You’re the CEO….
You’re the CEO of an S&P 500 company. You’re white, male, over 50, earn $15m per year and have an MBA from an elite business school that you attended more than 25 years ago. You’re driven, competitive, and focused exclusively on the company’s financial performance. Shareholder-value rules your life.
Your charm and charisma in the office got you to where you are today, allowing you to impose your influence and inspire others. To get a decision you’d go for a coffee with people, get them lined up, do deals and handle the politics. The office was your theatre, your home, a place where you were a star – but no longer.
Pre-pandemic, you knew how to run this super-tanker, but now it feels hard. You can’t get stuff done. People don’t seem to care, loyalty’s out of the window and even threats and bonuses don’t seem to work. You pull the levers you used to pull but nothing happens. You feel impotent.
What you learned at business school never equipped you to manage a hybrid organisation where people exist mostly on Zoom.
You’d just love to get everyone back to work in the office five days per week, but you seem to be powerless to achieve that. Isn’t the CEO supposed to have the power to make stuff happen? You and many leaders around the world like you need a new North Star.
The CEO’s New Hybrid North Star
At the start of the pandemic The Amsterdam-based Center for Evidence Based Management, a highly respected global community of prominent academics, undertook what they called a rapid evidence assessment to identify the factors that make the biggest difference to the performance of virtual teams and communities. Their methodology is rigorous. Only the best research makes it through the review process.
The research identified six factors that I suggest might make an excellent ‘North Star’ for CEOs struggling to come to terms with the management of hybrid communities.
Make sure all employees can connect their work to the company vision. Today’s top-down generation of vision in Ivory Towers and cascading of vision statements doesn’t work. Involve teams directly in shaping a vision and goals that they can feel invested in and can emotionally commit to without constant monitoring and prodding.
Go beyond barking orders. Listen, empathize and provide customized technical and emotional support based on individual needs. This takes time but earns loyalty and increases energy. Without it a teams performance will decline over time.
Break down silos by nurturing a culture of collaboration and information sharing across functions on platforms like Slack or Teams and through face to face cross functional gatherings. Prevent teams from hoarding knowledge and reward cross functional open-ness.
Deliver on personal and corporate promises, demonstrate reliability and care. Trust is hard-won and easily lost. Forgive occasional violations of trust and keep nurturing a climate of honesty.
Proactively cultivate friendships and connectivity within teams and across communities through events, training, socials and fun within business activities. Demonstrate this through the way you behave and don’t leave this to chance, it’s a key role of the hybrid leader.
Encourage curiosity beyond the company walls. Let people explore ideas outside their immediate domains and expose their work to outside scrutiny. Even if your organization is uber successful, make sure corporate (we know best) arrogance doesn’t creep in.
In a nutshell…
The sophisticated reader will notice many links between these six factors. Together they create a psychologically safe environment in which brains flourish and energy can be devoted with pinpoint accuracy to things that make a difference.
‘Under the hood’ the factors point to the idea that organisations are communities of connected brains. Rather than commanding performance, leaders must now focus on fueling engagement, connectivity and knowledge flows within a community of brains and focus that energy on things that really matter.
Application
The North Star can be applied at a personal, team, community or corporate level and works best when absorbed into corporate culture and behavioral expectations. In fact you can build culture change programs around them. Leaders need to model them too, every day.
This new north star redirects leaders’ attention to the human dynamics that hybrid models depend on, if of course leaders recognize the need and have the desire to do so.