Is your team burned out?

Is your team burned out? Some ideas…

1. Do they have a vivid and powerful vision to motivate them? Or are they driven by a tactical business goal, by fear of competition - or worse, no goal at all

“Help 1 million people by doing X” is a vivid and powerful vision. This is ideal.

“Raise money” is a tactical business goal.

“Beat company X” is fear or competition.

No goal is when leadership is chasing shiny objects - whatever investors or customers say.

What is your vision? Is your team excited about it?

2. Are you making decisive decisions or letting them linger for too long? Are you allowing confusion to make day-to-day decision making by the team painful or impossible?

Worse than making a bad decision is not making any decisions at all.

Don’t wait for full conviction. That’s impossible. Instinct, passion, experimentation and informed iteration/pivots are essential parts of the startup journey.

3. Do you meet with the team on a regular basis to inject authentic enthusiasm and celebrate the wins?

A little genuine praise and celebration can to a long way to boost morale and help the team focus on what matters.

4. Can you add a new leader or advisor to inject clarity, enthusiasm, cadence and accountability into the team?

The right kind of fresh blood can change everything.

5. Is the team suffering from a lot of incompetence? Fire low performers! Show the team that quality work is valued and rewarded. Be careful about jumping to this conclusion though - bad perform is sometimes the result of bad leadership.

6. Have you tried giving everyone a vacation. Stop everything for a week and encourage everyone to refresh and come back with renewed enthusiasm!