Why 21st leadership is different as Covid-19 means the end of ‘command and control’

Covid-19 may be one of the best things to happen to leadership for a very long time. Just as Covid-19 is accelerating social and business changes, it is also accelerating changes in how leaders have to lead, says Jo Owen

Covid19 is bringing leadership into the 21^st century. As leaders and managers are discovering, everything is much harder when the team you lead is remote (and that is good news); it is forcing managers to raise their game and become much more deliberate and purposeful about how they lead. It is forcing managers to learn skills which are distinctly 21^st century skills as the 20^th century world of command and control finally disappears into the rear view mirror.

Leading a team in an office is relatively simple. You can see who is struggling and who is coasting; you can see who needs help and who can give help; you can quickly spot misunderstandings and resolve them. Within an office, it is easier to build social and professional networks and to build the informal bonds of trust which are the invisible oil that every organisation needs to function.

When your team starts working from home you discover how much harder it is to perform the basics of leadership and management: workload and performance management, motivation, communication, goal setting and decision making suddenly become much harder. You can no longer rely on informal and ad hoc management practices, and you have to learn some new tricks. Here are seven major changes in 21^st century leadership, which have been accelerated by the pandemic.

Get smart

The 20^th century assumption that work happens only in the office is dead. Hybrid working is not a temporary change, it is a paradigm shift and managers need to be smart to manage it. Hybrid working is often called smart working for a reason: you need to be smart about who does what where. New team members need the office so that they can build the relationships which make teams work; new graduates need the office for training, mentoring and having a desk to work at instead of attempting to work at the end of a bed in a flat share. Established team members may be more comfortable WFH.  Work which is collaborative and creative is better in the office while document review and preparation is often better done at home, away from all the distractions of the office.

Communicate better

On a remote team, the entire day can be spent communicating instead of working. You have to manage communications so that the team is not overwhelmed. It does not matter what system you have, as long as you have a system to which the team accepts and adheres. A simple system is to hold a YTB team meeting every morning: each team member gets 90 seconds to summarise what they did yesterday (Y), what they will do today (T) and what blockers they face (B). Quickly, the whole team knows who is doing what and where help is needed; goals are clear and accountability is established. Beyond that, agree when and how to communicate: emails, like meetings, are often a substitute for real work. Emails are a plague which needs to be controlled.

Care for your team

Working from home is taking its toll. There is a quiet epidemic of mental ill health emerging, and most professionals find that they struggle at some point with working from home. Working from home has been a setback for work-life balance because the boundaries between work and life have been blurred more than ever. Working remotely, you may not even be aware that a team member is struggling. Make sure that your communication is not all transactional and work related. Create some space for informal chit chat. Try setting boundaries for yourself and your team: encourage them to switch off and recuperate, at least occasionally. Shift your style from controlling to coaching and supporting: supportive relationships are essential to maintaining motivation.

Build influence

Influence is the consummate 21^st century leadership skill and it is a key skill for hybrid working. In the past, leaders made things happen through people they controlled. Now, you have to make things happen through people you do not control and may not see: you rely on other departments, suppliers, partners and even customers to make things happen. You have to learn to build alliances, forge common agendas, cope with conflict and influence people and decisions over whom you have no direct control.

Establish trust

Trust is the key to influence. To be effective, you need networks of trusted colleagues within and beyond your team, department and firm to make things happen. Building trust, like motivating people, does not happen by email. If anything, email destroys trust because it is so often used not to make things happen, but to leave an evidence trail in the event of a post mortem when things go wrong. And the first person to work out how to motivate by email will make a fortune: it is a fortune which is unlikely to be made. Trust is about showing you have common values, a common agenda and that you do as you say: this sounds easy, but it is not. All too often trust evaporates because we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions: trust often collapses into the mile-wide gap between intentions and actions.

Involve your team

Making a decision, or setting an objective, and then communicating it is very 20^th century. The best way to sell a decision to your team is to involve them in making it: that way, they will understand all the trade-offs. They will understand the ‘why’ as well as the ‘what’ and will own the decision. You will be slower making decisions, but quicker and more effective in executing decisions. Don’t let your team delegate problems upwards: give them ownership and let the rise to the challenge. That is how they will learn and grow to become better team members.

Reinvent your role

In the 20^th century managers passed orders down the hierarchy and information back up. That is clearly redundant in today’s hyper-connected world. So what is your role as a manager? You are not there to be the smartest person on the team, just as a football manager is not there to be the best player on the team. There is a difference between playing and managing. Your job is to recruit the best team, help each team member improve, organise the work and deal with interference from outside. You have to move from being the 20^th century boss to the 21^st century coach.

The leadership bar is rising all the time, and leaders have to respond by raising their game. This is wonderful news. It is making leadership not just more challenging and demanding; it is also becoming far more rewarding. Leaders who master the ambiguity, complexity and uncertainty of 21^st century leadership will also make themselves future proof against the other great change of the 21^st century: AI. It is time to double down on the human side of leadership with all its contradictions. Enjoy the ride.

Jo Owen is a best-selling and multi-award winning leadership author, keynote speaker and social entrepreneur. A new edition of his book The Leadership Skills Handbook shows readers what works in practice, not in theory, in crucial areas such as people skills, career skills, mindset skills, organisation skills, personal values and behaviours. Based on research from over a thousand leaders throughout the world at all levels in the public, private and voluntary sectors, this book outlines 100 practical skills to make leaders even more successful, and offers guidance on all key topics.