MCE Quarterly - Summer 2020

MCE

UARTERLY

SUMMER 2020 • VOLUME 6 • NUMBER 2

JOURNAL OF THE MANAGEMENT CENTRE EUROPE

Restructuring Professional Development in a

Work-From-Home Economy OTHER HIGHLIGHTS BEING A SUCCESSFUL LEADER IN TODAY’S VUCA WORLD Page 10

DERIVING LONG-TERM STRATEGIC ADVANTAGE FROM MANDATED TELECOMMUTING Page 14

www.mce.eu

REMOTE LEARNING FOR EXECUTIVES CREATING NEW OPPORTUNITIES Page 22

ENGAGING (SUDDENLY) REMOTE TEAMS VIRTUALLY Page 34

HOW GRATITUDE CAN HELP LEADERS NAVIGATE A CRISIS Page 38

HOW TO CREATE AND SUSTAIN A VIRTUAL WORK CULTURE Page 41

Women’s Leadership Certificate Program Develop Extraordinary Leaders in Your Organization Ask how we can help you build a thriving women’s initiative

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MCE

UARTERLY

SUMMER 2020 Volume 6 • Number 2

JOURNAL OF THE MANAGEMENT CENTRE EUROPE

Restructuring Professional Development in a WorkFrom-Home Economy AMA faculty member William Thallemer, PhD, looks at professional development in the post-COVID-19 work-from-home setting, and the opportunities it offers for innovation.

14 Deriving Long-Term Strategic Advantage from Mandated Telecommuting

30 Leading Remote Teams

Page 4

FEATURES

10

Being a Successful Leader in Today’s VUCA World The outbreak of the coronavirus in March 2020 has shown how quickly local problems can become global catastrophes. And it has turned the entire planet into a world that is more dramatically VUCA than it has ever been before. By Martin Emrich

14

Deriving Long-Term Strategic Advantage from Mandated Telecommuting The most successful leaders in this new COVID-19 era will prove able to fully embrace the new normal, strategically reorient their management practices and drive efficiency through more purposeful meetings. By Andrea “Andi” Summers and

T.J. Topercer

18

Developing Leadership Talent During the New Normal of Remote Learning Learning how to involve, manage, and grow team members that work remotely poses many challenges, but by following proven principles and best practices, employers can create highly engaged, focused teams. By Paul Eccher

22

Remote Learning for Executives Creating New Opportunities The rapid movement toward social distancing and telecommuting forced many resistant organizations to rethink their traditional views of operations, meetings, and train-

ing. With this rapid pivot in operations, executives were challenged to put their skills into action to navigate changes associated with the pandemic toward a new, unknown normal. By Angela L. Kegler

26

Nine Best Practices to Lead and Manage Your Virtual Team This is a moment for leadership. You must help your team navigate this new world. As they look ahead, embrace the new normal, set a course, and make decisions on complex issues, they have to do so without the benefit of being face to face. By Suzanne Bates

30

Leading Remote Teams Employees accustomed to seeing each other and their managers every day at work have been relegated to conducting business and interacting with each other via the computer and telephone.

This distributed workforce raises new leadership issues for organizations.

Some leaders are more prepared than others for this new environment.

By Randy Moon

34

Engaging (Suddenly) Remote Teams Virtually For many employers and employees, the work-from-home (WFH) experience is new. There was insufficient time to train managers about the adaptations necessary to make this kind of environment successful. Here is what managers and leaders can do to help team members succeed when everyone is in a different location. By Nikki Evans and Hugh Massie

38

How Gratitude Can Help Leaders Navigate a Crisis The expression of gratitude for employees’ efforts can be a huge motivation and productivity booster, especially during the worst of times. And yet, while practicing gratitude may appear easy, it is one of the most misapplied tools of management.

By Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton

41

How to Create and Sustain a Virtual Work Culture As companies around the world are learning, the necessity for virtual work in light of the COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a whole new level of complexity, and leaders have adapted quickly to meet the challenges head-on. However, now that virtual work is integrated into the temporary work world, what comes next?

