Three ways to prevent hybrid work from breaking your company culture

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by Earl Simpkins and Varun Bhatnagar

 

It’s tough to maintain a cohesive culture when half of your employees—or more—regularly work from home. Specific steps can help.

Here’s a situation you might have experienced at your latest team huddle. Half of the group gathers in the conference room as the meeting is about to kick off. But your remote colleagues are busy trying to get connected, and several miss the first few minutes. The discussion gets repeatedly halted by echoes or silenced when remote employees are reminded to take themselves off mute. The conference room doesn’t have a video screen—or a functioning screen that anyone can figure out—so some people in the room dial in on their own laptops, defeating the purpose of an in-person meeting.

Many employees love hybrid work models. But this new approach to work can have a profound impact on their sense of community and connection. A Harvard Business Review study of more than 1,000 employees found that many who worked at least partially remotely felt more excluded from workplace affairs than their in-office counterparts. PwC’s Global Culture Survey 2021 found that among employees who worked from home during the pandemic, 44% found it more difficult to maintain a sense of community with their peers.

And the challenge is not going away. In PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2022, 62% of respondents said they prefer some mix of in-person and remote work, and 63% said they expect their company to offer that kind of approach in the next 12 months.

Overcoming these issues and creating a cohesive culture in which employees can participate in meaningful ways regardless of whether they’re at home or in the office takes more than setting new policies. It requires that leaders take specific steps to create an environment that is connected, inclusive, and productive.

Understand your culture, and link it to explicit behaviors Continue reading →

How To Prioritize 101 (With Help From Dwight D. Eisenhower)

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By Frederic Kerrest
How one CEO grew a startup to a company valued at $40 billion by focusing on what was most important—a task much easier said than done.

Tien Tzuo, my Salesforce colleague and the founder of Zuora, told me a story about a friend of his who moved to a startup after working at a large Fortune 500 company. There, he’d overseen an army of people and spent his days tracking 50 separate “top” priorities.

“But now I’m in a startup,” he’d told Tien, “and I know I can’t get all 50 things done.” So he’d narrowed down his list to the 10 most important things. Soon, he discovered that even making progress on just those 10 items was beyond his abilities. He realized he only had the bandwidth to focus on two—just two.

“It was the hardest thing to let go of items 3–10,” he said, “because I knew that things were going to fall apart.” Systems would break. Customers would get mad. “But that’s the nature of a startup,” he said. “You have to focus on the things that are going to get you from Point A to Point B.”

Tien’s friend was right. There is so much coming at you in a startup that it’s easy for you to get distracted. And if you get distracted, your people will get distracted. Then it’s just a downward spiral. So you need to “keep the main thing the main thing.” Be ruthless in your prioritization. Here are some principles and practices I use to keep my priorities clear:

• Use the Eisenhower Decision Matrix. This has different names, but it dates back to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the top US general in Europe during World War II (before becoming the twenty-fourth US president). Eisenhower knew what it meant to make decisions under pressure. His system is very simple:

• Stuff that is neither important nor urgent? Scrap it.

• Stuff that’s not important but urgent? Give it to someone else.

• Stuff that is important but not urgent? Schedule it for later.

• Stuff that is both important and urgent? This is your area of focus. It’s the “main thing.” Make a decision, or at least start working on it.

• Keep a running to-do list. I use Evernote and Notion, and I keep them synced on all my devices: computer, phone and tablet. I revise my list several times a day because everything is always changing. Other equally great tools include Box Notes, Dropbox’s Paper and Google Keep.

• Be stingy with your calendar—very stingy. Question every meeting request. Ask yourself: Does the meeting actually need to take place? If so, do I need to be involved? If so, does it really need to take 60 minutes, or can we tackle everything in 30? Be particularly wary of recurring meetings. You’re probably not needed at most of them. (Every 30 or 45 days, I go through my calendar, and delete all new recurring meetings that other people have added me to. Then I wait to see how many people send me those invitations again, after they notice I’m not attending. Spoiler alert: very few.)

• Control your email; don’t let it control you. Email is what other people want you to do. Ignore most of it. A lot are just FYIs. If you’ve hired great people, you don’t need to follow the play-by-play. Maggie Wilderotter, the former CEO of Frontier Communications, told me that she deletes every email that has more than two people on the “To” line, as well as every one where she’s cc’d. “Then what bubbles up to me are the really critical decisions or ones where I need to move something forward or course correct,” she says. “Otherwise, I trust the people who work for me to get the job done.” Another tactic: I block off two hour- long sessions on my calendar for email: one in the morning and one in the afternoon or evening. Usually, by the time I get around to whatever burning issue has been sitting in my inbox, it’s already been resolved.

