Leadership in Lockdown
Communicate "one on one" with as many team members as you possibly can each day.
As the Team Leader you may personally be very busy but others still need to feel that they are valued, connected to a cause and have a purpose.
Understand that the way that you may feel in your own lockdown location may be very different to
how others in your team might be feeling in their own situation.
When you engage with team members, apart from work related activities consider checking in with others about their own personal challenges and concerns.
These will be different for everyone as people may have anxiety around job security,
the challenges that might exist if they were required to find alternative employment, financial liquidity, problems with personal relationships,
a loved one’s mental health, managing family members while working from home or even
just wondering what the world will really look like going forward and when they will next get to catch up with family and friends overseas.
Unless you have developed close personal relationships with your team already,
people may not be prepared to open up to you around what their real concerns and issues are.
So consistently “sell” the message that you are there for a talk if they want to engage with you and always do your very best to
engender a bit of light-heartedness into the conversation where you can. (By the way this is a very different process to
just asking each team member in a group video forum to share “how they are going” as that is unlikely to secure the most meaningful
and honest responses).
Understand that some people may not have the ideal quiet or private "home office" space where they are living.
Or they may be battling it out with others in the household for use of the quiet space or internet bandwidth.
I had a video conference one individual that was sharing the kitchen table and benchtop with 3 other flatmates
so everyone was trying to work from the same space while the others were conducting their own skype sessions,
holding virtual team meetings and even making lunch in the background!
Do what you can to assist people to do their remote work effectively.
This may mean moving to some form of cloud based file access or providing essential items like cameras, headsets, cables,
software or even additional hardware to make things as seamless as they can be.
I even know of an organisation that couriered a parcel of groceries to all of their team members – how is that for appreciation?
When people in the business are being paid at a reduced rate (say 80% salary) consider whether you can modify their hours
so at least they are not expected to work “business as usual hours” for a reduced income.
There might be less for them to do anyway so consider cutting them some slack and encourage them to use the spare time for
exercise or other forms of self-care.
Or if team members have voluntarily taken even more significant additional pay-cuts to help keep a business afloat,
make sure that as the Team Leader you actually understand how long and hard they might be still be working.
Surprisingly perhaps, the people that have had their hours dramatically cut back may now actually be delivering many,
many more hours than they are being paid for. On reduced hours people have a lot of surplus time and while your
most committed team members may choose to voluntarily fill their day by working for longer, make sure you are aware of this
discretionary effort and log it so it can actually be recognised in some capacity in the future.
This is not the new normal!
And finally, remember that many things will take a great deal longer to do in a work from home environment.
There may not be as much as work available for the business, but out of sight does not mean that your team are not still working really hard.
Just like you, many team members are working harder than ever just to deliver any results in this environment.
In NZ we move to a Level 3 lockdown next week and this realistically means that most of us are still working from home to limit social contact.
So we are in this together for a few weeks more at least and let’s not miss this opportunity to add some content to our Leadership toolkit.
Frankly most of the practices mentioned above are just as important in normal times as they are right now.
So use the current scenario as an opportunity to start actively raising the bar relative to your own Leadership behaviours.
Doing so will certainly serve you well whatever your career aspirations may be going forward.
Stay safe and share widely.
Author: John Richmond
Team Leadership Services