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

A common mistake, e.g. in off-sites and workshops, is to present generic questions for which the answer is self-evident or can’t become very specific and useful. Another mistake is not to make the question(s) relevant and personal. Examples of such questions are ”-How can we become more customer focused?” or ”-How can we work better as a team?”.

The ’trick’ is to contextualise any leadership-question.  For example; ”- In service-group X we have invested a lot of money of effort to get better customer feedback. Yet, this service is still getting weaker customer feedback than in service-group Y in which we have invested nothin! I’ve tried to figure out why this is the case? What could we do differently to be more focused on the customer?” As a result of the contextualisation, we have a real question people will recognise. What’s more, as you state that the question is engaging you personally, you will inspire your team members on an emotional level to engage their minds to find an answer.

Good luck with your questions!

…and don’t try to ‘lead’ if your leadership is not needed. It’s Time to Lead Together.

…and believe what they discover themselves. As a leader, it is your job and privilege to ask good questions to trigger discovery.

…to motivate your team or your subordinates. Motivation is personal and grows from within. Just make sure you are not  keeping someone from growing her motivation!

Let’s start off with the good news. By now, a universal view of good leadership is sinking in fast and across industries. Most modern leaders recognise two “musts”. First, if you need your company to change, you need to lead your exec team to be one, be fast and be driven by purpose. Secondly, you need to turn your managers into leaders of change. So far so good. It is good know what needs to be done. As always, the challenge is making it happen.

With my colleagues, we have identified three particularly persistent beliefs preventing too many companies from accelerating change and building their capacity for learning faster.

Myth #1: Managers need detailed instruction, training, before starting to lead in new ways.

Myth # 2: The behavioral impact of a leadership-programme always starts to fade fast after completion. And it is impossible to tell if behavior actually has changed.

Myth # 3: Learning leadership is best done in workshops with strong content presented by skilled trainers and facilitators. That’s why training is very expensive, takes too much time out of work and needs to be done in smaller batches over time.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

At LearningMiles, in pragmatic and daily work with clients, we have learnt to challenge the myths and find ways of accelerating change in any company. Let me finish by sharing three insights from this work;

1. Managers can be helped to learn faster by coaching them to start ‘doing’ new leadership activities immediately. The time for reflective talk is later when there are interesting experiences and insights to discuss with peers.
2. Managers become engaged by having their supervisor leaders challenge them with real business questions. In the process, they learn to challenge their own teams.
3. Finally and not insignificantly, coaching managers into real leaders of change can be partially supported by digital and mobile concepts. Compared to traditional ways of training change leaders, this allows for increasing the numbers of participants while keeping costs significantly lower. Most importantly, leadership learning gets more personal, business-relevant, visible and fun!

Den förestående och ännu otydliga vårdreformen i Finland ger kommunen anledning att begrunda och omforma sitt uppdrag. Förväntningarna på individualiserade, digitala kommuntjänster ökar hos allt fler kommuninvånare. Samtidigt kvarstår en betydande grupp invånare som av olika orsaker inte kommer att vilja eller kunna utnyttja digitala tjänster i samma omfattning.

I kommunen krävs i nuläget ett strategiarbete som i första skedet ger en mångsidig insikt om hur kommuninvånarna, företagen och andra aktörer i kommunen ser på sin situation, om deras bekymmer och förväntningar på framtiden. Insikten ger utgångspunkten för att formulera en strategi för hur kommunens tjänsteutbud ska utvecklas, hur tjänsteutvecklingen kan ske fortare med stöd av ny teknologi och i allt högre grad i samarbete med användarna.

I Sibbo och Pargas har LearningMiles fått uppdraget att ta fram ett upplägg där strategiarbetet sker smidigare än förut samt engagerar många fler medarbetare och användare på bred front även med digitala metoder.

Det framtidsspanande första skedet av strategiarbetet startade i början av januari och pågår fram till slutet av mars 2017. I vardera kommunen medverkar samtliga chefer samt över 100 framtidsspanande medarbetare. I stället för traditionella seminariedagar har deltagarna uppdraget att själva möta och föra dialog med invånare och företag på bred front. Tack vare stöd i form av LearningMiles´ mobil/webb-applikation kan detta arbete koordineras och genomföras på mycket kort tid och kostnadseffektivt. I följande fas förädlas insikten till kreativa men verklighetsförankrade frön för ledningsgruppens och det nya kommunfullmäktiges strategiarbete.

This post is about ‘engagement fatigue’. By this, I refer to the frustration a number of experienced managers express when faced with the need to start a strategy-process.

