5 ways to bring energy to your team on Monday morning
Remote working has destroyed the most important day of the week.
But here are five ways you can save Monday,
and beat your competition while they ‘ease themselves into the week’.
Monday is your opening scene
The opening scene of a Bond movie is renowned for dropping you straight into the action.
In Goldeneye the film opens with Pierce Brosnan running along the top of the Verzaca Dam, before leaping off it just 58 seconds into the action.
You are immediately drawn in, setting the tone for the rest of the movie.
Who is that? How did he do that? What will happen next?
At work, each week is a movie.
And as a leader how you start that movie each week determines the amount of energy, urgency and outcomes that your team achieve that week.
Remote work has meant that very few weeks start like a Bond movie.
Mondays are typically ‘at home days’ with teams being asked to come in mid week if at all.
Because they are at home days there is less incentive to push through the inertia after the weekend.
A slower start.
An extra coffee
Some planning calls
A weekly kick off call
Get the schedule for the week sorted
These days just have less urgency than when you bring the team together in person.
Dedicate Monday as the in office day
If you are only having one or two days in the office, don’t default to Wednesday being the day.
It builds momentum and focus towards the middle of the week, instead of starting the week with a bang.
Why do we choose mid-week if it isn’t to subconsciously tell everyone Monday is not a day that has the same energy?
Have an honest discussion with yourself about whether the reason you focus on mid-week for the office is because that is what suits you better.
If you aren’t in the office on a Monday your team feed off that.
Plan your Monday morning team meeting on Friday
Too many leaders kick off their team meetings as if they started thinking about it five minutes before - “here’s whats in my calendar this week, I haven’t got much else for us to talk about”.
Think Bond.
Your team are looking at you for energy, urgency, a rallying call.
What insight can you share about the company’s direction, a competitor, a recent customer story. Some learning from a meeting last week. Progress towards a collective team target.
Plan this meeting out on Friday so that on Monday you have an engaging agenda ready to go.
Include some workshop activity to get everyone involved
Instead of lazily asking everyone to tell everyone else what they have coming up that week initiate some kind of activity that adds value.
Gong call review. Listen to a call snippet from one of the team’s call the previous week and pause and discuss how to handle a customer question or objection before rolling the recording on.
Plan out the agenda for a customer meeting one of your team has coming up
Role-play a customer call that is happening that week
Of course it is easier not to do activities, but they get the adrenaline going, and the greatest teams across sports, medicine, music.… and sales practice, practice, practice.
Hand out incentives on Monday morning for Friday activities
I used to work for a company based in Nice on the French Riviera.
Every Friday we held a pitch challenge where the person that completed the most successful outbound calls on the Friday got to go parascending over the sea with their manager first thing on Monday morning before coming into the office.
This brought great energy to both the Friday and the Monday.
Your office might not be next to the Mediterranean, but you can develop some form of weekly incentive for your team that gets rewarded on Monday morning.
Move checkins and 121s away from Monday
It is easy to default to putting your update meetings and 121s on Monday as an “easy warm up” into the week.
Instead move them to Wednesday and beyond so that you and your team can focus on hitting the ground running.
Every other sales team is stuck in 121s and updates on a Monday - you can outmanoeuvre them, build some urgency and get your team on the phones.
Monday is the most important day of the week
With these five suggestions you can bring some urgency and momentum to your week from day 1.
As a leader it is your role to build the energy in your team, to get rid of the inertia.
Mondays make up 20% of your week, of your month, of your quarter.
You and your team need to own Mondays, because if you don’t, while your team is ‘easing themselves into the week’ another team is meeting with customers and using that extra day for their benefit.
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