Did you adjust your leadership style in 2020?

In this article I want to stimulate to question ourselves: Am I leading still in the right way?

In 2020 the Leadership style has become more important, as we saw and still see shifting activities and staff members able to work from home away from their usual offices. Being more at home and less present in the office means changes, both for the employer as well as for the employee, thus for all of us.

Some Managers have absolutely no problem with home office, others have rather difficulties: How can I control him/her? How can I ensure he/she is delivering? How can I keep the pressure on?

Talking about pressure, I realize that on the other side, many employees are also building up a kind of “negative pressure” themselves, thinking of: Is my boss happy with my performance? Am I delivering enough to justify my position?

At the end of the day, there should not be a difference if someone is working in the office or at home because being a Leader means, to trust my team, my employees. But also to receive trust from our Leaders.

Managing by objectives is for sure one of the key elements, but it needs to be applied correctly. And not to forget the fact that working from home, especially if you’re 100% working from home, means also to have impact on the social aspect. Therefore I want to share some experiences and some Leadership practices which I’m applying:

• Set goals for the week and/or month, as well as some priorities which have a specific deadline
• Keep in regular contact with your team members to follow up, but not with the intent to control, but to understand if support is needed at some point
• Ask regularly how things are going from a human/personal perspective – don’t talk only business all the time
• Organize (maybe once per week or all 2 weeks) a virtual call with your team members just for the social part – don’t talk business but let everyone share how they are doing, what kind of news they have and depending when the call is scheduled, share lunch or a drink together
• Don’t schedule to many meetings on the same day/week and ask also your team/peers to do so. Leave some time to recover (especially between long calls). At the end, we also need to find time to work on the different projects and tasks.

So, to sum up, from my point of view it is essential to be close to your people and even more during this exceptional time.

Take care and have a healthy start into 2021.