1.0 The nature of the hybrid working revolution

1

Relationships: build networks of trust and support to make things happen

The move to hybrid working has accelerated changes in how you can lead and manage. Hybrid working forces leaders to move from twentieth-century to twenty-first-century practices. In the office you can see who does what, which makes command and control easy. When teams work remotely, you have to trust that they do the right thing even when you cannot see them.

Traditional office management was based on high control and low trust. Now it is about high trust and less control. Command and control was very transactional; remote working depends on strong and supportive relationships. These are hard to build when working remotely.

In this chapter, you will discover:

● The nature of the hybrid working revolution.

● How to become the trusted leader.

● How to build your network of influence.

1.0 The nature of the hybrid working revolution

The hybrid working revolution is not just about learning to work from home (WFH). It is a revolution in leadership and management, and one that has been a long time in the making. This particular revolution started with Machiavelli in the sixteenth century: he asked whether it is better for a leader to be feared or loved. He advised leaders to be feared, because love is fickle. For many years, this was how management worked. It was a command and control environment and the office was paradise for control-freak. In the office you can see who is doing what, and managers you can interfere at will. In the office, you don’t need to rely on trust, because you can rely on control. Exercising close control is considerably harder when your team is far away: you can neither see nor hear them. You cannot be sure what they are doing: are they working, or walking the dog? Command and control continued to work in the nineteenth century when workers had little education and few alternative sources of employment. As education levels have risen, workers have become professionals who can achieve more, but at the same time they expect more. The good news about professionals is that they have pride in their work and want to do well: with training, they do not need to be told how to do things. The bad news is that professionals may think that your job as a manager is irrelevant, and that they can do it better than you. They do not want to be micromanaged and are prepared to leave rather than put up with a boss they dislike: the number one reason for people leaving their employer is to leave their boss.

Twentieth-century management was about making things happen through the people you controlled. On the other hand, twenty-first-century management is about making things happen through people you do not control or do not want to be controlled. WFH means you can no longer micromanage your team. There are still some firms that use twenty-first-century technology to recreate your nineteenth-century command team and control: keyboard loggers, location trackers and always-on video are signs of a firm deeply committed to command and control. These exceptions aside, it is clear that WFH means the days of command and control are over. If you can no longer micromanage a team by observing them in the office, you have to trust them to perform. Trust is a two-way street: your team has to trust you to look after their interests. And this is the answer to Machiavelli’s question: the true currency of leadership is neither fear nor love – it is trust. You have to become the leader people want to follow, not the leader they are told to follow. You need to be respected by your team, your colleagues, your bosses and by all the stakeholders on whom you depend to succeed. This means you have to build your personal networks of trust and influence to make things happen through people you do not control – i.e., other departments and functions, and through customers, suppliers and partners. Trust and influence frees you from the confines of the command and control pyramid, and as a result you can make yourself as powerful as you want to be. The task of the manager always has been, and always will be, to make things happen through other people. Hybrid working means you have to make the same things happen through other people whom you cannot see and cannot control directly. Trust and influence are your keys to success, but they are hard to acquire remotely. This chapter shows you how you can become the trusted leader who has influence far beyond your formal span of control. First, we need to understand what trust and influence actually mean.

Understanding trust.

Trust is the glue that holds any team together. A true team is one where each team member cannot succeed without the support of other team members. Dependency is the hallmark of a team; if no one depends on anyone else, then you are just a group of individuals who happen to share the same boss. Trust becomes more important when working remotely – as has been the case with the pandemic. You have to be able to trust that employees are doing the right thing even when you cannot see them. Trust is at the very heart of the hybrid working revolution. Trust is the product of four variables, which you can develop:

● Values alignment. It is easier to work with people who are like ourselves: we understand them more easily because we may have shared experiences, shared culture and shared backgrounds. When we first meet someone from a completely different background, we may struggle to read their meaning and intentions.

Values alignment is one reason many firms struggle with true diversity: we find it hard to trust people who are not like ourselves.

● Goals alignment. It is hard to trust someone who has a competing agenda that will undermine yours. But when you are all working to the same goal, trust comes more naturally: sports teams naturally foster trust because everyone is working towards the same goal, literally.

Within firms, there is as much competition as there is co-operation. It is an art form to align your interests with those of people in other parts of the business.

● Credibility. You probably have values alignment with your friends, which is why you chose them as your friends. But you might not choose to depend on them at work. To be credible you need the skills to do the job, and the track record that shows you do as you say.

Credibility is like a vase: it takes time to build; it can be ruined in a moment of rashness and even if you can stick it together again, it is never quite the same.

It is a precious commodity you have to nurture and protect.

● Risk. The greater the risk, the more trust you need. I might trust a stranger to tell me the way to the post office, but I would be unwise to trust the same person with my life savings. Smart managers learn to manage risk, often in unusual ways. Indeed, sometimes they manage risk by increasing it, not decreasing it.

Trust is essentially personal. You may trust the colleague to your left and distrust the colleague to your right. Each bond of trust has to be built up over time, which makes it a very valuable asset. It also explains why it is often difficult to start work in a new firm: you simply do not have the networks of trust and influence that helped you to be effective in your previous role.

Understanding influence: Influence is how you extend your power beyond your formal area of control. Trust is personal; influence is your network of trusted relationships. Influence is the way you use your key asset of trust to make things happen. Your network of willing allies will keep you informed of developing events, advise you reliably when you need it, and help you influence decisions that affect your team and your future. Influence is often confused with persuasion, but is fundamentally different. Persuasion is an event, a one-off transaction; influence is an enduring relationship. Often, persuasion and influence pull in opposite directions. If I were a very clever, and amoral, salesman, I might persuade you to buy a second-hand car that promptly falls apart when you try driving it. If you next encounter me, after I have changed jobs to become a financial adviser, you will probably refuse to have anything to do with me: you will not trust me at all. Persuasion can destroy your network of influence. To step up from trust to influence, managers need to master one more art: enlightened selflessness. You have to give in order to take, but if you always give then others will perceive you as being weak and they will take advantage. The good news about influence is that it is self-reinforcing. Once you become influential, you attract more allies because of your apparent power to make things happen. More allies make you more powerful. Creating this virtuous circle takes time and is an investment that will pay off many times over.

The end of command and control? It would be easy, although quite wrong, to claim that command and control has disappeared with the advent of remote working and new technology. In some conditions, technology has become an increasingly oppressive tool to control remote workers. Algorithms may help delivery drivers find the most efficient delivery route, but they also control the delivery driver closely. Such drivers have discovered that when your boss is an algorithm, your boss is a tyrant: it is always looking for more productivity; it is always monitoring you; it makes no effort to motivate you; and it is completely uninterested in your mental or physical health.