victory. In fact, when morale is low, what you want to do is look for the smallest, tiniest opportunity for a victory, for an improvement, for a win. That’s actually the best way.

So you look for a very, very small thing that the team can do and succeed with, because that small success, even the tiniest little success will instantly raise their morale, get them feeling stronger again and that will help them, of course, fight for the bigger challenges and to raise the morale much higher.

Let me give you some examples of that. Again, let’s say a sports team, a very clear example. Let’s say again a basketball team, they’ve lost an important game, morale’s really low. First, you get them to lighten up. You joke about it. You get some playfulness back, stop being so serious. Then you get them to focus on the big picture right, think about the whole season. Think about being a team. Think about improving all the large goals that you have. Then you reframe, you change their focus to learning, you get them to think about and focus on the good things that happen in the game, maybe the defense was good, maybe some other part of their game was good. Get them focusing on that, all of this starts raising the morale more and more.

You deal with any individuals who are very negative. You either cut them or talk to them and say hey, enough of this or you get them laughing and you use humor to do it. So you use all those techniques, now the team’s feeling a little better, now they need a victory.

They need a small victory. You could do this in practice, okay. You could give them a small challenge, a tough challenge in practice but you know they can do it. I don’t know, maybe it could be a practice game between two of them or it could just be some drill and you get them doing it and when they start doing it well, when they start getting that little victory, they start having a good performance, then you encourage them, you praise them. Yes, that’s better! Look at this, oh yeah, we’re improving now, very good, getting tougher.

So you start encouraging them and showing them things are better. Look, we can overcome challenges. We can do difficult things. It’ll be the same in a business. If your team has lost some money or had a bad project, find a really small, fairly easy project, some small challenge. Get them to work on that and to quickly succeed at it and then you encourage them and you focus on that success. Hey, we did it. Fantastic job. Look, we’re getting better. We’re turning everything around. We’re improving the situation already.

This is a counteract, an aggressive counteract. A counteract means it’s the attack after someone else attacks. So, your enemy or the situation attacks you and you lose. There’s a defeat, the morale drops, so now you need to attack back. You need to solve some small problem. You need to get some small victory, and then once you get the small victory then you focus on it, you emphasize it, you talk about it. You get everybody excited about it and enthusiastic again, because they’ve just had a small little victory. Ta-dah, now the morale goes higher and higher and higher.

And so in this way you can see how step-by-step you can turn around bad morale, low morale. It’s a step-by-step process. Usually if the morale is quite low you can’t immediately and totally change it, that’s often very hard, often very, very difficult. So what you do, you do it step-bystep. You use the humor and playfulness in even taking a break, just getting away from the problem for a short time, getting everyone laughing and smiling again at some level. Then you get them focused again in remembering their big picture, the strategic goals, the mission, the deeper purpose. Then you get them refocused on what they can learn. You get them refocused on what was good, on what they did well.

And finally, you choose some small easy challenge where they can get a quick and easy victory, a counter attack. And then by the time when you do all of this stuff, after doing all these steps you will find that the team morale, your family’s morale, your little team at your jobs’ morale, your sports teams’ morale, whatever, you’ll find the morale becomes much higher, much more positive and now your team, your group is ready to win again or to enjoy life more or whatever your goal is.

So, that’s how you do it, simple step-by-step. Use this this month. Use this. You have some group, some team where you can use this, and even if the morale is already good or maybe it’s just so-so, make it higher, make it better. Use all of these steps.

All right, I will see you next time. Bye for now.