When you see your colleagues in person or in meetings online, you can often get a sense of how they’re doing. Some of that may come from body language, but it’s also reflected in the way people talk about their work and ongoing projects.
Those conversations can give you insight into others’ motivation. And that is where you may begin to pick up that someone hasn’t just had a bad day, but that they’re really getting demoralized about work.
When someone is demoralized, they’ve lost hope that their work will make a difference to the organization and to the world. They’ve lost faith that the organization supports their efforts. They can’t generate the effort to work hard because they don’t think those efforts will lead to anything significant.
When you have a colleague who is demoralized, there are three things you should do:
Validate first
Whenever a colleague is feeling down and like they can’t succeed, there is a natural tendency to want to help them solve the problem underlying their feeling of hopelessness.
That may not be what your colleague needs—at least at first.
When you sense that your colleague is demoralized, start by letting them know that you hear what they’re saying. Recognize the frustration they’re expressing. When people are feeling down, they often start to think that they don’t have a good reason to feel the way they do. Knowing that others understand your feelings and emotions is important.
Be supportive
Next, you should find out what your colleague really wants. If you try to solve someone else’s problem, you’re likely to try to solve your own version of the problem you think they have rather than what they are actually grappling with.
The best way to find out what your colleague wants is to ask. They may want to figure out how to be more effective in their current role. They might want help with a manager or supervisor. But they might also have difficulty knowing what they want in that moment. Continuing the conversation may help them determine what’s going on.
My partner in crime on my radio show and podcast Two Guys on Your Head is Bob Duke, a music professor at the University of Texas and a psychologist. He tells the story of a student who came to his office demoralized. After listening to her for a while, he suggested that she drop out of school. She looked at him, shocked that he would make such a suggestion. His aim, though, was to help her realize that she has agency and can actually choose what she wants to do.
Ultimately she didn’t drop out of school, but the conversation helped her clarify that part of being demoralized was that she had not committed to her education, but rather was feeling like she had to be in school to please others. By facing the prospect of dropping out, she was able to recognize her own commitment to education.
Help develop a plan
When talking to a colleague who is demoralized, it can be easy to stay focused primarily on the frustration and hopelessness. But as important as it is to validate their feelings, ultimately it’s also important to help them plan their next step.
As you begin to better understand what your colleague is struggling with, start to ask them questions about next steps. You don’t actually want to be the one to solve your colleague’s problem. Instead, you want to help them develop their own solution through the discussion you’re having.
If you focus your questions on what they want to do next, you can help lead them through a process of finding a way forward. There are two benefits to that type of interaction (rather than just telling them what you think they should do).
First, it’s easier for someone to commit to a course of action they have chosen for themselves than to do what someone else has told them to do. Plus, being demoralized is often about feeling like your actions don’t matter. So the act of choosing what to do next itself starts to fight demoralization.
Second, resilience is about knowing how to address the situations you face. When people find a way to solve their own problem (even in the context of a conversation), it makes it easier for them to think about what to do when they face the same feeling another time. If your colleague can think back to this conversation in the future when they feel hopeless, it may make it easier for them to get back on even footing.