The Death of Traditional Management: Managing Your Team Post COVID, Pt II
Jason Lauritsen is a management trainer and innovator with expert advice that is transforming the way managers manage their teams. In this interview with Archetype Chief Growth Officer, Chris Harrington, he discusses some strategies and tips that will help managers succeed as more employees return to the office post-COVID.?
Read part 1 of our interview here .
Chris:?What do you believe is a manager's biggest struggle, particularly those that were maybe relying on those traditional infrastructures and getting by?
?Jason:?As I reflect on all the things that need to change and what's the biggest pain point, the one that is probably the biggest and being talked about a lot is mental health. I think the collective mental health of people, not just in the U.S., but globally is a huge concern and we haven't even started to feel the impacts of that yet. As managers, recognizing that not only is your mental health probably something you should be tending to, but also the mental health of your people. And by the way, most managers have absolutely no training or background, or they've not been given the support to know how to even navigate that. So, I think that is challenging. Learning to be compassionate and empathetic with your people is a good first step.
?I think the other thing is, that pre-pandemic we were all in the office and everything was static. Everybody showed up to the place and sat in their spot and did the thing that had been done the same way for a long time. It was very easy as a manager to look out your office and see that everybody showed up today. But when people were distributed to homes or when people were working a flexible schedule, managers didn’t know when people were working or how. Suddenly there are several things that you now have to have conversations about or that you have to get clear about. “How are we going to communicate?” “When are we going to work?” “What barriers are we going to have?” Now you have to document; you have to lay all that out so that people have clarity about what we're doing. Even when we can't see each other, we trust that we know how we're going to get things done. I think those are probably the two big things now.
?Chris:?There was probably for all of us, or for a lot of us, this separation between work and personal lives. And now with the pandemic, those things have blended. I can appreciate some managers are probably really struggling with that blend. Any suggestions you would give those managers for how to appropriately check in with their people and touch on their mental health?
?Jason:?That is the biggest barrier there. Often managers are uncomfortable with even stepping into that conversation. And usually what stops the manager is what if an employee says, “I'm really struggling.” What if they say, “My mental health is bad” or, “My marriage is falling apart”? What do I do with that? I'm a manager, not a counselor. So, they just stop the conversation rather than weigh into that. Partly, that's because HR scared managers. We’re so worried about the risk that we won't even engage in that conversation.
?The advice I always give is, well, what would you do in that situation? If you were sitting there and you asked the people that are closest to you, “How are you doing?” and they're like, “Yeah, you know..” You wouldn't just move on to the next question. You'll follow that up, “How are you really doing? What's going on?”. You'd push them on it. Then hopefully you'd say something like, “How can I help?”, or, “Is there anything I can do to support you?” You, as the manager, should at least have a sense of what resources are available or if you don't, you'd say, “You know what, let me go see if there are any resources that the company can provide or anything that I can help you with or connect you to.”
?When we strip it back, we remember that this is a relationship that you're building with your employee. You don't have to have all the answers. You just have to care. This is what compassion looks like. Because you recognize that they're suffering, you have to want that suffering to go away. You must be moved to do something about it. And then you have to take action. That's compassion in action. As a manager, if you do that, you don't have to have the answers. You just need to want to help and move to action. So that's what I would suggest.
?Chris:?So, in some areas, in some industries, people are returning to the office. What suggestions would you have for managers as they and their people start coming back to the physical location?
?Jason:?I would say the biggest thing is it needs to be a collaborative effort. If you want this to work with employees, there's a couple of things. I think number one is being clear and upfront about what's negotiable and what's not negotiable. Entering the conversation with employees about what the company has already decided creates boundaries and expectations. For example, the company's decided we're all coming back at least three days a week. Okay, well, that is fixed. I can't, as a manager, do anything about that. So, my job is to figure out how to partner with my team to make it work. What is the best way we can make this work? Because you're going to have people on the team re-litigate the decision about why we're going back for three days. They don't want to go back for three days or whatever. Recognize that people are going to have different kinds of feelings.
?I would recommend talking to each person individually first. So, you can have the conversation and let them vent all the venom about why they don't want to come back. And then land in a place of, I get it, that this isn't ideal, but this is the decision that's been made right now. I want to make it work for you. So, let's talk about that. Let’s figure out how to make it work the best we can. So that's the conversation. Then as a team, it's the same thing. Let's talk about how we can make this work the best for everybody, let's get everything on the table, and then let's make some agreements about how we're going to make it work. It’s the same thing you should be doing about how to make hybrid work or how to make remote work. Engaging with your team to figure out how to make this work best for all of us and being clear about what needs to get done. And we can have some flexibility within that limitation or that structure that we've been given.
?So, the biggest thing is co-creating your return to office plan with your team, because if you don't, you're going to lose people. People want to feel heard. They want to feel supported. They want to feel like their opinion was weighed and they want something that's going to work for them. The more they're involved in creating the plan, the more likely they are to feel like it works for them.
?Jason’s new management classes are available to register for here.