• Keep your people focused. Your team will come to you and start talking about five different things. Make them decide what their top two most important things are and then talk about those. When my team starts wandering, I bring them back and ask them: “What’s the main thing?”

• Ditch your 1:1s. Most managers hold regular check-in meetings with their direct reports (often called one-on-one’s or “1:1” for short). But Zuora’s Tien Tzuo says he doesn’t do them. Ever. Let me repeat that: the founder and CEO of a $3 billion company doesn’t have regular 1:1 meetings with his senior executives. Tien estimates that such meetings can quickly consume 80 percent of his week, which he doesn’t think is the best use of anyone’s time. “I just tell my executives, ‘If you need me, call me. And if I need you, I’ll call you,’” he says. Which makes sense. If you hired great people, why wouldn’t you trust them to do a great job running their groups? Plus, Tien says his approach actually makes Zuora work more effectively. The 1:1 system ends up producing what he calls a “hub-and-spoke” approach to solving problems. “Everything is brought to you instead of your leaders working out issues among themselves,” Tien says.

Source: Chief Executive 

What’s most needed from managers now

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by Adam Bryant

As organizations shift from command-and-control leadership to more decentralized decision-making, the “frozen middle” is melting—and managers have to step up.

At the risk of generalizing, I find that managers typically fall into one of two camps—those who are most comfortable following a playbook that rarely changes, and those who relish the idea of writing a new one for their job. And in this era of endless disruption and ambiguity, the managers who will get ahead are the ones who see this time as an opportunity, not a headache.

Companies are pushing more decision-making to their frontline managers, who in turn have to step up and make some tougher judgment calls. As just one example, Amazon announced in late 2021 that instead of issuing a company-wide policy on in-person work, its directors would decide which days their teams needed to be in the office.

These new freedoms—or pressures—will create a difficult period of adjustment for the managers who contribute to their company’s “frozen middle.” That is the term for the group of managers who are the most resistant to change, and who are an endless source of frustration for C-suite leaders trying to implement a transformation strategy. A CEO I know once said shortly after joining a company that “there are too many policemen here,” referring to those employees who felt their job was to blow the whistle on anything that fell outside their that’s-not-how-we-do-things-around-here guardrails. The optimist in me would like to think that as decision-making becomes more decentralized, managers can no longer afford to have that attitude.

Handling hybrid

One example in which managers will need to become leaders: when managing culture in a hybrid world. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Companies are still trying to find the right balance between remote and in-person work, and the best answer is likely different depending on how much collaboration the work requires. Continue reading →

LEADERSHIP

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Early in the pandemic, Josh Bersin called it the Big Reset: “The Coronavirus is accelerating one of the biggest business transformations in decades.”

As the business landscape evolves and employees reassess their priorities, leadership is changing as well. To reset thinking on what it means to be a leader today, we asked other thought and business leaders for their perspective. This is the third in our series.

 

One of the key factors found in “Great Leaders” that is frequently under emphasized is Teamwork. My experience is that building great teams, then developing and enabling them to work together is rarely evaluated when selecting leaders. A leader that takes advantage of the variety of their team’s skill sets, then getting those same team members to work together toward a common goal almost always results in success. At almost every level of my career, I witnessed teamwork skills were undervalued by many leaders. Be a great “team player” and a great “team leader” to greatly increase your odds of business success.”

-Charles Ansley, President and CEO, Symon Communications (Retired)

 

Great leadership is centered around empathy.  Empathy for your clients and the challenges they face.  Empathy for your people and their individual needs.  If you can truly step into your key stakeholders’ shoes and empathize with their vision of great, all else falls into place.

-Eugene M. Kublanov, Principal, KPMG Consulting

 

A great leader will inspire others to fly. That inspiration comes from a building of trust through communicating a vision, being accountable for it, and making the people your focus.

-Steve Rudderham, Head of Global Business Services at AkzoNobel

 

Leadership is having an optimistic vision for the future, envisioning the possibilities of what could be, and then being able to communicate it in a compelling enough way that others want to follow you there.” (It’s really the combination of the two skills, –first having the vision and second having the ability to describe it in a compelling way that others can get excited about).

