Leading in Lock Down - Navigating Teams Online

Your role as a leader in your organization is to give direction, and at best to create the conditions for cooperation, boost change agility and development, for your organization, the teams and personally. Achieving all those, resetting your environment, is a great recipe for future success, tangible positive results and a healthy, prosperous team, able to elevate the company’s situation.

This chaotic and rapidly changing work environment requires setting up and respect new clear models of order, time and productivity. It requires to refine the direction, update the practical business model and especially creating a relevant practical vision. An active breakthrough to achieve new and altered levels of excellence, changed perceptions, that are now critical for success, is essential. Finding new authentic motivations, to connect belief and cause, and to express that in the daily work.

Get your virtual office right – your appearance matters!

Arrange a good camera on your eye level to avoid looking down to your team. Dress professionally, it will make you feel, thus act, better. Position yourself at a table, against a clean background. Close all other applications on your laptop and put your phone on silent mode, disable vibration, or put it away. Be on time to proof you are leading. Be present, physically and mentally.

Get prepared - you leading the agenda matters!

Prepare well for the meeting and be aware and prepared who you are talking to. At the very best have the meeting practiced beforehand, role played, or walked through for yourself. Have an agenda on hand and in front of you. Stick post-its around the screen with key stuff. Make sure you are uninterrupted for the session. Have paper, pen and a glass of water at hand. Free you mind and brain. Be ready for your team.

Get things done – Coach! Inspire! Be a modern Leader.

Start the meeting on time and connect to your team, to each of them. Actively ask them to check in and share how they are, mentally, physically, emotionally.

Let them speak. Fully discover their current story, and surface their thoughts. Ask open questions and listen, listen, listen. Listen to understand, not to respond. Practice active listening. What you answer, and how, is key. Silence is a great way of showing empathy, to make them feel they have been heard.

Frame the meeting well and share your agenda, set the scene. Be empathic and empowering. Perform at your best, remember the role play or walk through you have done, be aware of the way you appear. What you say and do, how you appear must positively contribute. 

Always try to know where your team is mentally right now. Lead them to an alternative, new, more empowering story. Start to drive that story with empathy and create a new belief. Fill that belief with positive content. Practice the power of storytelling. Share practical baby steps for your team to start walking that new path. Go first. Remember your coaching skills and make successful coaching methodologies consciously available for yourself. 

Conclude the meeting leading people from what is to what can be. If you would like to see your people grow in this changing world, coach them, lead them, guide them. If you trigger their self-leadership, their self-navigation, they will start to lead themselves towards a new future. That will easy your leadership.

Renew your skills and capabilities

The skills that brought you here are likely different to the ones needed to perform as a leader in the new world. Commit to self-development and willing to “look inside”. Be open and eager to learn and grow. Talk to others to train your new self.

All the best of luck to navigate safely through this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world!