By now, concepts of co-creation, interaction and engagement are not new to any manager. But temptation is growing to reduce the programmed and planned dialogue and storytelling that today make up much of what is considered strategy-work. To many, the age of lean start-up and agile leadership seems to suggest we could perhaps cut down on ‘talking’ done to help people make sense and engage. This way we would surely get the ‘strategy’ nailed faster get on with the implementation?

Now, based on leadership research, it is very likely that a successful company has managed to stay in business and reinvent itself not despite but rather because it has developed – learned- a good capacity for engagement and sense-making ‘talk’. Invariably, this capacity implies that both managers and employees to some extent have learned to relate both to strategizing and the notion of ‘strategy’ in a pragmatic way as part of work. In the words of Karl Weick, they know how to ‘talk the walk’.

Unfortunately it appears that, in the classical role of a ‘manager’, a common approach is to treat every strategy-round as a routine and one identical to the previous one. We tend to forget that we ourselves and our colleagues have learned things since the last time and could start from where we are and not from scratch. Above all, we forget that we have ‘learned to learn’ and learned to ‘talk’ and communicate much faster.

Indeed, in the minds of many directors and executive boards the notion of strategy-work still seems to include time-consuming flip-chart- and powerpoint-driven workshops, kick-offs, off-sites and roll-outs. Ironically, in every old-school workshop or off-site, all participants can be seen actively doing real-life ‘talk’ (chats and emails) using their mobile phones and Ipads. Effective and real strategy, it seems, gets co-created in chats and fast communication. What’s more, in any company today, there is more ‘strategizing’, involving more colleagues than ever, not less.

Perhaps it is time to replace any outdated corporate blueprints for interactive strategy-processes with contemporary ones. The new approach needs to build on mobile, collaborative, creative and much faster ‘talk’.

Tuttu johtaja ja ystävä purki turhautumistaan edessä olevaan uuden strategian rakentamisurakkaan. Taas olisi alettava ikään kuin alusta, “ymmärryttää kaikkia” loputtomissa työpajoissa ja lopputulemana syntyisi kuitenkin aika odotettu ja hampaaton “himmeli”. Voisiko tällä kertaa mennä jotenkin suoremmin asiaan, vähemmällä keskustelulla ja tiukemmin määrittelemällä tekemisen tavoitteita ja mittareita?

Lohdutin ystävää ensin ehdottamalla että ehkä useiden aikaisempien strategiakierroksien tietynlainen toteuttaminen oli mahdollistanut firman tähänastisen selviytymisen ja jonkinasteisen uudistumisen? Kovensin kommenttia. Johtamisajattelussa, -tutkimuksessa tai toimintaympäristössä ei ole tapahtunut mitään joka antaisi mahdollisuutta nyt vähentää vuoropuhelua organisaaiossa ja asiakkaiden kanssa strategiatyössä. Pikemmin päinvastoin. Yhä useammat toimialat jotka uskoivat olevansa turvassa murroksesta löytävät itsensä tilanteesta jossa toiminnan olemassaololle tai palveluille löytyy kun löytyykin haastajia.

Ja vaikka oman toiminnan radikaalimpi muutos olisikin näköpiirissä vasta vuosien päästä, nousee työn tekijöiden yhä suurempi tarve jatkuvasti “uudelleenkiteyttää” — ja vähintään osittain uudistaa työn ja oman tehtävän strategista tarinaa. Lopuksi, olemmehan jo pitkään halunneet valmentaa tekijöitämme yhä vahvempaan aloitteellisuuteen ja osallistumiseen toiminnan kehittävään keskusteluun?

Mutta strategiatyön taisteluväsymystä on kyllä liikkeellä paljon. Itse mietin olisiko käynyt niin että olemme jääneet “strategiatyön” vuorovaukutuskäsityksessämme vanhan ajattelumallin vangeiksi? Siksi, kun ajattelemme hekilöstön tai asiakkaidemme havainnoimista tai vuoropuhelua, ajattelemme ehkä aikaa vieviä strategiapajoja tai höpinätasoa tuskin ohittavia fläppitaulu-ryhmäesityksiä?

Tämänlaiseen strategisointiin ei enään riitä aikaa missään yrityksessä. Eikä liioin taida riittää kalvosettien puuduttaviin massavaluttamiseesityksiinkään. Jotta strategiatyö koskisi aidosti ihmisille (kollegoille ja asiakkaille) tärkeitä asioita emme voi vähentää osallistuvien määrää, todellisten kysymysten esittämistä tai yhteistä ja luovaa tiedonrakentamista ja ketterää kokeilua. Mutta isonkin yrityksen strategiaa , olemassaolon tarinaa voi mainiosti tehdä ja uudistaa paljon nopeammin. Tehdään yhteisöllisesti, innostavasti ja samoilla keinoilla joilla tekemistä, merkitystä ja ajattelua rakennetaan chättiaikakaudella muistakin tärkeistä asioista.