SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 210,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each week in our e-newsletter.
How much disturbance is the election causing at your office?
- A lot! It’s all anyone focuses on to the exclusion of work: 7%
- Some — people are pretty preoccupied with it: 22%
- Not much — It comes up occasionally but doesn’t interrupt work: 39%
- Not at all — We’ve moved on and have work to do: 32%
Business as usual (mostly). The vast majority of folks are already back to business as usual. I’m sure most of you are just glad to have all the campaigning mostly overwith regardless of your opinion of the result. For those who are still dealing with the fallout of this election season, find the balance between hearing what’s on your team members’ minds but also getting them to focus on their responsibilities. It’s a tricky balance. If you ignore what’s on their minds completely, you can be seen as uncaring. If you enable or even encourage the dialog to the point it’s distracting, you’ve lost control. The right answer is somewhere in between. A way to move through the change is to open a fact-based discussion on how political changes will affect the work you do. When you can make the changes (or lack thereof) tangible and eliminate fear, uncertainty, and doubt, you’ll enable your team to regain their focus more quickly.
Mike Figliuolo is managing director of thoughtLEADERS. Before launching his own company, he worked at McKinsey & Co., Capital One and Scotts Miracle-Gro. His is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He’s the author of three leadership books: “One Piece of Paper,” “Lead Inside the Box,” and “The Elegant Pitch.”