Leaders Can Hide

The COVID crisis has sparked a profusion of articles on leadership, leading in a crisis, etc, but most of these pieces have focused on leadership from the leader’s perspective.  That sentence may sound ridiculously obvious but while good leadership advice should always take the employees’ wants and needs into consideration, sometimes the best insights are communicated by presenting from the bottom-up perspective.  Rather than reading another article about what leaders have been feeling, thinking, and doing over the past few months, consider for a moment the experience of transitioning from seeing your boss every day to the world of remote work.  What are the key elements that determine whether that transition has been smooth for you?  What has improved in this new setting and what are you most excited to see revert as offices begin to reopen?  How can you, as a leader, help your team turn their own answers into reality?

We have all experienced many emotions since the pandemic started but “certainty” has rarely been one of them.  Many leaders have attempted to shield their teams from constantly shifting contexts and updates because protecting teams is a fundamental responsibility of leaders and managers. But over informing and failing to communicate each pose unique challenges: too much information can be overwhelming to some while others find too little information can be the scariest situation of all.  To complicate matters, some employees function better when they feel they have more information, even if that information lacks much certainty, because an absence of feedback causes minds to run wild and imagine worst case scenarios around every corner.  Others prefer that updates include only decisions and action points.  Leaders, particularly in such extraordinary circumstances, must take the time to understand the individuals in their teams and provide each with the degree of information that will allow them to function most effectively. There is no time more important than now to practice “The Platinum Rule” - treat others as they wish to be treated.   Some leaders have discovered through remote work that they have to adjust their communication style, almost by employee, to meet everyone’s needs. Such customization was actually needed all along, but the remote workspace has illuminated the issue.  Once these leaders got over the frustration of the perceived extra effort, they adjusted and ultimately realized the value of the Platinum Rule, whether collocated or remote. 

Expressing one’s self virtually can require some different skills than when collocated.  Written communication carries more weight, but emotional overtones can be misconstrued by subjective interpretation, gestures during video calls may be lost against virtual backgrounds, and clues we may have never noticed we relied on vanish entirely.  Many astute employees learn early to “manage up”.  They watch their leaders for tells: the excessive coffee breaks or increased foot tapping that denote bad news brewing, or the spontaneous jokes that break out more frequently when all is well.  In fact, when times are really tense, collocated teams report that they can actually “feel the tension in the air.”  We have yet to find a Zoom equivalent for atmospheric tension.    Similarly, for employees who are particularly dependent on verbal communication or reliant on serendipitous break room encounters to pass on low urgency but high importance information, adapting to remote communication tools can be a struggle.  Worst of all, with the broader existential challenges everyone faces right now, separating work-communication induced stress from background noise can be challenging.  

Leaders therefore bear the responsibility for initiating “how are we doing” conversations about communication.  Explicitly talking about non-verbal cues may be possible only in particularly high trust relationships but leaders can reflect and try to identify their own signals to find ways to get that information to the teams anyway.  That’s exactly what the owner of a mid-size company found he had to do.  This leader has a somewhat gruff exterior, is highly directive and has little patience for idle chatter, to the extent that his team knew a delay in his response time signaled displeasure.  Now imagine the perfect storm that occurred when these well established signals met video conferencing glitches.  Early in the remote work process, the employees found themselves frequently ending meetings thinking that they were in trouble or had displeased the owner.  Morale was, understandably, negatively impacted.  Eventually they shared this with the owner, who was completely unaware of the situation and secretly found it comical.  He now makes an effort to address these types of situations immediately.  Although reports are that a few such moments still slip through the cracks, the team is learning to live with them and is far happier than before the concerns were brought into the open.  

Perhaps most stressful for employees is how easy a remote environment makes it for leaders to hide.  Leaders have more choice over when the interactions happen with their team. In a collocated environment, doing nothing but sitting at his or her desk can make the leader seem present and accessible.  In a remote environment, the same action can make a leader seem closed off and absent to their team.  For many people, sending an email, IM, text message, or otherwise initiating active communication feels more daunting than swinging by a desk or an office.  For these employees, leaders who are simply failing to make a specific outreach effort will come across as hiding from, or possibly even abandoning, their teams.  Now is a great time for leaders to pause and reflect on their interactions with their team, the principles of the Platinum Rule, and confirm that each employee perceives them as being as available and accessible.  Intentions, in this case, are simply insufficient.

The availability of, and easy access to, leaders is important for collocated teams but becomes crucial in a remote setting.  Adjusting to new communication norms and conveying the most reassuring level of detail during inherently unsettling times can also help smooth the transition of employees to remote or hybrid work environments.  But both depend on a minimum level of contact and connection, along with a clear understanding of the individual’s needs.  Employees who feel empowered to initiate conversations, and confidence that their concerns will be addressed, will better transition to, and sustain productivity within, remote working environments.  Remote work makes hiding easy but success depends on resisting the urge and being more present, and sensitive to employee needs and preferences, than ever before. 

Postscript: No single article could cover every aspect of communication and leadership - there is always more to consider.  For example, how you communicate a message can convey information beyond the message itself.  For a deeper dive into this aspect of communication, particularly in the context of remote/hybrid work environments, check out Belle Walker’s latest article.