DISBAND THE CULTURE CLUB - Rethink Leadership

There is a Culture Club forming that cites culture as the reason people need to work in a building. I challenge every member of this club to find a definition of culture that refers to a location, a building, or an office. You won’t find one.

This will be a Culture Club series of newsletters as we explore what needs to be eradicated and replaced to build a thriving culture in a distributed workforce.

Last week, we looked at location, and work is what we do, not where we go.

This week, we will explore the aspect of leadership. You can only have a thriving culture if you have good leadership. Those citing a loss of culture if employees do not return to the office do not have a remote problem; they have a leadership problem.

Leadership

This could be the shortest newsletter I will ever write. Why? I have said everything I want to say about leadership and culture before.

Unlearn and relearn

The world of work is fundamentally different today than it was before March 2020. Leaders must have the courage to unlearn and relearn to embrace what the future holds. I have often said that we are being presented with the greatest opportunity to rethink the way we work we may ever get. Leaders with the courage to unlearn and the integrity to admit they were wrong will be our organisations' victors, frontrunners, and heroes. Link.

Culture and leadership must evolve

Leaders must intentionally reinforce greater and more impactful ways for employees to connect with the culture – both emotionally and through their day-to-day work and experiences. Link.

Leaders must take a more human (authentic, empathetic, and adaptive) approach to overseeing people and work. Link.

Performance measurement

Employees want to be measured on the value they deliver, not the volume they deliver. We know this is an issue as productivity paranoia is rife. Despite research informing us that employees working remotely are just as productive if not more so, than when they were in the office, bosses do not believe they are being productive because they are out of sight. The crazy thing is that even when they could see them at a desk, they did not know if they were being productive. Link.

Trust

Employees do not trust their leaders to value them for their contributions or achievements. They want to trust that they will be measured on the value they deliver, not the volume they deliver.

They want to be given the flexibility, autonomy and trust to do their very best work wherever they choose.

Trust is a 2-way street. It is not just that employees do not trust their leaders, but the leaders do not trust the employees!

Employees do not trust their leaders to value them for their contributions or achievements. They want to trust that they will be measured on the value they deliver, not the volume they deliver.

Bosses do not trust their employees to be working when they cannot see them.

They do not trust them to do the job as well as they would do it, therefore they micromanage.

Evaluate it using a matrix exercise and then address the issues. Link.

Leaders need to have character to be trusted. Link.

Leaders need to have competency to be trusted. Link.

Leading change

Many so-called leaders still don’t see managing change as necessary and stick to the premise that if they think a change is a good idea, so will everyone else.

I want to highlight some common mistakes that adversely impact achieving successful change and organisational culture.

I believe five common mistakes can be avoided. Link.

Listening

Leaders need to start talking and listening to their employees. For today’s talent, ambition is no longer just about career progression. For talent, ambition puts work-life balance, flexibility, equity and skills at the heart of career decisions.

Talent values work-life balance as highly as pay. There is a continued strong desire for flexibility, both in terms of where and when people work.

With generational and geographic divides - as well as personal circumstances - affecting the needs of their workers, employers must rekindle connections with colleagues to better understand how different career paths and working models will suit individuals. Doing so will allow employers to move away from broad-brush talent strategies and personalise their approaches. Link.

Leading a distributed workforce

McKinsey’s research, “The State of Organisations 2023”, found that only 15% of business leaders they surveyed said they were comfortable leading remote and hybrid teams.

My response is, “Of course they are uncomfortable.” Most leaders have never led a remote or hybrid team before. It is unchartered territory. You cannot just pick up the old policies and practices from a totally in-person working model and drop them into a remote or hybrid model. Those who have tried have failed miserably.

We need new norms for a new way of working. Add to the obstacle that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Every organisation is different and must determine the working model that works both for the employer and the employee.

Leaders need education, training, coaching, and mentoring to be effective leaders of hybrid or remote teams. Link.

Want to know how I can help? Link

The next newsletter

In the next newsletter, I will explore another aspect of the thriving distributed workforce culture.