Nearly 3 months into lockdown, it’s a good time to review what we’ve learned and, assuming we’re going to be leading teams remotely for some time to come, to invest some time and effort in improving the experience for all concerned. Here are some of the tips we’ve gathered from our clients and our own experience of the last 12 weeks since on our first leadership in lockdown blog.
- How do you look – it still matters! (and we’re not just talking about the increasingly 1970’s hairstyles). The visual impression you make as a leader still counts when you are on screen, particularly in meetings with external audiences or people who don’t know you well.
- Lighting, camera position, and what’s visible in the background all have an impact. Lift your laptop on a box so the camera is on a level with your eyes or slightly higher. Avoid strong single coloured backgrounds, as your laptop camera will try to colour balance the image, neutral backgrounds are best. It’s worth taking a few screen grabs to see what you look like in different positions in your office and with different lighting setups.
- And if you find yourself raising your voice as if you’re projecting across a large room, invest in a headset or an external USB microphone so you can position it much closer to your face and still keep the laptop and camera at a good distance for the image.
- How do I lead my team, and work with internal and external partners?
- Over the weeks most teams have found a way of getting operational work done on a regular Zoom or Teams video call – but it’s much harder to do some of the softer stuff of leadership online. It’s difficult to spot the team member who is struggling, or to have a quick 1-to-1 chat over coffee on the way to a meeting with a colleague whose concerns you want to handle. We’ve found leaders need to make more time for informal 1-to-1 conversations, and try to do these on the phone as it feels more personal and confidential than a video call.
- Don’t schedule back-to-back video conferences through your day. It’s too exhausting. One client talks about the “50-minute hour”, and schedules all their team calls for 10 past the hour, to allow everyone some time to get a break, find the papers, or have that quick WhatsApp exchange to check out someone’s position before the meeting starts.
- The technology can really affect the way you work with groups outside your own team. Different companies favour different conferencing systems, and IT protocols and company firewalls often mean that people outside your immediate organisation can struggle to join your meeting, which immediately puts them at a distance. So get your IT department on the case to help find some work-arounds for external participants in your meetings.
- There is a similar challenge with running hybrid meetings where some people are in the room, and others ‘dialling in’ – this can easily create the impression of a two-tier group, reducing the quality of interaction and un-balancing decision making. Hybrid meetings are best avoided.
- How do I influence stakeholders?
- The enormous effort of creating the means to operate your business remotely through lockdown has resulted in many leadership teams becoming very internally focussed. Three months in, this is a good time to review the state of your stakeholder relationships and recognising who you’ve not been bumping into at external meetings, as you might in the past. Schedule a set of 1-to-1 calls with key individuals, to listen to how they are coping, what lessons they have learned from the last 12 weeks, and how you might be able to help each other in the weeks and months to come.