By Diana Vienne

DEPARTMENTS

2 EDITOR’S PICK

Working from Home a Learning Experience

3 FROM THE DESK OF THE CEO

A 3-Step Process for Reopening Businesses We, at AMA, expect that most institutions will experience a path to a new normal that will include a three-step process. Each organization will rely on its people to address the specific industry-related challenges as they navigate through unchartered territory.

By Manny Avramidis

MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020 I 1

EDITOR’S PICK

Working from Home a Learning Experience I

remember when I asked a former employer if I could work from home eight years ago or so. They were not receptive, at least at first.

Eventually, however, the group of us wore them down and the whole team started working from home. Since we were already dealing with a production team in India, it was very apparent that we could all work from home and put out a magazine just fine.

All this meant that when I went freelance in 2014, the transition to “work from home” wasn’t a big deal, as I had already been doing it for a year at that point. But for everyone forced out of their offices by COVID-19 in March, there was no transition. They had to scramble to set up a home office if they did not have one already. They had to figure out how they were going to communicate with their team, more than just using email. Google Hangouts? Zoom? Skype? Webex? Slack?

And their HR and learning people had a new challenge: how to offer education and training remotely. Was it even possible to be effective?

The authors in this issue of AMA Quarterly enthusiastically agree that it is possible to work and learn remotely. Our cover article features William Thallemer, PhD, an AMA faculty member who talks about what it takes to restructure training and development in a work-fromhome economy. Others, such as Paul Eccher and Angela Kegler, talk about developing remote opportunities for executive training. Suzanne Bates and Randy Moon speak about the best ways leaders of remote teams can effectively engage these employees. And Martin Emrich, a faculty member at Management Centre Europe, AMA’s European counterpart, talks about how to navigate in a VUCA world (and the pandemic has certainly shown us how volatile the world is right now).

American Management Association is standing by with the tools and training to help executives at this time. As AMA President and CEO Manny Avramidis points out, the organization was one of the first to adapt an online modality, putting 120 titles, products, and services into a virtual classroom “literally overnight.”

Human beings are extremely adaptable. We’ve survived for this long, and in the era of COVID-19, we will continue to grow.

Christiane Truelove Guest Editor, AMA Quarterly

2 I MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020

MCE

UARTERLY

JOURNAL OF THE MANAGEMENT CENTRE EUROPE GUEST EDITOR

Christiane Truelove CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Lauren McNally ART DIRECTOR

JohnCarlo Pellicciotta COPY EDITOR

Eileen Davis GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Tony Serio

PRODUCTION MANAGER

Claire Koby

PUBLISHER

Piera Palazzolo PRESIDENT & CEO

Manny Avramidis

MCE Quarterly© (ISSN 2377-1321) is published quarterly by American

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FROM THE DESK OF THE CEO

A 3-Step Process for Reopening Businesses To our AMA community, I hope this letter finds you, your colleagues, and family safe and healthy.

We’ve all learned recently that in times of crisis, you can go to “business unusual” in the blink of an eye. When you’re going through times of chaos and complexity, it’s important to find a balance between leading your team in the present and learning how to leverage these new skills after business returns to “normal.”

For the majority of organizations, today’s unprecedented situation calls on you to plan for what comes next and to react thoughtfully, now and for the long run. You also need a steady hand so that your team stays focused and operates with as little anxiety as possible.

We, at AMA, expect that most institutions will experience a path to a new normal that will include a three-step process. Each organization will rely on its people to address the specific industry-related challenges as they navigate through unchartered territory.

• First, when it is deemed safe to do so, the government must allow us to reopen our facilities. As we operate across the country and all over the globe, we expect that to happen systematically over the next few months.

• Second, people must establish a level of comfort that allows them to visit populated venues.

• Third, organizations must be in a financial position that permits them to conduct business. AMA was one of the early adopters of the live-online modality. At the time, we saw it as an opportunity to offer alternatives to employees who may not want or were not able to attend an in-person learning experience. Our digital offerings catered to a certain type of client that “preferred” to learn in that manner. Throughout the years, we’ve been building that virtual delivery expertise and enhancing it with new titles and providing online learning in both standard interactive and highly customizable options.

