As McLeod notes, "People aren't stupid. They know when things are going badly." Respect your team's intelligence, and they'll respect you right back.
Take the initial chaos of COVID-19. In the background of our company Zoom calls during those early days, dogs were barking and kids were screaming. There was no point in pretending it was business as usual, and we made that clear. This honesty allowed everyone to stop worrying about keeping up appearances and, instead, focus on adjusting to a new reality.
I was working at an email marketing firm, of all places, when this lesson hit home. Our days were spent looking at open-rates, conversions, customer acquisition costs, leads and the countless data points that rule modern marketing. But what actually got me and my colleagues out of bed in the morning was something far more elemental: the realization that our technology was helping small businesses and the ordinary people who ran them.
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