A mentor of mine once told a room full of leaders something I have never forgotten. She said we are all born with eighty-eight keys on a piano, and most of us spend our entire lives playing the key of C. Safe, familiar, reliable and after a while, quietly deadening!
I think about that image a lot when May arrives, because Q1 has a particular way of narrowing us down to our safest keys. The year begins with genuine energy and intention, and then what my brother Glenn calls incoming takes over. The urgent email that pulls you away from the thing that mattered. The new assignment that lands before the last one has fully landed. The team member at the door asking if you have a minute, and you do not, but the relationship matters more than the calendar, so you wave them in anyway.
Here is what that accumulation costs. The team member who used to push back on ideas starts nodding along instead. The meeting that used to crackle with debate becomes a series of status updates. The leader who prided themselves on knowing how their people were doing realizes they have been so deep in the work that they stopped asking. None of it feels like a crisis in the moment. All of it adds up to one over time.
In my experience, the two strongest signals that a team needs a reset are the ones most leaders overlook precisely because they are too busy to see them: fighting fires and dialing down the drama. If those words describe your last twelve weeks, this post is for you. Three tools, grounded in research and in thirty years of working with leaders, that you can use this week to restore the energy, reconnect the team, and get the full range of the piano back before the second half of the year demands everything you have.
Three Practices to Recharge Your Team This Spring
Tool One: Stop Managing the Moment and Start Seeing the Person
Ask yourself: When did I last have a genuine conversation with someone on my team that had nothing to do with a deliverable?
Showing vulnerability and building connections are two of the most underutilized keys on your piano. People bring their best thinking to work when they feel genuinely seen, and the single fastest way to restore engagement in an exhausted team is for the leader to close the gap between what people experience and what they acknowledge is happening every day. In my work I have come to think of this as smashing the mirror and replacing it with a window. When leaders stop looking inward at results and start looking outward at the people producing them, something shifts in the room almost immediately. The practice here is disarmingly simple. Before your next one on one, put the status update aside and ask one genuine question instead. How are you doing with the pace of things right now? Then listen without redirecting. What you hear will tell you more about where your team is than any engagement survey ever will, and the act of asking with genuine curiosity will do more to restore trust and energy than any initiative you could announce.
Tool Two: Make the Progress Visible Before You Ask for More
Ask yourself: Does my team know how far they have come, or are they only seeing how far there is still to go?
Your team’s progress on meaningful work is the single most powerful daily motivator available to you as a leader. What drives team commitment and grows motivation can be found in the simple day-to-day rewarding experiences that feed their productivity, increase their learning and brings them joy. The challenge in difficult times is that teams lose sight of their momentum because they have been moving too fast, but maybe not fast enough to keep up with the goalposts shifting ahead. One of the most energizing things a leader can do right now is to gather the team, map what was built in Q1, and name it specifically before the next set of targets comes into view. Not a general well done but a precise accounting: here is the problem we solved, here is what it took, here is what I saw from each of you that made it possible. Progress that gets named becomes fuel. Progress that goes unnamed becomes invisible, and invisible wins do nothing to restore the energy the months ahead will require. As I wrote in The Compassion Advantage, what gets named in our lives becomes our leadership life. The same is true for teams.
Tool Three: Build In the Pause Before the Push
Ask yourself: When did my team last have enough uninterrupted space to do the work they are genuinely best at?
Throughout The Compassion Advantage I come back repeatedly to the 3Ps: Pause, Plan, Prepare. The pause is not passive, and it is not a luxury. It is the discipline of creating enough distance between where you have been and where you are going to choose your next move deliberately rather than reactively. Research on flow state shows that people perform at their natural best when they have a clear goal and enough freedom from interruption to reach genuine concentration. When you are besieged by all of those incoming distractions and ever moving priorities, it’s hard to tell if and where progress is being made. Rather, team members find themselves in a quagmire of half-done/not done activities that fail to land. Spring is the time to step back into structure – and mean it. Protect a morning. Cancel the recurring meeting that has outlived its purpose. Give your team one project with a clear outcome and enough unbroken time to pursue it with real focus. The energy that returns when people are doing their best work in conditions that support it is different from anything a motivational initiative can produce, because it comes from inside the work itself rather than from above it.
What a Recharged Team Looks Like
When leaders treat team renewal with the same seriousness and skill they bring to strategy, something shifts that is difficult to manufacture any other way. Conversations open back up. People start bringing ideas rather than waiting to be asked. The pace of collaboration quickens because the relational foundation underneath the work has been cultivated rather than assumed. The more a leader invests in developing a healthier, open culture, the more productive returns will land.
My spring mantra is to remember that leadership is a way to be and not a thing to do. Tend to the people who have been carrying the weight of Q1 alongside you, before the second half of the year asks them to carry more. The 88 keys are there, they’re just waiting to be played.
What is one thing you could do this week to let your team know that you see what they gave in Q1 and that you are genuinely invested in what comes next?