The race is on to plant this year’s spring crops. Stress will be high as you make progress in a shorter-than-normal window.
While you want to be a doer, you can’t ignore the responsibilities of being a leader, says Bob Milligan, senior consultant at Dairy Strategies and former Cornell University professor.
“Even in busy times, you must maintain leadership as your top priority,” he says.
Milligan says you must focus on these three issues.
1. Organization
“When you stop doing, you lose one person – yourself; when you stop organizing, you lose the work or reduce the efficiency of EVERYONE!” Milligan says.
Your employees have waited all winter to get out in the field, he reminds.
“They are excited! They are willing to work extra hours as needed to complete the spring work,” he says. “To maintain their initial level of excitement, they will require a sense of continuing accomplishment, not frustration from unclear plans, expectations, or directions.”
Before you join in the work, make certain you are thinking several steps ahead, making plans for those next steps and communicating those plans to everyone. Just as you have a system for your spring work, Milligan says, you need a system for communicating with the workforce.
This system should include a combination of:
- Short operational meetings
- Verbal/text communications
- Weekly meetings
“In all cases, there will be many updates as you call audibles to the plans you have laid out,” he says. “These also require clear and frequent communication.”
2. Clarity
Milligan compares communication to “chalking the field.”
“During busy periods everyone is in a hurry, often stressed and sometimes exhausted,” he says. “Each of these increases the likelihood of a communication failure; that what you said is not remembered completely or correctly.”
Milligan provides these ideas for top-notch communication:
- Whenever possible, especially when the communication includes numbers or directions, have the details written down so you can leave a copy for later reference. When employees are unsure about details, they are much more comfortable looking at the reference than calling you.
- When communicating verbally, ask employees to take notes. Not only does taking notes provide a reference, but it also greatly increases retention. Everyone should always have access to a place to take notes; it can be a mobile device or simply a small notebook.
- When communicating specifics – directions, quantities, locations, etc. – the less you rely on memory, the fewer the problems.
- As always with “chalking the field,” explaining WHY increases both acceptance and retention?
3. Perceptiveness and Empathy
As the leader, you need to continually take the emotional “temperature” of your dedicated workforce, Milligan says.
“Your employees will work harder and longer than is good for their emotional and/or physical health,” he says.
Watch for these signs:
- Look for telltale signs that emotional stress is growing (easily frustrated, quick to get angry, reduced enthusiasm, anything that is out of character). When these signs appear, the person needs a break, a task change, encouragement.
- Look for the telltale signs of physical stress: any of the above emotional signs, increased frequency of errors, moving more slowly, resistance to directions, lethargy. You need to move quickly to ensure that this person gets some rest. At this point, the person is an accident waiting to happen.
- Make certain people have sufficient short breaks. Machines need refueling and routine maintenance; people need breaks to refresh and replenish. The research is clear that after three to four hours at a repetitive task, productivity has declined such that a adding a break will results in more total work than continuing with the task.
- Encouragement and feedback are just as important in busy times. The format will be quick and informal.
“The good news is that the above responsibilities should not require all your time,” Milligan says. “They must, however, be your first priority.”
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