How to help people (including yourself) get unstuck at work

Photo by Stefan Hiienurm on Unsplash

If you or your team are feeling frustrated, unmotivated and/or powerless for an extended period of time, you just might be stuck. I’ve helped many teams to get unstuck effectively and today I want to share some tips with you. 

My suggestions involve careful change management, creating a vision and tangible examples of what that vision looks and feels like in practice, and using data to show why change is needed. 

There are often hidden anxieties and worries around both the process of getting unstuck, and what a different, unstuck future could look like. Get to the bottom of these, and you’ll find it easier to move on together. 

How and why we get stuck at work

A wide variety of triggers can make teams, and the individuals within them, feel stuck at work. 

One key driver of stuckness is difficult relationships between teams or between prominent individuals in teams. Perhaps people feel that colleagues in other teams don’t understand or respect their skills and expertise. Or people admit that current workflows aren’t functioning well, but are resistant to change because they are worried that the little agency they have in certain areas of work will be taken away. Tensions like these between teams create a toxic culture and can eventually damage the fabric of an organisation. 

What does "stuck" look like and how can we recognise it?  

There’s a big difference between being stuck and just feeling a bit annoyed. You can tell you’re stuck at work if you’ve been feeling disgruntled about the way things are for a long time. You’re not moving on.

Again, as an outsider in many organisations I notice that this can manifest as people being visibly grumpy and constantly making references to incidents in the past. Crucially, though, they might not even be able to identify themselves as being stuck. If you’re a leader of a team and this is happening, take heed. 

Things we can do to get unstuck

1. Use data to banish the myths

Every change management handbook will say that you need to keep painting the picture of your vision over and over again in order to get buy-in from your colleagues. But if the vision doesn’t fit an individual’s idea of what needs to happen, they may keep resisting change. The status quo may make teams ineffective and unhappy, but it can paradoxically also provide comfort and a sense of being in control. Often you will hear people say “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Painting a vision of the new future needs to be accompanied by an explanation of why change is necessary. For instance, in a change management process I was involved with, the director told teams the reason for moving towards digital supporter engagement was that long-term projections showed that income was going to keep falling. But some staff didn’t connect with this soft messaging; they didn’t feel that change was necessary because they were surpassing their own targets. 

So the message had to become more direct and more detailed. The leadership team shared more data demonstrating which areas needed to urgently change – from acquisition channel mix to cost per acquisition and donor retention rates. If you want teams to start following your vision, explaining the ’why’ of using evidence to banish the myths plays an important role in getting unstuck. 

2. Show empathy and understanding

When people feel that their position is threatened or that they have not been heard, they may end up feeling undervalued and demotivated.That makes them less likely to walk in step with the rest of the team and the new vision. My article, Why digital change is hard for people and how to make it easier is useful for understanding this dynamic in individuals.  

There will always be people who disagree with organisational change for a variety of personal reasons. In this article, I explain the SCARF model which describes the elements of human social experience that can make people feel threatened or afraid. These are: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. Change usually shakes up all of them. So it’s important to think about how your team is being impacted by change on a social and emotional level. That way, as a leader, you can empathise with them and address their concerns.

3. Focus on the vision

Motivating people with a specific vision is one way to make them feel less stuck – especially if you can demonstrate to them that the budding shoots of this brave new world can already be found in the present day. 

In Solutions Orientated Coaching, a favourite approach of mine, I ask my coachees to imagine their ideal future scenario at work. We focus on using positive language, focusing on things within their control, and describing the scenario like it’s a film. Then they work backwards in time to identify key milestones. For instance, if the vision is to have integrated ways of planning and working within a year, we explore what will be happening at six months, three months and one month from now.

People can often get disheartened at this point, so it’s useful to explore whether something that will help move towards their vision is already happening. Could there be a small project already in existence that can showcase integrated ways of planning and working?

If you, or your team, feel stuck and you think I might be able to help, let me know.  And if you’ve got any tips of your own for getting unstuck, I’d love to hear about them.