This valuable early entry into the synchronous digital learning market has allowed us to quickly adapt over 120 titles, products, and services into a virtual classroom—quite literally overnight. We leveraged our existing infrastructure, our know-how, and our processes to become a digital-first training organization—all the while maintaining the level of quality and interactivity that our clients have come to expect from AMA. As we work with our clients, we are committed to providing high-quality learning experiences and top-notch faculty experts—practitioners who have managed teams and led strategic planning sessions and who bring their hands-on, personal experience to the virtual classroom. As we approach our 100th anniversary, we are operating with the mindset of a start-up: nimble, quick, flexible, and market focused.

We look forward to continuing to serve you and partnering for outstanding business results.

Manny Avramidis President and CEO American Management Association

MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020 I 3

4 I MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020

Restructuring Professional Development in a

WORK-FROM-HOME ECONOMY

BY WILLIAM THALLEMER

Heraclitus once stated that “the only constant in life is change.”

As a change management specialist, I find that there are always opportunities to be innovative during times of great change. As a 15-year work-from-home employee, I have seen many people acquire a fondness for working from home during the COVID-19 event. Recently in my professional circles, we have discussed the real possibility that most employees will not want to return to the office space after working from home for so long due to this change event. As a result, L&D leaders will need to think about how they are going to alter their delivery of professional development for work-from-home employees.

REMOTE VERSUS WORK-FROM-HOME One of the first things L&D leaders should understand is the difference between the terms “remote” and “workfrom-home.” The term “remote” connotes a lonely, distant, and physically away-from-everything type of environment.

This is cold and business-like, in terms of how employees might view being assigned this term. They may feel they are not a contributor or not valued as a team member and are viewed as just a number within the organization.

Conversely, the term “work-from-home” conjures up visions of productive employees who are fortunate enough to work from their happy and secure homes. It is warm and friendly, yet still assigns value and connectivity to the employee. I have

always found that employees prefer to be assigned the term “work-from-home” rather than “remote.”

Some of the many benefits of working from home include fewer colleague-driven distractions, more work getting accomplished, and the elimination of the headaches and inconvenience of traveling to and from work. As far as professional development is concerned, the changing work environment provides either a new challenge for L&D leaders or an opportunity for innovation. Let’s look at the opportunity for innovation that transforms the current state to the future state.

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR WORK-FROM-HOME L&D In my work as an AMA facilitator, I hear from leadership participants that they oversee employees who complain that they don’t have enough time to complete the many required tasks for their current jobs, so they have very little time for professional development. Some have not identified career pathways for their next professional position, while others seem to be happy right where they are in organizational life, challenging L&D leaders with a variance of levels to professional development. Many employees are reluctant to advocate for their own development and the opportunities for mentoring, job shadowing, and upskilling are slim at best within organizations. The term “professional development” MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020 I 5

“ Trust is everything in a relationship, and as you ‘coach’ employees more and seek continued dialogue about professional development passion, you will develop a deeper level of trust with employees.”

seems to have been assigned only to high-performing leadership programs within organizations.

The future of L&D should include some innovative approaches that engage employees and make efficient use of their newly discovered free time to help them develop professionally. You ask, “What extra free time?” With the reduction in lunch hours, colleague interruptions, and general workplace inefficiencies, there is extra time for employees to reflect and create an action plan for their professional development future.

The pathway for L&D leaders should include three stages: Reframe, Transition, and Encourage.

REFRAME While working from home, employees can experience influences outside the organization daily that can frame their professional development choices. Influences such as social media, TV, radio, and the ambience of home can be used as leverage to gain some true insight into what drives them and where they want to go.

In the first stage, Reframe, reach out to the employee and ask him or her two questions: “What is your professional life passion?” and then “If you had all the time in the world, what would you professionally develop first?”

The object of this stage is to get employees to remove themselves from the current state—thinking about professional development—to the future state of what stokes their fire professionally.

