YOUR SECRET WEAPON FOR BUILDING TEAM MORALE

It’s Wednesday afternoon at your fitness facility, 4:30 pm. Your evening trainers are just shuffling in to prepare for the tidal wave of clients that will be pouring through the door in the next few hours. Let’s take a closer look at your training team to see how they’re doing…

Trainer A spent the morning without any hot water in his appartment. (That sucks!) After several hours of trying to get his landlord on the phone, he still has no confirmation that the hot water will be fixed when he gets home. The frustration is weighing on him and he looks pretty grumpy.

Trainer B seems to be in a pretty chipper mood, but when you probe you learn that she’s actually exhausted. She had a date last night that turned into a “sleepover,” and while she had a great time, she maybe got 2 hours of sleep. She’s attempting to put on her game face for the long night ahead.

Trainer C is energized and ready to tackle the day, but when he takes a look at the list of clients coming for the evening you can see him roll his eyes and look annoyed. When you ask about it he says, “It’s fine, it’s just that Mrs. Smith is coming in tonight and we didn’t have such a great session last week. She didn’t like the program I made for her and I took it personally.” You get the sense that he is prepared to get things back on track but it’s weighing on his mind.

Is that scenario ringing any bells? How often do you or your team show up to work with baggage from life at home or with anxiety about the day’s work ahead?

If you’re anything like the team at Mark Fisher Fitness, it happens all the time. All of us have projects, and relationships, and families, and even side jobs that influence the way we show up at work. And that is completely normal. As much as we’d like to think our lives are neatly compartmentalized into tidy tupperware containers, they’re not. All of our daily successes, fears, and challenges are filtered through our one brain, so it’s natural that all of the areas of our lives affect one another. It’s okay.

The problem this presents is that all too often bringing your crummy attitude, or frustration, or exhaustion into the workplace can have an immediate and measureable impact on the business. Productivity suffers, tensions builds up with your teammates, and perhaps worst of all, your client’s experience suffers. Our clients our paying us to be on their agenda. For the hour (or so) they are in our care, they should be our focus and #1 priority. It is nearly impossible to be on your client’s agenda when you are actively carrying the emotional weight of your own personal shit. (I say that with love ♥)

But, what if you could have a reset button?

What if you and everyone you work with had magic wand you could wave when you walked into work that helped you find a more focused and productive mindset? That’d be pretty rad, right?

 

Your new secret weapon for team morale is called a Power Huddle.

Here is how it works…

  1. Gather everyone on your team before the start of a shift or a busy period of work, and have them all stand in a circle. Standing is important because this should happen quickly, in under 5 minutes.

2. Go around the circle and have each person answer these three questions, one at a time:

What is something you are grateful for?

What is a something you admire about the person to your right?

What is something you are looking forward to this week?

3. Take one deep breath together — a giant inhale and exhale. Then, give eachother some high fives (hugs and jumping high fives are optional) and go kick some ass!

That’s it. Sounds easy, right? Well, it is. And you know what? It’s really f*cking effective!

In less than 5 minutes your team can get out of their own heads, put their personal challenges to the side (for now) and begin to find a more positive, service-oriented posture. When you and your team are feeling optimistic and hopeful about your own life, you are in a much better position to serve others. That’s the kind of fitness professional our clients deserve.

 

A QUICK TIP

The secret sauce to a Power Huddle is the powerful combination of practicing gratitude, admiration, and hope. You’ll notice that there was a question about each. The questions themselves don’t really matter, it’s the emotion they elicit that make them effective. So, feel free to change the questions often to keep it fresh, just make sure they are a practice of gratitude (a feeling of thankfulness), admiration (a feeling of respect and appreciation), and hope (an excitement about the future).

 

Now go try it! I mean, what the heck do you have to lose? It’s 5 damn minutes!

Once you try it with your team, report back how it went in the comments below. I’d love to know what questions you asked and how you and your team felt afterward.

Carpe diem you sexy people!

Speaker Images_Michael  B4U Signature (MK)