Managing people starts with this reality

We’re all trying to figure out the best way to work from home.

You’ve seen plenty of tips on how to position your Zoom camera, what sort of background is best for work (we don’t want to look in your closet!), and how to configure your settings to block “Zoombombers.”

Any discussion of how to manage your people starts with this reality: we are in extraordinary times; time and attention are at a premium, and we must manage our expectations.

Our current situation is much bigger than working from home. It’s working at home with your family. In quarantine, every day is Bring Your Kids (your spouse, your elderly parents) to Work Day — just less fun because everyone’s routine is disrupted, and we’re all more anxious.

The time and attention you are asking of employees has become much more expensive. We must ask, in today’s environment, what are reasonable expectations?

Your people have less time to give right now. They’re locked down with others to care for, and they’ve lost all their help and most of the structure that made it possible for them to give you 40, 50, 60 or more hours a week.

They’re also dealing with outsized stressors, like trying to figure out how to parent and teach their children. (Modern parenting practices aren’t optimized for stay-at-home life. A lot of us are having to figure out for the first time how to tell our kids that they can’t have our attention just because we’re close by.) They’re worried about those from whom they’re separated and loved ones (or perhaps themselves) whose “underlying conditions” have suddenly become potentially fatal risk factors.

The best leaders in these times will do three things:

1. Expect to accomplish less.

This is not business as usual. Our profits and competitive edge must be balanced with the health and well-being of our people. You have to prioritize projects and postpone what you can — and clearly communicate so people know what matters most to the business today, tomorrow and next week.

Your reconfiguration of priorities needs to be explicit. We’re out of our usual environments. Your team can’t read your body language in a meeting (though try backing up from the camera so viewers can see more of you, this might help), and word of mouth doesn’t work the same today. Let’s over communicate. What takes the place of your water cooler conversations, your white board ideation sessions?

Remember, informal and nonverbal communication are minimal at the moment. Remember the 7% rule? While misused and overstated, most communication is nonverbal — body movement, eye contact, posture, etc. Our senses will develop new paths for assessing nonverbal, but it will take time.

2. Make the best use of the time people can give you.

We need to think about how our people split their time between collaboration and concentration (research, problem solving, innovation, fleshing out ideas). Don’t tie up all their time in meetings. It could be an extraordinarily creative time for some. Figure out who, and take advantage of it. Creativity and innovation often arise out of changing and challenging circumstances.

We’re discovering that Zoom is tiring. It requires a lot of focus for a fraction of the visual clues we get from sitting around a table together.

We need shorter meetings with fewer people and just one or two decision items. We’ve known we need to move in this direction. We can’t put it off anymore.

Think about the best medium for each meeting: Phone, e-mail, Slack, Zoom.

Short updates in writing, not calls. Calls for decision, negotiation or working through feelings.

Do what you can on the phone or via email. (Stay off email for negotiation, detailed expectations and emotional conversation.)

Give them collaborative tools, particularly tools for drawing together online. We’re missing our whiteboards. Drawing with a mouse is hard! Find better stuff. Friends recommend Miro for distributed collaboration tools. I admit I haven’t yet tried it but the online demonstration is quite appealing. I plan to try these tools this week.

3. Check in regularly.

In tough times, your people want to help. They’ll teach you how to get the best out of them in this new environment.

Let them teach you what their life is like right now. You have to care. You have to show them that you understand.

Now is the time to think about the difference your business really makes, the good you do in the world, the way your goods and services make life better for people. Nothing else really prioritizes.

Managers who rely on fear-based motivations — losing a job, disappointing a boss, etc. — are losing leverage when people are looking for meaning. Right now, we’re all asking more basic questions. As we’re letting a lot of things go, we’re asking ourselves in what really matters.

This is a time to help people see which of their contributions is truly essential to helping our communities pass this test.

New: Culturati LIVE April 23

We’re excited to launch our Culturati: LIVE series with Prof. Jeremy Hunter. Jeremy serves as Associate Professor of Practice at the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management. He is also lead faculty member for Weatherhead Executive Education’s Mindfulness for Effective Leadership certificate program. He was a top rated presenter at this year’s Culturati Summit.

The Storm Makes You Stronger: Managing Your Mind in the Face of Crisis

How do you face great challenges and come out better on the other side? The skills for managing great challenges are learnable. We will explore the fundamentals of these skills and practice them so you can help yourself, families and organizations. Jeremy will offer approaches and techniques including:

• Acknowledge and accept what you are experiencing during this challenging time and explore ways to cope with fear, frustration and exhaustion.
• Successfully play the Inner Game (forces within ourselves) and the Outer Game (forces outside ourselves).

You can register for the 2pm April 23 webinar here.

Brain Science to Help “Stay Calm” with Coronavirus

Vikki Hanchin is the mother of one of my dearest friends, Adam Lyons, the founder of The Zebra. She’s a LCSW, wholistic psychotherapist and author. We had dinner a couple of months ago and I asked her to allow us to publish her next piece. It couldn’t be more timely — here.

Albert Swantner is CTO of Mobile Tech RX, a startup in Austin and also a 2020 Culturati Fellow, as well as an inaugural Notley Fellow. He wrote Culture in the time of Coronavirus which we’re including in this issue.

When will things return to normal?

First, according to Dr. Fauci, “when we say ‘getting back to normal’ we mean something very different from what we’re going through right now, because right now we are in a very intense mitigation. If ‘back to normal’ means acting like there never was a coronavirus problem, I don’t think that’s going to happen until we do have a situation where you can completely protect the population with a vaccine.

Bill Gates says a vaccine will take at least 18 months, so does A&M professor Gerald Parker who directs the Bush School’s biosecurity and pandemic public policy program.

Personally, I’m building my plans around a respite from the virus in Austin in late June, early July, but people still not congregating in big groups. Most experts predict a return of COVID illness and hospitalizations in the fall/winter, then another let up in summer 2021. If mass, reliable testing could take place and aggressive test-and-trace is implemented, we might be able to more rapidly return to our new normal. If Trump and his Republican governors over respond to political pressures to return to work before reliable testing and test-and-trace are in place, this curve too could flatten.

Finally, I don’t buy the assumptions of the Economist’s conclusion that as our economy stalls innovation has to wither and skills decay. But, we have to start programming, designing practices to maintain, even sharpen our skills, and tracking and rewarding innovation now. While forecasts of our reemergence are dynamic, rather than asking when, we must ask how … how will we get together. We can’t wait for a vaccine to return to our new normal. We should define and make our way now.

Stay Home, Work Safe.

Fondly,

Eugene

P.S. my husband — Steven Tomlinson—and I collaborate on nearly everything, even more today under quarantine. Many thanks for his help organizing these thoughts.

Eugene Sepulveda is the co-founder of Culturati? as well as the CEO of the Entrepreneurs Foundation, a director and partner in Capital Factory, and the Treasurer & a Sr. Advisor to Austin Mayor Steve Adler. Eugene’s long played at the intersection of business, politics and community in Austin and nationally. He can be reached at [email protected]

?(this was originally published as the intro to our April Culturati Magazine, here: https://medium.com/culturati/april-culturati-magazine-e738076bbc8e)