When I facilitate the AMA course Expanding Your Influence: Understanding the Psychology of Persuasion, leaders learn about what is behind choices psychologically. When leaders address employee passion and what is psychologically behind those choices, they get a front-row view of the disconnect between current job skills/tasks-based professional development plans and employee passion.

Too many L&D professionals equate passion with job skills/

6 I MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020

tasks, and that is shortsighted and superficial. When you identify an employee’s passion, you have a pathway to creating an engaged employee who can be self-directed toward professional development goals.

The second question helps you to prioritize where employees want to develop first. In another AMA course that I facilitate, Preparing for Leadership: What It Takes to Take the Lead, leaders take a self-assessment titled “What Followers Expect from Their Leaders.” I listen to leaders who lose employees because they do not understand what employees want from the people in charge. Leaders who do not know what employees want result in unengaged employees who lack passion for their jobs and career plans.

Employees’ feeling of disengagement can go straight back to their college years. Those who are looking to be engineers, doctors, and IT professionals find that colleges make them take two years of “core” classes that have nothing to do with their program choice. As a result, they are bored, unengaged, and frustrated. And we tend to do the same thing as colleges when we create professional development plans for employees.

To counter this disengagement, we must seek to find what pathway employees prioritize. Do they want to manage people? Do they want to be an individual contributor? Do they want to ascend into the traditional vertical of moving from manager, to supervisor, to VP, to SVP? Or do they want to be the best individual in the role they’re currently in? These are important questions that will help “reframe” how they feel about professional development and prioritize where they want to begin their journey.

TRANSITION In the new work-from-home world, the term “transition” is powerful because of the recent transition experience from a work-from-office to a work-from-home employee. If you are a smart L&D director, you have scheduled professional development for managers and employees on how to manage and function in a work-from-home environment. There are

many differences between someone who works-from-office and someone who works-from-home, such as dress code, work schedule, mental and physical fitness, and work priorities.

For example, as a veteran of working from home, I have changed my schedule during the week from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. to 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., and then 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. I was extremely productive as I ran and did my mental exercises in the morning and began the day with amazing energy! This allowed me to have more balance in my life, which was one of my professional development goals.

In the Transition stage, you are transitioning from traditional professional development processes to more one-on-one conversations, FaceTime, and Zoom meetings where the plan becomes continuous instead by quarterly, biannually, or yearly. This transition applies to “how” you are coaching professional development. You are using continuous and meaningful conversations to create a fluid and active document that adapts to the engaged employee. As the L&D leader, you become a coach, encourager, and celebrator of all professional development achievements. Work-fromhome employees are more likely to share and engage when you connect due to their semi-isolation from office humanity.

When I facilitate the AMA course Coaching: A Strategic Tool for Effective Leadership, I find that the five foundational skills— “Be an ethical, inspiring role model,” “Learn and embody the Platinum Rule,” “Build a culture of trust,” “Become an excellent listener,” and “Understand the nuances of having a dialogue”—strongly support the Transition stage.

The Platinum Rule is an offshoot of the Golden Rule, and it states, “Treat others as they want to be treated.” This is where active listening and discovering an employee’s passion and priorities come into play. Trust is everything in a relationship, and as you “coach” employees more and seek continued dialogue about professional development passion, you will develop a deeper level of trust with employees. This bleeds right into being an excellent listener. Conversely, the ability to create deep and meaningful dialogue is paramount to gaining and sustaining trust.

The Transition stage is a mindset that continues from the Reframe stage as both the L&D leader and employee are transitioning from the current state to the future state, driven by the employee’s passion and priorities. The work-fromhome environment can give employees more “reflection” time concerning their future. L&D leaders should “coach” employees a little harder about defining their passion and priorities with their newly gained reflection time. Push them to think deeper about the reasons behind “why” this is their passion and “why” these are their priorities so that you gain a more true understanding about what drives their professional development needs.

When you are an ethical and inspiring role model, it sets you up for the final stage—encouragement through leading by example.

ENCOURAGE The third stage, Encourage, allows the L&D leader to support employees through failures or less-thanstellar performances and celebrate their wins and accomplishments. In a work-from-home environment, there are so many creative ways to celebrate with employees. Look around you these days—what type of creative celebrations do you see? People are having drive-by birthday celebrations, Zoom happy hours, emoji parties, and social media celebrations through Twitter and Facebook. Who would have thought that these would become a thing? Innovation can come from events such COVID-19.

