Leading ourselves and others through challenging times

As the case counts are rising again and winter is coming, many of us ask ourselves: How do we get through another year of this ongoing pandemic? How do we gain back mastery over our lives, and manage to be productive? Managing and leading ourselves and others has never been more important than these days. And all leadership starts with self-leadership.

The Covid-19 pandemic has generated a rapid move towards digitalizing our work settings. What the dotcom boom and internet euphoria did not manage to bring about 20 years ago, this pandemic that may well turn out at a global turning point in history now has done. The future of work did arrive more rapidly than anyone might have still believed.

For knowledge workers, remote work has soared, and along with it the need to explicitly take care about passing on and getting important information for our projects from colleagues: More calls, more formal meetings where usually a short walk across the hall solved a problem in two minutes when popping one’s head into the colleague’s office (and with the added bonus of lifting one’s mood with a friendly chat). With office sharing schedules that prevent too many people from showing up at the same time, we need to coordinate more, and manage more effectively.

It can all feel pretty exhausting – and it is going to continue for the foreseeable future. How to plan? How to work around this situation and become productive again? How to master this mode of working for another year, as the projections forecast?

Taking a step back from this description of many work lives right now, this pandemic has just made it visible that modern knowledge work requires the workers themselves to be qualified experts for their assigned tasks, but also self-managing their workload to a large degree.

These increased demands on our self-management and leadership skills are going to stay with us, because the future has just arrived more quickly than expected.

Because knowledge workers know best what their tasks require them to do, on top of executing their assignments, they need to be able to manage and lead themselves, their projects, and other humans. With shifting demands, they need to be versatile in taking different roles in different teams as needed. The pandemic has just sped up the timing with which this became a reality for now a large number of employees.

High-performing companies and organizations have realized for a long time that they need to leverage individual expertise in order to gain a competitive edge to thrive also in the future, argues Arie de Geus. The corona crisis brought this future on for everyone, and now we are working out of our homes, having to manage ourselves and our lives and workload.

We need to create knowledge and solutions for ill-structured problems, and make decisions with very limited knowledge. In the midst of an ongoing health crisis, this does not only apply to top-level managers and leaders of a company or organization, but basically to all of us who are trying to navigate our jobs and assignments and our own lives through these challenging times – just that now, we are doing this from the living room table. In these times, trusted techniques such as “management by walking around” don’t work any more.

Many feel that it would help our psychological survival to know when this ends and we can get back to normal. But most likely, we are not going back. These increased demands on our self-management and leadership skills are going to stay with us, because the future has just arrived more quickly than expected.

So, instead of waiting for these times to pass, it might make sense to invest in learning how to improve our (self-)leadership skills. The reward of it may be that we don’t have to let our lives be prioritized by the circumstances for us, which can feel frustrating. Instead, we need to learn how to prioritize, adjust ourselves, and keep track of the goals we wanted to realize and the contributions we wanted to make before these turbulences shook our world.

At the heart of self-leadership is to know our values, our vision, and what we want to achieve. And then breaking down this big picture into tiny steps that day after day we can practice to put onto each other. Reaching intermediate goals and removing obstacles, racking up a ladder of small successes that reward us enough to keep believing in our big goal – a goal worthy working towards, but one that can’t be just reached within one gigantic step from square one. At this point, the need for self-leadership comes in.

Applying self-leadership means acting such that we can believe ourselves that our patient work towards a long-term goal will pay off eventually

After we’ve been asking ourselves what we especially can contribute to solve important questions, with the combination of skills we have, and forming a vision, we need to build towards it and shield it against competing demands or external turbulences so that we can continue to build our best contribution to the world.

Staying on track requires self-leadership.

In a nutshell, applying self-leadership means acting such that we can believe ourselves that our patient work towards a long-term goal will pay off. And finding ways to make sure we can each day continue contributing our efforts towards this goal:

• By protecting and honing our mind’s focus, our health, and our creative time and energy.
• By not putting off the tedious tasks that we need to get out of the way, in order to work on what matters - be it clearing up emotional turmoil, clarifying relationships with other stakeholders in our projects, or getting organizational requirements cleared.
• Sometimes self-leadership also means adjusting to changes in the world’s landscape that pose new demands, while keeping our ultimate goal intact.

Self-leadership allows us to keep going on the path to our unique contribution, and helping and creating value for others on that way.

