Leading through lockdown is tough. ‘Work From Home’ is now an established new reality, along with onsite staff rotation and other new hybrid working patterns, all of which come with their own leadership challenges. Whether you manage hundreds of staff or just one Direct Report, leading people remotely, in a way that delivers results and maintains engagement and motivation, requires a new mindset and a new skill set.
And here’s the good news. The mindset and techniques needed to lead your staff to move from surviving to thriving in this new business landscape are all practical and learnable skills.
This article will introduce the mindset shift required to maximise performance during a pandemic and share a practical skill that can be tried out today as part of your daily leadership role with your teams.
Just before the world first heard the words CoronaVirus, in November 2019, the Harvard Business Review published its findings from a large scale research project on the future of leadership. Now is a good time to consider the conclusion of those findings as they provide data-driven insights on how and why a major change in leadership style has taken place within many of the world’s most successful companies. As we will see, the approach to managing these companies transitioned to in the years leading up to the pandemic are all incredibly well-suited to maintaining staff engagement, motivation and performance in this post-pandemic world:
“Highly successful, flexible and future-focused companies are moving to ‘…a model in which managers give support and guidance rather than instructions, and employees learn how to adapt to constantly changing environments in ways that unleash fresh energy, innovation, and commitment. This is dramatic and fundamental. The role of the manager, in short, is becoming that of a coach’.
‘The Leader as Coach: How to Unleash Innovation, Energy, and Commitment’
by Herminia Ibarra & Anne Scoular Harvard Business Review Nov/Dec 2019
In the 18 months since this research was published there has been a constant need to ‘unleash fresh energy, innovation and commitment’ due to the far-reaching impact of Covid-19. The pandemic demands this of every organisation, large or small. The same pressures apply whether you work in the private sector or the public sector, in education or for an NGO. Survival depends on the ability to adapt quickly and now it also requires the ability to adapt continuously, to never stand still, to assume change is the only certainty and to respond to this new reality with energy and commitment.
Begin with the Mindset Shift
In the world of professional sports, the coach knows that they are the coach and the athlete is the athlete. It is a clear and simple division of roles and responsibilities. The mindset of the coach is focused on how they can raise the performance results of their athletes and the team. Coaches spend their time thinking of new experiments, new practice drills and new training schedules they can try out to see what will get better results. With sports, performance results are easily measurable and so is improvement in terms of metrics like lap times, split times, points scored, goals conceded, matches won, league table position, medals achieved and trophies attained.
The First Breakthrough Moment
In my work, I deliver leadership development programmes that often last between one month and one year, to ensure that a coaching culture is truly embedded within an organisation – but for each manager on these programmes, the transformation begins the moment they have a very positive realisation that ‘their playing days are over’ – they are no longer paid to play, to be on the court, on the pitch or on the track – their role is to coach the performance of the players under their care, their team. From here, the role of the ‘leader-as-coach’ becomes clear. Their new challenge is to work out how to get every single ‘player’, meaning Direct Report, to reach their full potential as an individual and as an essential part of the team.
There are significant and important differences between sports coaching and leadership coaching, but experimentation to raise performance is one clear area of crossover, where leaders within organisations can learn from the mindset of the sports coach. In a working context, there is a very practical, business-driven reason for this – survival depends on innovation and productivity, so the leader needs to harness the full potential of the whole team in the same way that the sports coach needs their players in order to perform.
Visualisation Shift
So when you next walk into work, or turn on your screen and connect virtually with your team, try seeing yourself with COACH printed across your shirt and every Direct Report wearing your team colours. This is now the mindset of managers in many of the world’s highest-performing companies are using.
Innovation through Experimentation
Even before you learn any of the specific professional coaching skills that will transform your leadership style, you can try to conduct the following experiment with your staff to find hidden potential that can be used to increase team performance results:
- Select a current challenge or issue where you and your team need to deliver results. This could be anything from meeting a revenue target to overcoming a technical problem that is affecting business results. The more immediate, clearly defined and short-term the issue is, the better for this exercise.
- Clearly introduce the specific challenge. Define the problem/challenge… then do NOT give any possible solutions. Hold back. Here your challenge is to only present the current situation without giving any indication of how you would go about addressing the issue.
- Ask every member of your team to write down their own possible solutions to the problem.
- Ask everyone to read out their ideas – establish a ‘no judgment, no feedback’ rule whilst individual ideas are being presented
- Use a whiteboard/flipchart/laptop & projector to write down all the possible solutions generated by the group
- Ask each person to rank the top five possible solutions to the current challenge
- Then facilitate a discussion on the five solutions your team have ranked as most likely to work
- Gain agreement on which potential solution to try out first
- Have the team identify each step required in their experiment to try and solve the problem and get performance results to meet the agreed targets.
- Using SMART targets, gain agreement on when the first results of the planned experiment will be available to review
At this stage, you only need to focus on the process, not the outcome. Accept that the outcome is unknown – if we knew what was going to improve performance results we would already be doing it, right?
This is the nature of coaching performance, you don’t know what the result will be but you know where you are now and where you want to get to – leadership coaching uses a continuous cycle of creative experimentation, drawing on your team as your best resource.
I would encourage you to conduct your own experiment and see how much-hidden potential you can uncover in your team. The above steps can be adapted to a one-to-one coaching session if required. 2019 HBR Research data supports this approach to management in terms of the bottom-line business results of high-performing companies.
Please share your feedback and outcomes if you take on this challenge to experiment in order to Engage, Entrust & Empower your team through LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-a-alexander/
Ashley Alexander FCMI is the Director of Alexander Associated Leadership Solutions Sdn Bhd. Ashley is an international multi-award winning leadership development specialist from London, England. He holds a Fellowship of the Chartered Management Institute in the UK and is the author of the LEDA Coaching System and the internationally accredited ‘Coaching Skills for Leaders’ programme, Certificated by the British Association for Coaching. He is a Research Fellow with the National Human Resource Centre (NHRC) of HRD Corp.
The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.
