Finding freedom to lead in an online world
If you’re a leader or facilitator in 2020 you’ll most likely have wondered:
What does effective leadership look like in these times?
How can I sustain my energy when working remotely?
How do I make the technology work for me rather than the other way around?
In this article I share what I’ve learnt supporting clients this year and my experience facilitating teams and learning online in general.
Despite the misery and dread that many have felt working from home ongoing, I believe - because I see and feel it often - that there is freedom to be found.
A key principle
First and foremost, who’s in charge? Humans or the tech? The technology platforms offer us the vehicles and tools through which we can collaborate, engage, and share our work. But the tech is not the work itself. Your most valuable resource as a leader remains you.
My hope is that the changing shape of our working lives doesn’t distract us from the core wisdom and experience we hold about leading through uncertain times.
I summarise this in the following way:
Don’t confuse the ship for the Captain.
Early in my career I found myself running presentation skills workshops. The approach that made the biggest difference to people’s effectiveness: write it first and prepare your slides at the end. Because slides used to aid you. Now we say “let me take you through the slides” as if you’re humbly showcasing their brilliance rather than the other way around.
We can fall into a similar trap by getting attached to the same way of engaging remotely, namely: the video call, and for larger groups: regular use of breakout rooms. Prescribed rules or getting into repetitive habits is adding salt to the work-from-home wound/doom of the pandemic.
Your capacity to discern what’s required, your good judgment, your passion and care, your vision and creativity, your talent and experience…these are unique and hard-won, and all work together as you navigate through the many pushes and pulls at work. You are the most reliable expert witness in your role, its many challenges, and what others may require of you.
With that established, let’s acknowledge what is different about leading virtually.
What a difference a Zoom makes
The emotional life of people and teams can be heightened when we’re remote, for better or worse. Many teams are used to being located across geographies snd the experience isn’t much different.
Some people feel more engaged and enjoy the autonomy and privacy of being remote. Not everyone is a fan of a noisy open plan office, and they might even feel more safe to open up about their personal lives. However many find it transactional and soulless, particularly when remote working isn’t a one-off, but the everyday all-day experience against your will.
It is easy to click on and off meetings without connecting to vital parts of who we are: our feelings, joy, desire to see and be seen, to feel and be felt by others. I suspect the transactional experience is a symptom of a lack of processing and acknowledging our emotional landscapes and their relevance for work.
Despite the great apps available we are more than a square image online: our eyes want to look in more than one direction; our bodies want to move; our intuition wants to sense the mood in the room.
The monotony of working through a computer for all our activities can be numbing. Add to that the pressure of keeping an organisation afloat in challenging times, and the pendulum can swing towards organisational survival over human vitality. It’s a zero sum game: what are organisations achieving if they’re harming us?
Virtual emotions
Through my work with groups and culture I explore how the unconscious aspects of our lives impact on the work place. Extrapolate this process out to teams and large organisations and you have untold complexity and patterns of behaviour: the human system.
We have an experience of something big or small - an eyebrow raised in a meeting, someone interrupting us, or a change to our contract - and we infer meaning, wondering what this data says about how people perceive or judge us. Based on our mood, mindset, and unique psychology the meaning we make of the event will vary.
When working virtually our data points are dramatically reduced. We can’t feel the pulse of the room or the energy of a team. We can’t walk into the office and get a gauge on the general mood. And we can’t manage our social needs and relationships as easily. For example we lose the ability to maintain eye contact, buy someone lunch, accept their offer of tea, or adjust our body language.
Without these data points our minds fill in the gaps with stories from the past, or become eclipsed by challenges in the present.
Where can we start?
I believe we all have a part to play: to notice the gaps in our data and challenge assumptions and inferences; to manage the narrative in clear, honest, and adult ways as best we can; to keep the unhelpful stories and anxieties at bay by sharing the relevant information.
Not everyone is a master of linguistics or enjoys talking about emotions. However whatever your personal comfort level, emotions are an intrinsic part of the magic and meaning of human endeavour.
It isn’t about politely asking how people’s families are or what they did on the weekend. Emotions are lighthouses for our world: they point to what needs attention, hint at un-spoken dynamics, and draw out instinct and intuition.
Make the implicit explicit
Here are some ideas:
Before you share important information with your team, start by verbalising how you feel about it: excited, cautious, anxious, disengaged, reflective. Use ‘emotion’ words to signpost the mood. Be creative and use more pictures in presentations.
If you do check-ins or daily stand ups, incorporate an ‘emotion word’ into the update from each person to get a read on the team. It doesn’t take long but brings rich data to the surface. You could take it in turns to bring a song or piece of art work for a different kind of inspiration.
