Deeds and words: leadership under COVID

This is the last of three posts focused on lockdown's impact on the way we work. It's about how we're managing to lead teams and businesses remotely. The previous post, about creativity and collaboration, is here. To get the background on the series, read this introduction first.

“I tell you one thing about lockdown. You can really tell who the leaders are now.”

It was one of the comments that stood out most to me in all my conversations. It was the statement of someone bearing witness to a manager they now know is not a leader. In this way, lockdown has been the great revealer. It's revealed the people best equipped to carry the emotional weight of a crisis, as well as those who aren't. It's revealed the companies with a strong culture that's central to who they are, and also those whose culture has been squeezed out to the margins now the business is a series of talking heads on a screen.

Since so much of what makes a business resides in the behaviours and mindset of its leaders, I wanted to use this final post of the series to look at the leadership challenges generated by lockdown and remote working. In particular I'm going to examine two traits.

The first is empathy. You can tell when it’s there, and when it isn’t. As my interviewee said, “emotional intelligence is difficult to fake” when the trappings of office aren’t there anymore. It’s just one human relating to another. The filters are off. And if you’re not making the effort to get in touch, it’s pretty clear.

The second is decision-making, another trait that's sometimes at its most obvious when it’s not there. Making decisions isn’t easy at the moment. There’s no playbook. But limbo isn't sustainable. Any strategy is about decision-making: deciding what problem to solve, deciding on a solution, and deciding what resources you’ll put behind it. Any strategy right now feels like making bets on a future no one can predict. It's a huge gamble. But, as one person put it: “no one expects you to guess the number, but you need to put some chips down somewhere.” So, strategy is decision-making is leadership. When everyone in the business is feeling uncertain, a vacillating leader is the last thing they need.

Let’s take a look at these two in turn. We'll do the second one first.

Avoiding decisions IS a decision

Tiredness is a factor in the kind of thinking we feel able to do. One senior leader admitted to me they’d “never felt more tactical in [their] thinking.” Aware they need to be looking longer term on behalf of clients, their team and the agency, they in fact felt as if they were rarely thinking more than a few days in advance. Just responding at all is a strain - a strain that crowds out our capacity to think further out. The practice of strategy often requires a value judgement about the world - it asserts that one course of action is better than another, demands practitioners impose themselves on the world rather than be constrained by it. But this extremely difficult at the moment. It can even seem futile at best. It’s not exactly clear what to aim for.

A client I spoke to said that “no one’s really thinking.” He works for a brand that needed to get advertising out quickly, and he salutes the way in which his team and their agencies met the production challenge, but acknowledges that the quality of the work out there isn’t great. The problem is not only a lack of thinking time, but also a lack of consideration of what they’re trying to achieve. Early COVID advertising is simply a matter of informing the public about what you’re doing, and showing that you care. Work is making its way into the world not as a result of business decisions, but of instinct.

Of course, companies have been dealing with a huge cognitive load: furlough, CBILS, making sure operations are up and running. Not being able to think beyond this is understandable. But a business is like a shark, it has to keep moving or die. Right now, the business of being in business is where all the attention is, with few people giving themselves anything to work towards. There's a danger that the energy of a workforce will be squandered on the same thing - a new presenteeism which I don’t think can be entirely blamed on the people exhibiting it. What would you do if roles were under threat where you worked? You’d make damn sure you were seen on the right video calls. You’d work up speculative briefs and write recovery plans. Some leaders fear that’s happening without quite knowing, but without a longer term horizon to shoot for, we shouldn't be surprised if it is.

Slack is the other way to be visible of course. Reports from one agency suggest the noise on Slack made life tough for anyone strategically minded. Channels were filled with loads of tactical ideas, from people with loads of energy (this was a few weeks ago, at the start of lockdown), and lots of support for those ideas that might hold revenue potential. But it was hard to get a handle on what the priorities were. There wasn’t very much direction on what would be the right things to do, and what wouldn’t be. Some people will thrive in that scenario, but others won’t. I’m not sure that having your most energetic employees determine where your resources go is quite what an organisation as whole needs or deserves.

Leadership is about deeds, and sometimes deeds are words. Not making key decisions, or failing to communicate them, can create a vacuum that anxious, well-meaning staff will fill very easily. But a filled vacuum doesn’t mean you have a strategy, and it doesn’t mean the quieter ones in your organisation are consent to or even know what is happening. 

A team needs its leader

“It’s very easy to become invisible,” said one client I spoke to, a head of marketing responsible for thirty-three people. He said he faced a decision over the course of each week: stay in constant contact with the “3 or 4” people he talks to most often, or risk neglecting the rest of his team. As a leader, he realises how important those moments of visibility were in the office. Just overhearing conversation and saying hello on the way to and from meetings were ways of staying in touch with everyone. For him, the situation is so fluid and fast-moving that the day can be eaten up by a series of half-hour phone calls. He said it’s not unusual for the working day to last from 7am to 11pm. And in the morning it begins again.

