Shifting Your Approach To Leadership

3 to-do’s for leaders in this new age

Actually, leadership approaches aren’t shifting. They’re being completely obsoleted—at least for now. And this isn’t a new age. It’s an unprecedented age. It’s a radical disconnect at the very core of what defines an organization. As a result, many of the traditional tactics of leadership are not only struggling to succeed, the reality is that they’re no longer even applicable. They’re non-starters.

Management by walking around? Walking around what, your kitchen counter, your dining room table, or if you’re lucky, your work-at-home desk? There’s no way you can watch your people work, unless you want to be a video stalker, you’ve tapped their phones, or you have some sort of stealth screen-sharing software hidden on employees’ PCs.
 
And the same goes for your team watching you. Coaching by example? You can tell people what you’d do. You can explain it. But you certainly can’t show it.

Daily morning scrums? It takes everyone longer to get on the blastafritzen webcast than the entire meeting is supposed to last. And yes, you can mimic putting items on the board, but it isn’t the same. You can’t see as much on a small laptop screen, even if you could read the small print on the individual items.

Casual lunches? “Let’s grab a bite to eat” used to be a way to get employees off-premise, and have a more relaxed, personal conversation. Now, if you can even go into a restaurant at all, you’re soaking your hands in disinfectant, mumbling through your mask, and wondering who has touched your food. It’s about as relaxing as chatting in the operating room of a hospital.

But there’s more!

You don’t look like a leader either. You’ve been reduced to a five-inch tall, washed out face with an overhead light glaring off your forehead. The camera angle is below you, like the people seeing you are five-year-olds. Your voice is tinny from the built-in PC microphone, and you don’t have eye contact with anyone because you’re focused on your screen and keyboard.

The list could go on, but you get the point. Many (most?) of the leadership skills that you’ve honed over the years are out the window. And there are some new skills you absolutely have to master if you want to continue to be an effective leader.

So how do you become more leaderly in this decidedly unleaderlike environment? You need to think differently about your image, a key skill, and how you conduct your duties.

Start Looking Like a Leader

You have position, authority, responsibility, experience, and skills. So quit looking and sounding like an amateur. Would you come to work in your pajamas, or in your knock-around home clothes? Would you entertain business guests in that mess of a room visible behind you in a webcast? Would you bring your cat to a sales call and let her walk across your keyboard during your client pitch? Of course not.

Video and audio have become the new standard for communication. You need to start thinking of yourself as being on a video set or in an audio studio. Look at it this way: You’re not going to the kitchen. You’re going to work. Look like it. Act like it. Create a workplace visual set that rivals your layout at the office. You don’t need anything fancy. Simplify the background. It’s you people should be looking at.

Then get some effective A/V equipment. Enough with the low-caliber video cam and mic built into your PC, along with ambient lighting. Get a decent digital webcam with a noise-canceling microphone, or even add an inexpensive lapel mic and USB sound adapter. At the start of the pandemic, these items quickly went out of stock, but you can find them now.

As for the webcam, you want the style that mounts right on the top of your PC screen, so you can maintain better eye contact with it. Also, get a low-cost LED ring light and tripod for your desk, so that you can properly light your face. You’re talking as little as $60 here for the whole setup. Spend your own money if you have to. You need to look sharp and sound sharp.

Master the Technology

By now, you wouldn’t think this would be such a big issue, but it is. Leaders are still stumbling around hosting a webcast. They struggle trying to screen-share, showing things on their desktop that they don’t mean to. They drop calls, get lost handing texted questions, can’t figure out how to erase screen mark-ups, and so on. Bottom line, they just don’t really know how to use the webinar software. This won’t cut it anymore.

Traditionally, leaders had to be knowledgeable about PowerPoint. Today, you need to be a webinar software pro. Now it’s your main tool for communicating with your team. Find the right IT person and get coached through all the features of the software your organization uses. Then practice, practice, practice. You need to operate the software smoothly, with a minimum of distraction, so that you can maintain more eye contact with the camera and look like you know what you’re doing as a leader.

By the way, you need to help your team, too, with all this, especially if they have outward-facing duties. Your department needs to look professional to your customers and partners. Provide the resources your team needs to make it happen. It’s not that big a dent in your budget.

Map Your Leadership Functions to the New Environment

With these mechanics mastered, you’re ready to better leverage them in your leadership tasks. 

OK, the previous assertion that so many of the old leadership methods have been made obsolete may have been a bit harsh. They better not be totally obsolete, because your team still needs to be led.
If you’re to be successful, you have to translate your historical leadership activities into the new environment. The problem is, this isn’t going to just happen on its own. Sitting in online meetings all day isn’t necessarily leading. It’s participating, but it isn’t leading.

The best way to transition your leadership approach to today’s environment is to identify what you used to do, and map it to how you plan to do it today. It’s literally analyzing everything you’ve always done as a leader, and figuring out a way to approximate it at a distance.

For example, you used to go to lunch with subordinates on a periodic schedule. It was great “relax and get personal” time. Maybe now, you decide to schedule lunchtime one-on-ones with individual team members. It’s more relaxed than a typical business webcast. You both have food in front of you. You’re sitting back, eating, and chatting away. It’s the perfect time to find out how people are coping, and what you can be doing for them.

On a more structured basis, you can’t walk around and watch people work. But you can connect online with them and ask a few well-aimed questions. “What have you been working on? Walk me through a typical day. What did your work on yesterday (or last week)? What exactly did you do? How did it go?”

When people are remote, leaders are typically focused on output. You see the results. But you have no idea how people got there. You have no idea if they’re busy or they’re coasting. That’s why you need to work harder at understanding not only what people are accomplishing, but also what they’re doing.

Then there are also your formal leadership duties. These are those rewarding motivational conversations or those challenging remedial conversations. In these online exchanges, the medium is the same, but the tone of the meeting is very different. It needs to be more formally set up, more formally described, and more formally conducted.

Those are just four examples that might be on your mapping list. You can see what it requires. It can be well worth taking a day of your time to carefully and logically work through exactly how you’re going to continue being the type of leader you’ve always been—regardless of the environment or technology. Then make sure you look and perform like a pro.

That’s leadership for this new age.

Author Bio

Ken Cooper is a leadership coach, performance excellence consultant, and e-learning startup co-founder. He has conducted over 2,500 seminars, and has appeared in hundreds of online video and live satellite programs. Ken is author of The Relational Enterprise and co-author of Taming the Terrible Too’s of Training, and has written for publications such as The Corporate Board, Entrepreneur, and Chief Learning Officer, among many others.  Visit www.kencooper.com Connect Ken Cooper