Prompt others to verbalise their thoughts and experiences, don’t take silence as agreement. If someone says ‘sounds good’, ‘nothing to add’, or ‘I’m fine’, ask them what specifically is good about it. You can’t feel the temperature in their room so you’re going to have to ask for a reading.
If you’re engaging a large group online for a town hall or conference, ask people to use the Chat early on to anticipate questions, or to give you feedback in the moment.
Beyond this are the general boundaries of roles and work life that contain and ground us. In a situation where boundaries surrounding the time and place of work have eroded, these become more vital than ever.
Be careful not to overdo it - read more about how to ensure boundaries are liberating rather than oppressive.
Core levers of leadership to anchor us
A quick health check…do you have:
A compelling vision and credible strategy to achieve it
Clear roles and goals – where people feel authorised and resourced in alignment with their responsibilities
An understanding of identity and belonging – which is my ‘primary team’, how do I relate to and work with the variety of people across our matrix and network
Culture and trust – the ability to role model openness and engender trust, and create this environment for others through informal behaviours along-with reliable and relevant formal processes
Don’t assume these are in place unless you have undeniable evidence from others. Keep testing your assumptions to make the implicit explicit.
Free your mind and the tech will follow
Having explored some ideas of the purpose and role of leading virtually we can now discern what medium or tech we use.
Many have become over-reliant on video-conferencing with some rules about whether webcams are used or not. However there is no ‘one way’ that works for everything, in the same way that the mass migration to open plan offices and hot-desks created its own host of problems.
Have you ever formed new friendships or relationships by spending hours on the phone every night? Do you feel that same intimacy after hours on video?
Here are a few alternatives:
Use a basic phone conference. It worked for three decades so why change now? The audio is reliable and stable, people are free to walk around or stare out the window, and it can help some people focus more without the distraction and intensity of videos. You can share materials by email. We shouldn’t need to chain adult employees to their screens to engage their faculties.
Schedule a ‘walk and talk’. With one person or a group agree to walk outside during the call, with headphones in so you’re relaxed and free to move as you would on a normal walk with someone. See how it changes your experience and engagement whether it’s a formal or casual conversation.
Cut through the dense diary by leaving a voice note or video message. It can feel more personal and generous than email, messenger or text, whilst being an easy way of connecting when diaries are busy. It also gives people time to process your message.
Creating environments online
Most of us have figured out how to translate general good meeting management to the online world. This goes some way to manage uncertainty, anxiety, projections, and confusion in the environments we create for others.
For those still resistant to the tech, or have slipped into habits of click-on click-off (you know who you are!) here are some ideas:
Manage the boundaries: stick to time, task, and clarify expectations. Why are people there, and what outcomes are expected?
Say hello to the humans in front of you! If videos are on, smile and try to look somewhere near the camera itself. Use people’s names to acknowledge you see them to make up for the lack of personal eye contact.
Let people know if you have family who might appear in the background in case they’re not comfortable being heard. Or wear headphones so no one feels broadcast around other homes.
Try standing up with your laptop propped up on a shelf or box. It particularly helps if you’re facilitating or leading a more formal session when you might usually stand at the front of a room.
Clarify the ground rules for using videos, mute, and the Chat function.
Clarify what’s being recorded. Face-to-face meetings are rarely recorded so consider your reasons. Avoid recording personal contributions.
Resist lengthy monologues; these rarely work in any situation but is even more draining online. Engage people early on with relevant questions. Use the Chat function for large groups to share and acknowledge contributions.
Visual aids are more important than ever: use concise slides that signpost where you are, to share vital information, or make language clear if you’re in a multi-lingual setting. Make these available for people to refer to autonomously, whether it’s a presentation, an interactive session, or collaborative meeting.
With large group engagements recruit a friendly colleague to manage the Chat room and someone else on tech support.
Learn how to use the different functionalities of your chosen platform and use them well - MS Teams, Zoom, Slack channels, Miro etc.
There’s no obligation to wave but ensure you close the conversation properly. Clicking off a meeting suddenly is like turning the lights off behind you when someone is still in the room.
Whilst we are in the uncertainty for the long haul, let’s take back control of the design and shape of our working lives. Let’s be more intentional about the environments we create. There are no hard and fast rules. But there is a chance to free ourselves and each other from disconnected, monotonous ways of working, or to simply try something different.
Are you looking to reignite the approach to virtual leadership in your organisation? Or looking for some Team Coaching to lift performance in this climate? Get in touch.