The week following the Victoria Day weekend often feels strangely emotional. The house is a bit quieter. People at work have their head down. What smart leaders realize they have just walked into a window of opportunity. The one that decides the second half of the year. The that makes or breaks Q3 and Q4. Priorities either gain traction in this stretch or slip away, and teams either find their stride or settle into a pace that will produce nothing September can use. By the time most leaders notice the drift in late August, the runway to recover is too short to produce a strong effect.
The encouraging news is that this window is highly responsive to deliberate leadership, and the three tools below are designed to be executed in this crucial period rather than admired and forgotten. Each one takes under an hour to put into practice, and each one will visibly change the way your team experiences the next eight weeks. As you read, pay attention to which tool you find yourself most resistant to, because that’s almost certainly the one you will need the most.
Tool One: Narrow Your List Until It Hurts
The fastest way to lose the next eight weeks is to carry five or six priorities competing for the same attention, and the fastest way to win them is to commit publicly to two. Take ten minutes today and run every priority currently on your plate through two questions:
· If I deliver this outcome by July 31, and nothing else, would the second half of the year be considered a success?
· Will this priority still matter to the team, your board, or your customers twelve months from now?
Anything that earns a clear yes to both is one of your two. Anything that does not should be parked until August.
Research on team motivation has consistently shown that clarity of priority is one of the strongest predictors of sustained engagement across a quarter, and the difference shows up not in what teams accomplish but in how confidently and consistently they show up to do the work.
Once you have your two, motivate your team by ing a short message before the end of the day saying something close to this: “Between now and the end of July our two priorities are X and Y. Everything else still matters and will wait its turn. Please bring any questions to our next meeting”. That clarity in May gives a team confidence to deliver in September.
Tool Two: Name What They Have Already Done
Teams leaning into a productive spring are usually running on momentum they cannot see. They have shipped, solved, and pushed through difficulty for nineteen weeks, and almost none of that work has been specifically acknowledged. Before your next 1:1 or team meeting, write a short acknowledgment for each person using a three-sentence structure that makes the recognition land properly. The first sentence names the specific problem they solved or contribution made. The second names what you personally saw it take from them to do it. The third names the impact it had on the team, the customer, or the work.
For example, you might say to someone that between February and April they took a stalled vendor negotiation and brought it to close at a better rate than projected, that you watched them stay calm through three rounds of pushback that would have rattled most people, and that the savings they produced are funding the additional headcount you need to deliver Q3. That single piece of acknowledgment takes ninety seconds to write and lands harder than any general “well done” has ever landed because it tells the person that the specific work they did made a noticeable difference.
Tool Three: Ask One Real Question Before Anything Else
Teams that fracture under Q3 pressure are almost always the ones whose relational foundations eroded between May and July. We see this in the organizations we work with. Conversations became transactional. One on ones became status updates. Before you open the task list, ask the person “What’s happening for you right now?” And don’t be surprised when you hear about things as much outside as inside of work. Genuinely listen to the answer. Begin thinking about ways you can support them better over the next eight weeks and check in to see how things are going?
We know that teams with strong relational foundations absorb genuine intensity far better than teams trying to build relationships under pressure. The work you do now to build those connections in May will foster the resilience your team draws on in October.
When you ask the question, resist three urges that will arrive almost immediately. Resist the urge to interrupt if the silence stretches a little longer than feels comfortable. Resist the urge to jump to solutions, because the question is not a request for a problem you can fix. And resist the urge to forget what they tell you, because referencing their answer in your next one on one is what proves the question was sincere.
That one question, asked three times this week and listened to properly, will tell you more about the state of your team than any engagement survey will tell you all year.
The Choice in Front of You
Three tools, each one executable today, each one designed to compound over the eight-week stretch ahead of you. Use them and your second half of the year will look fundamentally different from the one most leaders are about to have. Skip them and September will arrive with a team that has drifted further than you realized, and a runway already too short to recover.
This is what relational leadership looks like in practice. Not slogans, not fancy complicated initiatives, but small, repeatable acts of clarity, acknowledgment, and presence. Compound this practice over weeks and the return will be there. The leaders who win Q3 and Q4 do not work harder in October. They lead more deliberately in May, when nobody else is paying attention.
Which tool did you find yourself most resistant to as you read? That is the one to start with this week.