In times of high stress, such as a pandemic, our teams need support and help more than ever. Finding out what your team needs can help strengthen morale and confidence in their daily tasks. In this Quick Tips! video, Interact CEO Dr. Pamela Cox-Otto shares the three lead needs as written by William Schutz, and how they can be applied to your team to better meet their goals.

Good morning. Welcome to Quick Tips, I’m Doctor Pam Cox-Otto and I’m gonna share something that I found useful almost my entire career in community colleges. 

In 1958 William Shoots came up with an idea, the interpersonal needs, what people need. And right now everybody’s under stress, even if you’re home and you have a safe place to work and things are going well. You still have issues with all the tension around us which is we’re in a pandemic, you may not have heard but we are. And so the issue is how do you calm your troops, how do you keep people feeling like they’re doing things, like not getting into despair because seriously there’s been an incredible rise on the amount of people suffering from depression and stress and all sorts of things. So, here are three ideas that Shoots came up with that I find really useful and they are. 

Everybody has three needs, but they have them in different mixes. They are affection, the need to be liked. Inclusion, the need to be at the table, the need to know what’s going on, and control which is the need to drive the bus, right? Everybody has a lead need, and most of them, people that tend to be presidents tend to have a need for control. People who tend to be front line, working with students tend to have a need for either inclusion or being liked, right? Affection. And those are good things because they actually feed into the work that we do. So there’s nothing wrong with having different needs. But the thing is if you’re a supervisor, knowing what that innate need is of your employee is a critical thing because if you’re giving them control and what they really need is just a seat at the table, and you tell them what they need to do, giving them control doesn’t make them happy. And if really all they want to do is be liked, don’t expect them to make tough decisions. 

So, one of the things that you always have to know is what the people who report to you need and what the people you report to need. Generally, higher up an organization control. Generally the more you work with people face to face, the more it’s for affection or inclusion. Just remember, there are lots of ways to give people the things they need without compromising your work. The bottom line, when you take the time to do it, you’re going to find out that people in general are much happier working for you. 

That’s it, I hope you enjoyed the quick tip, more coming later. Talk to you soon.