Effective self-leadership capitalizes on a mix of skills – and their constant usage, training, and improvement.

In these times that require a constant re-adjustment, some skills may be especially helpful to get us through:

• Self-reflection that may take the form of journaling to keep track of our goals and values. But also to monitor our development and progress towards them. Over time, a journal also may help discovering typical traps that prevent us from achieving our goals.
• Techniques like mindfulness and awareness that may help to improve our impulse control, emotion regulation and equanimity in order to make sure that our productive work dedicated towards that ultimate goal that is not set off track by frustrations.
• Managing our energy instead of just pushing onward. That part about the energy needs to sink in – because it entails that any training effect is as much about the pause, as it is about the push towards achievement that precedes it. Breaks are part of any training program and provide the time and space to recharge. To improve in sports, the body needs to recover between trainings. To improve and learn new mental skills, the knowledge needs to sink in and be consolidated and practiced. Breaks belong to our work time and can't be just cut for the sake of efficiency.
• Taking care of our health. Good nutrition and non-competitive sports may help to keep our body healthy and in that zone that allows us to reach our goals patiently – but so does the active use of relaxation techniques when our energy levels are low.
• Self-leadership also has a social dimension: Often it is helpful to seek out the opinion of others to reflect on whether we are still on track, and in touch with those around us, or where we might be stuck. Often another person sees a solution to get us unstuck again that we alone just can’t seem to see.

Although few people, if any, may be “perfect” at using all skills the help us lead ourselves and achieve self-control, that's not the major hurdle. For many of us, it might be sufficient to focus on the skills we master well in order to keep on track towards our goals, because we may compensate deficits in some skills that contribute to our self-control with better usage of other skills that also help us to reach our goals. We just, on average, have to be good enough and know ourselves and what works for us. Looking into what's working and not, and creating awareness of what we would like to achieve versus what we are actually doing, and adjusting our behavior accordingly, is a first and important step.

If you would like to learn more and develop a mental map of what you will need on your way to developing (self-)leadership, join our online workshop on Managing and Leading in the Digital Economy that is organized by the University of Zurich’s Department of Business, Economics and Informatics on October 13 & 14, 2020 on Zoom.

We have a limited number of spots for external guests still open, and they go first-come, first-served. Participation is free, but we appreciate you to share your professional insights and best practices in our discussions. We kindly ask you to register through our webpage so that we can send you a link and a password that is personal to you.

The program for Tuesday, October 13, 2020 is open to external guests (after registration) from 10.45 to 14.00 Central European Summer Time (Zurich Time). The program for Wednesday, October 14, 2020 is open from 9.00 to 14.30 Central European Summer Time (CEST).

A brief outlook on the program

All leadership starts with self-leadership. Therefore day 1 of our workshop is dedicated to individual skills. A disclaimer upfront: There are no hard and fast rules – and in developing yourself, the actual work is up to you and resembles more a journey than a one-time event that you can check off your to-do list. What we would like to achieve together is that each of us afterwards can map the conditions for their own successful development, and to share how to work around typical traps, and share best practices and best fails that may guide us on the way.

Dr. Joana Breidenbach will explain to us why ?New work needs inner work“ and how she and her team at the Betterplace Lab navigated the process of the organization’s members taking over the lead. We also learn about some biological foundations and limits that our brains and our environments put on us when we try to use self-control from Dr. Silvia Maier. We’ll hear about leadership development in a large engineering company from Hilti’s Vice President Human Resources Dr. Paul Jokiel, and assessment specialist Dr. Anna Luca Heimann is going to tell us more about how to select the leaders of tomorrow, and which skills are needed for a new type of leadership that swiftly adapts to the demands of the situation.

On day 2, we take the perspective of the organization. Katherin Kirschenmann will inspire us with The Do School Method – how to enable individuals to select good ideas to work on and create the change they want to see. Serial entrepreneur and business angel Moritz Delbrück and Head of People Jonas Jankus are going to discuss what makes a good, mature team, and how to build one, sharing with us their lessons learned. Niels Rot is going to share his insights on impact entrepreneurship and how to scale one’s vision. The afternoon will show us some examples how large and traditionally grown companies with a long history such as Axa (Dominic B?chlin) and Zimmerli (Dr. Janos Hee) transform themselves into agile organizations.

Learn more about our insights on the individual skills perspective on day 1.

Learn more about our insights on the organizational perspective on day 2.