On the flip side, it’s clear for any employee that, in the words of a CSO I spoke to, lockdown has “taken its toll on boundaries.” The already blurry delineation between work and family, and even within the different facets of family life (for parents, time with and without their children, for example) have almost disappeared completely. Employers’ mindfulness of employees’ challenges beyond work have never felt more in the spotlight. I spoke to one leader tasked with speaking twice a week to eight employees with mental health challenges. Another has two team members on the government’s list of the most vulnerable – this person in particular is very aware that reinforcing someone’s vulnerable status can sometimes make them feel more vulnerable. It’s an extreme version of the unintended consequence every leader needs to look out for. It's impossible to observe a situation without affecting it.

So how does an empathetic leader, faced with the challenge of motivating – and monitoring – their team, strike this impossible balance?

I heard three different approaches, which complement each other very well.

The first: be authentic. One client said they’d found team members responded better when he himself was honest with his own experiences and feelings. He’d opened up about the "onslaught of emotions" he felt (frustration, loneliness, anxiety, even exhilaration) in the space of half an hour. Colleagues found it helpful to know he was going through it and felt more able to open up themselves. Honesty is reciprocated. This is classic Brene Brown, Dare To Lead territory. The more prepared you are to be vulnerable yourself, the greater connection you’ll make with others.

Secondly, get specific. When people are anxious, and worried about their jobs, platitudes won’t always be enough. ‘Do what you can’ is something we've probably all heard, but won’t necessarily be perceived as sufficient permission by a workforce that also feels the need to be visible. The CSO who is trying to keep spontaneity alive by calling creatives unannounced, noticed that more junior members of their team weren’t doing the same, despite it being recommended. In places with a ‘flat culture', it may be that hierarchy is starting to re-emerge, with junior members missing the tacit permission for interaction that was in the office. Creative businesses should watch out, and leaders need to keep reiterating that permission. Good communicators think about the context in which their message will be received, and not everyone in your audience will feel the same sense of autonomy as you, or feels as entitled to assert their own boundaries. In my recent role, I tried to make that permission tangible, giving examples of what people could do if they felt the strain. Ask for a call to be moved. Suggest it finish 15 minutes early. Ask for an extension. Take lunch. Go for a walk. Be with your kids. Leaders need to meet their audience way more than halfway.

The final area is to make sure you follow-through on that permission. “It’s easy for me to say that family’s a priority” said one person, “but it’s harder to refrain from calling someone every half an hour to chase up that piece of work I really need.” This is where true empathy comes in: if you understand, you’ll be better able to know when to protect people and when to push them. The presenteeism doesn’t help, and more than one leader mentioned the risk of people taking advantage. But trust is the bigger issue here. Trusting your team to say what they can and can’t achieve requires honesty, clarity, and consistency. And as a leader, that all has to come from you.

Final thoughts and best practice

As a leader, you can’t please everybody. Lockdown is no different. For every act of empathetic communication like this, there are people who, like one person I spoke to, simply "don’t have time for anything other than essential information". My own take is, visibility doesn't happen organically right now, so you have to work at it. Better to provide inspiration for people who don’t need it, than not provide it for people who do. In the end, though, ask yourself what kind of leader you are, and what you believe is needed. Stick to that. We can only really be ourselves.

Some things to try.

• Keep talking. Try to engineer visibility. If that can’t be a series of one-on-ones, find another way. It’ll make every other interaction a whole lot easier and more efficient.
• Keep up momentum as well as motivation. Businesses are like sharks – stop moving and they die. If it doesn’t feel like you’ve taken a decision in a while, be aware others below you might feel in limbo.
• Instigate more purposeful group comms. The all-hands Zoom is getting pretty tired by now. So too the virtual drinks. Try finding other reasons for people to come together. Karmarama are doing open source Zooms on topics like brainstorming and presenting. It’s a great way to shine a light on best practice and prevents the unstructured noise that can so easily fill up Slack.
• Look at near as well as now and next. Read Kev’s excellent post on this. Thinking across different horizons will bring more purpose to the business and clarity for teams.

So that’s it. That’s my summary of how people are adapting to leadership challenges in isolation. It's also the end of this chain of posts. If you've arrived here having read all three, or indeed any of it, then I hope you've found some of it useful. I've certainly found it a fascinating thing to write. Of course, it's not comprehensive. It's a week's worth of chats with a very small fraction of the people who are facing these challenges every day. But I'd like to thank everyone who gave their time to speak to me. Things are really hard at the moment, everything takes longer. So to spend any precious time at all reflecting on such an uncomfortable topic was probably not what any of them needed. So if that was you - thank you.

Who knows how much of this experience we'll retain, or what it will teach us. But for now, at least I feel I understand it better.

If you'd like more information on me and why I wrote all this, you can go back to the beginning of the chain here. Thank you for reading.