My recent post regarding fear and the need for certainty triggered some amazing discussions with front-line operational leaders this past week.
What I heard from leaders at the front lines:
- “Working” hours are approaching 50% of a 24-hour day
- Uncertainty is triggering a need to turn everything around “now”
- Even the best leaders are missing their “pop up” peer interactions
To be clear: we have lots of work to do. The leaders I spoke with are reorganizing functions, helping to set the stage for M&A decisions, and launching new products and services. In addition, issues with people, processes, and technology that could be worked around when we were face to face cause major issues in our new remote environment. It’s now harder to do the work of leadership, including delivering and receiving strong feedback, synthesizing collaborative solutions, and teasing out subtle decision drivers.
Virtual work is placing enormous demands and pressures on high-performance leaders to not miss a step and still deliver to their pre-COVID commitments. For that to happen, we are going to need to make some room to be human.
We only have so much brain chemistry in a 24-hour period, and grinding away for 10-12 hours per day lowers the quality of work – no matter how committed we all are. We are wired to work in groups (even if the task is largely individual) and being isolated is wearing us all down.
Some Tools to Help
To make room for the high energy items we talked about above, we need to find ways to reserve our energy for the heaviest lifts. I wanted to share some tools that I’m seeing bear fruit in firms that allow the day-to-day work get completed in a way that preserves some focus, energy and insight for those more challenging tasks.
At the risk of being too specific, let me share some very tangible approaches to:
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- Office Hours: Have a direct discussion with your team about “office” hours. One group I spoke with has blocked the day into “real-time” and “async” (standing for asynchronous, meaning it’s ok to buffer it in a queue). This banding of the calendar has helped leaders claw back some real “thinking” time.
- Email Protocols: Give your teammates the gift of clear asks and expectations. Using the subject line in emails and wiki requests to allow the intensity and gravity of an item to be seen at a glance has been done for a while, but ACTION NEEDED kills the stamina of the team when it comes in 20 times per day. More useful tags are NRR (No Reply Required), Y/N – Decision needed on…by… and so forth. For a complete set of these to get you started, see this article here.
- “A quick walk”: Set the tone that it’s ok to ask for a 15-20 minute, no agenda “walk” with colleagues. We did it all the time in the physical office. We grabbed coffee, went for walks together and then proceeded to have a no agenda chat about non-work items. It’s not healthy to be in a “transaction only” world.
When you put protocols like this in place (and they are caught as much as taught), you’ll see a noticeable difference in the energy level of your group. Having some dry powder is increasingly important as this current challenge extends.
What are you seeing that works? Please add to the conversation in the comments section below.
Coaching
If you’d like to talk about how a bespoke cycle of coaching could allow you to build sustainable momentum through the pandemic, please reach out to scott@scottpropp.com or put a 20-minute appointment on the books using this link.
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