Imagine if, at the beginning of the pandemic 18 months ago, companies and organisations would have responded with ”old-school” methods, by inviting managers to attend training programmes and courses on how to work in a pandemic. Fortunately we instead saw instant experimentation and fast change in our ways of working. In short: we learned fast. Now, going into post-pandemic times, we should embrace the same type of instant learning to create working set-ups for hybrid work. The threat if we fail, this time, is not death by infection, but the gradual death of shared engagement and personal sense of relevance at work.

In order to fully understand the urgency of leadership for post-pandemic hybrid work we need to consider the current-day situation of communities and professionals at work. What is the leadership-work-to-be-done? Only after this may we then figure out how leaders can be supported and the leadership be developed within the company.

Observations of the important pandemic-induced changes to work and work life underscore the fact that 18 months is, by far, a long enough time for habits and mindsets to form, to change and to be abandoned. We have also had experiences of collaborative work being confined to smaller circles and networks of colleagues, and of many individuals becoming more self-reliant and more mindful of personal terms of engagement at work. 

For the ongoing transition of organisations out of the pandemic, these pandemic-time changes to work and working bring at least three challenges that need to be addressed through leadership support.

Firstly, workgroups and their members need to collaboratively experiment, find and build habits and routines around new working practices of a new, eg. “hybrid”, set-up of work.

Secondly, individual employees need to be supported in continuously strengthening and broadening the capacity for self-leadership that they have practiced and developed during the course of pandemic-time work.

Thirdly, and perhaps most critically, many workgroups may experience themselves as lacking a strong purpose and meaning for working together within the team and company. Indeed, there are organisations that already have become surprised by employees who unusually strongly voice their commitment to a personal purpose, rather than a company purpose espoused centrally by top management.

Given these challenges, what is then the role of leaders addressing them, and how can the leaders be supported?

For understanding the role of leadership, we need to realise that all 3 identified challenges share in common a dependency on initiating and leading dialogue, both at the level of workgroups and individual co-workers. The leadership-work-to-be-done is to increase shared purpose and meaning by 1) starting and leading collaborative and engaging team-learning processes for practices of hybrid work, and by 2) initiating 1-to-1 development dialogues with all co-workers. It is especially important to recognise any self-leadership skills that co-workers have focused on and developed during the pandemic, and consider how to develop their personal capacity and purpose further as a part of their work in the team. 

At the core of these important leadership roles and tasks is the need for initiating and supporting communication and interaction, which in most organisations are viewed as baseline competencies for holding supervisory positions. In other words, the leader role in the post-pandemic transition to hybrid work does not require a new set of competences. 

Based on our experience, we would include the following 5 recommendations in for supporting leadership for hybrid work; 

1. Make it a top management priority to immediately start focusing leadership at the workgroup level, and to resist delaying leadership action in workgroups by waiting for traditional management training courses and off-site conferences. If leadership development programmes are already about to start within the organisation, ensure that they involve leadership actions by participants at the workgroup level as features already during the programme and not as actions expected after the programme.
2. Ask and support all team leaders and workgroup supervisors to mobilize and invite their co-workers to immediately share in collaborative activities of developing work
3. Provide all workgroup supervisors with a guideline, a “leadership-path” of steps for triggering development in their team*. Preferably, include guidelines that can be shared  by the workgroup supervisor with all group members, to make them “co-owners” of development in their workgroup.
4. Provide peer-coaching on-demand to leaders who experience problems with starting or are insecure about the task.
5. Provide opportunities for leaders, online or f2f, for peer-to-peer reflection and comparing of experiences about undertaken actions. Experiences of “doing leadership in action” are engaging learning experiences  that drive the need to tell others about received insights.

In the wake of the pandemic, “leadership development” implies focusing agile support to leaders to fulfil their role of immediately triggering and leading sensemaking and creative dialogue, both with groups and individuals. If the task appears familiar, it is because this is what most organisations have attempted to do already since years before Covid. Perhaps we could get further now as we have fresh memories of how real urgency indeed enables fast learning? 

* for clarification of “leadership path”, pls. contact author

Bo-Magnus Salenius is co-founder and designer of concepts for leadership support at TalentMiles