Do you remember Spring 2020? It was only three years ago, but for many reasons seems like a lifetime away, and if we think about all the things that have changed since then, it is indeed a different world. The world of leadership development was hit hard, where almost overnight our reliance on face-to-face interventions disappeared.
I was recently thinking about how these changes have impacted our business, and indeed the entire way that leaders lead, and it occurred to me that the experiences and learning from the last three years should be documented and analysed in order not just to see where leadership development might be headed, but how aspiring leaders are selected and prepared; in fact how they lead in this exciting new world.
My intention is to write a series of these posts documenting my and my team’s experiences and what we have learned. I hope that you find them interesting and useful.
Once upon a time (all right, pre-March 2020), leadership development took place in a world that was, for the most part, face-to-face in real meeting rooms with real people sitting around an actual table. And for many, this is how leadership was as well. Maybe not always in a meeting room sitting around a table, but usually within touching distance of the person and/or people concerned. This wasn’t always the case, of course. Global organisations had dictated that leaders were managing people not on the same site, and employees were getting used to having their managers in a different site, or even a different country. There was some attention paid to this new scenario.
Virtual working is not completely new
Forward-looking companies were educating their employees in the techniques of ‘remote management’ and conference calls, with people dialing in from all over the country or the world, were becoming ubiquitous. Even in the world of leadership development, we were running some events virtually, but these were seen as more akin to keeping in touch with participants between modules, checking in with them to ensure that they were using the tools we had shared with them at face-to-face events.
There was a general feeling that remote interventions were somehow second best to being in the same room as your team or your participants. What have the past three years taught us as to whether this is really true or not?
In the case of my business, overnight we went from running a busy schedule of face-to-face training modules with leaders and aspiring leaders all over the world. My team and I were used to jumping on planes at the beginning of the week, only returning home Friday evening. Suddenly our clients had stopped all travel and all development programmes as they tried to figure out what this new, locked down world, meant for their businesses. Our previously full calendars became empty and once we had recovered from the shock, we realised that if and when leadership development came back onto the agenda, it would probably look very different from how it had before.
So, we spent the time thinking and experimenting, working out how we could replicate the ‘engaging and inspiring sessions’ (or so our participants told us) that had formed the mainstay of our ‘real life’ development into a remote setting where people were sitting on their own in bedrooms and kitchens feeling, for the most part, bewildered and sometimes just plain scared.
Moving to a hybrid model
In the early days of the pandemic, all of our programmes became virtual, but in the past year or so we have transitioned to a hybrid model. This is where some of the work has been virtual and some face-to-face. This has been very much decided by our clients who have learnt that virtual is cheaper and easier than face-to-face, but that unless it’s delivered by people that understand how to do this in an optimal way, it can be less effective.
You can just about get away with a lecture-style presentation in an actual setting, but when trying this remotely you can sense the participants’ attention is wandering and that more urgent matters are encroaching. How to keep participants as engaged on their computers as they can be in a meeting room has been one of our main challenges and one that we have many ways of addressing.
Our journey from in-person developers to hybrid providers has not always been straightforward but we have learned so much from the things that have worked well and even more from those that haven’t. I have itemised some of these below and in future posts will give more examples and details on how we faced and overcame the challenges.
But for now, a handful of key learnings that I hope will be helpful for everyone that is dealing with the world remotely.
Key Learnings
- Over time we saw some employees feeling overwhelmed, isolated, and fatigued. The speed of the switch from constant human interaction to becoming dependent on technology led to people overlooking the importance of relationships and connection and the early wins in terms of productivity and results sometimes trailed off. This could also be exacerbated by feelings that they were not being fully supported by their leaders and managers when they were only seeing them on a screen.
- Hybrid working can be just as effective as face-to-face, in terms of increases in productivity, output, and results, but it doesn’t happen automatically. Having the right technology and techniques is so important, as is establishing a virtual presence. Adapting and being prepared to flex between face-to-face and virtual engagement takes practice. It takes a ‘hybrid mindset’ with additional skills and techniques.
- In a remote or hybrid business world, it’s easy for unhelpful habits to develop. People jump from meeting after meeting, often skipping important steps such as checking in with each other or allowing adequate time for dialogue and reflection.
- In some cases, important decisions and actions were being delayed because leaders started to see virtual meetings as second best and wanted to hold off critical matters until they could meet their teams in real life.
- Some leaders were going down a different route, utilising technology in the most effective way. They were using their remote meetings to really engage with their people and pace meeting schedules so that their teams didn’t feel overwhelmed. These leaders seemed to be able to continue the upward progression of productivity and results and had fewer instances of ‘digital burnout’ in their departments.
- The most effective leaders were often ones that had experienced good hybrid development so were used to using technology in creative ways and keeping focus on relationships and communication.
- Reports from global accounting firms report that those whose education was disrupted by the pandemic have weaker teamwork and communication skills than previous generations. Young employees who spent time away from the business during lockdowns appear to be good at working independently but struggle with speaking up in meetings and making presentations.
- Communication has never been so important. In a virtual or hybrid business world, we often don’t see the clues that tell us whether something has been understood and integrated and messages can get diluted or lost altogether.
As I said at the beginning, I’ll be exploring these topics above in more detail in future posts including what we observed the most effective leaders doing and how we adapted our own ways of working to embrace this new reality. If I could give you one message to take away from this, it is that virtual and hybrid leadership can be as effective as face-to-face working but cannot just be the same way of working at the end of a computer.
If leaders experience hybrid in their development, it helps them understand that methodology is as important as content when it comes to developing our future workforce.