In the Encourage stage, you can connect like-minded professional development employees and use the teambased approach to keep them motivated. For example, I see many people begin their fitness journey in a gym on January 1 as their New Year’s resolution. By February 1, I see less than half of them in the gym. Those who are still there are either self-directed or have found gym “buddies” who encourage each other when their motivation is waning.

You can use this same strategy for work-from-home employees who share similar passions and priorities.

The key for this stage is to use the work-from-home scenario as leverage for sustaining professional development engagement.

Events such as COVID-19 need to be truly viewed as innovative opportunities for L&D professionals. This innovation includes the relabeling of employees as “work-from-home,” and the reframing of the professional development world to include employee passions and priorities, the transitioning of variable work hours and how L&D leaders deliver professional development through continuous conversations, and the way L&D leaders sustain professional development through encouragement and team strategies.

As global episodic events such as COVID-19 occur in our lifetime, we should be agile enough to make changes on the fly. One of the astonishing parts of this event was how quickly it happened and how fast everyone had to transition to a new normal. In my years as a change management professional, I have found that the faster a change occurs, the faster people adopt it. The slower the change, the slower the adoption and weaker the sustainability of the change.

Work on being a proactive leader during these times and not a reactionary who doesn’t see the opportunity for innovation and enhancing an ineffective process.

Until the next global innovation opportunity…be well and be ready! AQ William Thallemer, PhD, formerly served as a VP of sales and has held other senior leadership positions. He has been facilitating leadership courses now for more than 15 years, and his greatest passion is developing new, mid-level, and senior leaders who coach and develop other leaders.

He specializes in building high-performing teams.

MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020 I 7

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Being a Successful Leader in Today’s

VUCA WORLD

BY MARTIN EMRICH

Our world has become increasingly complex in the past couple of months. The main drivers behind this development are unstoppable globalization and tremendous digitalization.

These forces have led to a business environment that many leaders now describe with the acronym “VUCA.” The outbreak of the coronavirus in March 2020 has shown how quickly local problems can become global catastrophes.

And it has turned the entire planet into a world that is more dramatically VUCA than it has ever been before.

The purpose of this article is to revisit the meaning of “VUCA” and present a new skillset for leaders in this contemporary business world. The four key skills relevant in today’s VUCA world can best be summarized with the acronym “NOPA,” which I will outline later in the article.

So what is meant by the “VUCA world” that everyone is talking about?

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Volatility. One example of volatility is the stock market.

Sometimes it goes up then rapidly down again, like a rollercoaster ride. “Volatility” refers to a very rapid, erratic change.

These changes, such as those experienced by a market or a single company, are very difficult to predict. You don’t know when, how seriously, or in which direction a change will happen. Often, goals change in the middle of a project. This is also referred to as “moving targets.” These make classical project management either very difficult or even completely pointless.

Uncertainty. This volatility often causes an enormous uncertainty, both intellectually and emotionally. A meticulous search for information usually doesn’t provide the desired remedy here. Even after talking to the most prestigious

professors and other experts, we cannot predict with certainty the effect of a tweet by Donald Trump or the impact of the outbreak of the coronavirus on the global economy.

And, ironically, both too little and too much information can evoke uncertainty.

Complexity. The multiple interactions between some known, and partly unknown, parameters make many topics and issues of our time enormously complex. A flood of new scientific findings and ever-more differentiated legal regulations increases the degree of complexity. But our brain is not perfectly constructed for that. It constantly tries to reduce complexity. This trick in our thinking partly explains the success of politicians who offer simple, black-and-white solutions, such as “Only diesel vehicles cause particulate pollution of the air!”

Yes, oversimplifications seem to be experiencing a veritable boom in politics—precisely because of the de facto complexity of the world, which is driving many citizens mad. In addition, many voters wish to be presented with a simple scapegoat for complex issues. Albert Einstein, on the contrary, said, “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler!”

