As part of the We Are Company Webinar series, we have been looking at how to enable our relationships to thrive in a time of social distancing and remote working.
On the first Webinar Andrew Williams (one of the Founders of We Are Company) unpacked 6 relational factors that will profoundly affect our organisations in the future. It’s vital that we keep these front of mind as we make our decisions in the present.
In the second of this series of three blog posts, Simon Barrington now unpacks two more of the six relational factors that will be enhanced in the future, explains how businesses are responding to them in the midst of the Corona Crisis and leaves us with important questions we need to be asking now as we set future strategy and direction.
3. Leadership will need to be more vulnerable and trusting
It’s really tough to micro-manage when everyone is working remotely, and we are already seeing changed leadership behaviours across our client base.
In the future, leadership will become increasingly focussed on outcomes rather than activities and that requires a move to more of a “coaching-centric” leadership style, which is more collaborative. Leaders will need to focus more on equipping and energising their teams and creating a culture which is more self-aware and responsible.
Many of our clients are moving to approaches that deliberately and systematically create a “coaching culture”.
This will require leaders to become more vulnerable partly because of heightened levels of uncertainty about the future, and how they are feeling about this. Being more human, more emotionally engaged and enabling greater autonomy of action will be the marks of the next generation of leaders.
How trusting and vulnerable are you? How much of your time goes into listening, equipping and energising?
4. The type of culture in your organisation will become critical
It will no longer just be about what you do, but about how you do it. Cultures that enable high levels of relational engagement and reward the leadership and actions of teams will be highly sought after. Poor relationships, non-relational performance management and toxic environments that don’t allow people to thrive will be walked away from.
It will be increasingly important to measure the health of your relationships and to focus on enabling those relationships to thrive in distributed environments.
To enable this, one client is getting all employees to go back to their latest set of psychometric tests with their team and to ask the question about how their strengths and weaknesses contribute to how they best work remotely in this crisis.
How can you enable trust and empathy to be practiced in your remote working environment?
Look out for Article 3 which will be appearing in a few days’ time and unpacks two more relational aspects of work that will be vital in the future.
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