-Kathy F. Bernhard, KFB Leadership Solutions

 

Here are links to the previous blogs:

Leadership – ISSG

Leadership – ISSG

 

If you’re inspired by these perspectives on leadership today, stay tuned…there’s more to come!  And if you are interested in crafting your own contribution, please email me at janis@issg.net

 

The Five Cs of Trust

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By Ali Grovue and Mike Watson

Creating a high-trust environment isn’t easy but applying these five principles on a day-to-day basis will get you there—and closer to real resiliency.

 

 

 

There are the five Cs to live by when it comes to establishing and building trust:

 

1. Care

While a leader must be above average on each of the five Cs to be effective, growing evidence suggests that care matters more than the others.

Many leaders engage in unconscious acts of self-destruction in their first days in a new job. They do this by making change too quickly, by telling versus asking, and by not engaging the hearts and minds of the people around them. All of this can lead one to be seen as uncaring, and if you are seen as such, you will not build trust. If you don’t build trust, you will not engage hearts and minds. If you don’t engage hearts and minds, your results will be suboptimal.
Here is some practical advice for leaders:
1. Embrace care as a personal value. Accept that it is the foundation of trust. Model it and recruit people who demonstrate it.
2. Establish a personal accountability to get to know the people who report to you.
3. Learn what is important to the people who report to you.
4. Work with them to draw links between what is important to them and their careers.
2. Communication
It is one thing to care. It is quite another to communicate with care. Telling is not communicating. Communication requires active listening and understanding. It requires engaging at the level of personal pursuits.
Through years of watching how leaders communicate and the results that follow, we have identified a small number of best practices:
1. Tell the truth.
2. Be direct. Better to say the right thing the wrong way than to say nothing at all.
3. Always start a difficult conversation with the mindset that you care about the individual you are speaking with.
4. Link your communication to your organizational vision wherever possible. Never let your team lose sight of the defining purpose of your organization.
3. Character
The things we do today will be on record decades from now. Like it or not, we must accept it. This is our reality.
But more important than how people we don’t know view us is how we are seen by those who do know us—our families, our friends, and our colleagues. They see what we do. And their trust in us will be a function of the integrity that we display.
A common challenge we see is the leader who has more than one persona. These leaders often display a “work face” at the office and a “friend or family face” with others. At its core, this demonstrates a lack of authenticity, and in these situations we encourage our clients to go back and reflect on their motivation and purpose. The reason they cannot be their authentic self in all interactions likely rests here. If their motivation or purpose is hollow and they are unwilling to do the deep searching within that is required of a resilient leader, it will be almost impossible for that leader to create deep trust.
4. Consistency
The temperament of a leader permeates their organization and influences cultural norms. We likely have all seen examples of leaders who have reacted negatively (emotionally or behaviorally) to stress. The very best leaders can channel stress into positive responses such as increased mental focus, healthy urgency, and decisiveness. But when a leader exhibits negative stress responses, it imperils enterprise resilience. A leader with a widely vacillating temperament sends a signal to the organization that such a temperament is acceptable if not even endorsed. And as the behavior takes hold, it becomes part of the culture.Our advice is this: Establish a band in which you will operate. Keep your emotions in check within this band. Establish protections for yourself so that you can recognize how you are showing up. The consequence of getting this wrong can be dire. If you are prone to mood swings, your people might be reluctant to bring you information for fear of which leader will be greeting them in that moment. This stifles the creativity necessary to be adaptable in these disruptive times. Again, this is easier said than done. Start by keeping it top of mind that operating within a clear emotional band matters. Mindset is a powerful driver of behavior.
5. Competence
We have discussed many of the soft skills needed for building trust. However, regardless of how caring, communicative, and consistent a leader may be, they will not establish trust if they are not competent. You must build the knowledge to master your craft. You can’t fake competence.
You must be competent if you are to earn the trust of those around you. The message to all aspiring leaders is to take the time necessary to build your skill. Opportunities will come. And, when they do, be ready for them, having built your résumé through experiential learning.
Creating a high-trust environment is not easy. However, the components are clear: care, communication, character, consistency and competence. Applying these on a day-to-day basis requires powerful commitment. Resiliency depends on it.

 

 

Source: ChiefExecuitive