Ambiguity. Ambiguity means vagueness. The first three letters “VUC” result in a situation that the individual often doesn’t even know how to interpret, and that is where “ambiguity” comes in. We can look at almost every event as an equation, where (E) allows for multiple possible interpretations (I1, I2, I3...). For example, “E” can be “My boss

doesn’t respond to my email. It may mean that he doesn’t like me (I1), fully trusts me (I2), couldn’t receive my email (I3), or simply forgot to reply (I4).” Or it could be something completely different.

How quickly and how realistically we interpret events has a big impact on our success. Also, knowing whether it is habitually OK for us to not have a simple explanation for everything immediately (high ambiguity tolerance) or whether this state causes us stress (low ambiguity tolerance) is quite essential. The ability to withstand the tension of ambiguity is increasingly used as a selection criterion, especially when selecting managers.

Now let’s address what additional skills a business leader needs to adequately confront this VUCA world.

COUNTERING VUCA WITH NOPA “When the wind of change is blowing, some build walls, others windmills.” According to this saying from China, it’s not about stopping the VUCA trends or even bricking them in. Rather, it is helpful to “resonate” with the new dynamics of the VUCA world. Here are four ways you can resonate, summarized in a strategy that I developed in 2018 as “NOPA”: Networking, Openness, Participation, and Agility.

Networking. As everyone should know, your network is your net worth!

MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020 I 11

“ A modern leader should always try to care for employees and systematically develop them. The most effective way to do this is by sharing your power.”

Due to the explosive growth in knowledge, a single human being is hardly able to familiarize himself with everything and individually penetrate the complexity of facts. One remedy can be a well-functioning network. If I have only a limited knowledge of my own but know which people in my social environment can give me more knowledge, that is very helpful. It’s not what you know, it’s whom you know!

Self-employed people, generally speaking, are optimally networked via virtual social networks. Companies are also trying to push the internal networking of their employees to counteract departmental egoism. The German company Bosch, for example, has launched its own “internal Facebook” called “Bosch Connect,” which is enjoying growing popularity among employees. The company has also organized a so-called “lunch roulette.” Every employee who wants to participate puts her or his name in a raffle and is randomly assigned a “lunch date” from another department and a different hierarchical level. This lunch date happens only once and lasts only 30 minutes, but the program has been shown to drastically improve interdepartmental communication and to decisively strengthen informal networks.

A modern company leader is already aware of the importance of informal networks. These networks probably helped the leader get to his or her current leadership position.

How can the power of networks be employed at your company? First, both direct reports and colleagues should be granted access to already existing informal networks by company leaders. In this way, the growth and career advancement of everyone working for and with the company leaders can be accelerated.

12 I MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020

Second, company leaders should be good observers of the organizational system and initiate and consolidate new formal and informal networks where they make sense.

Openness. Your mind is like a parachute. It only works if it is open.

Openness has a lot to do with allowing criticism and listening. It also means embracing mistakes as a source for learning. The opposite is the “zero tolerance for mistakes” company culture. This kind of culture suffocates and paralyzes. Openness, on the other hand, allows miniexperiments, new things, and mistakes. In terms of “error culture,” more pioneer work is still needed in numerous organizations. Many executives still view mistakes as flaws and failures. A first step could be that managers are very transparent about mistakes that they have already made themselves. This will encourage employees to talk openly about their own mistakes instead of sweeping them under the carpet.

A modern business leader should be a role model in terms of openness. One of the most effective measures is to talk openly about your own mistakes—especially your more severe business mistakes where there was no happy ending. At the same time, feedback from everyone in the organization should not only be openly accepted but even highly appreciated.

This openness creates an organizational climate where subordinates are likely to share their own mistakes and are more willing to accept feedback about their own blind spots.

Participation. Caring is sharing!

Participation means systematically involving employees in important decisions. We also speak of “empowerment,” or the authorization or granting of power. The authoritarian model of leadership bundles the power of the CEO and turns the employees into mere recipients of orders. As a result, the organization is only as intelligent as the boss, who makes all the decisions “from above,” alone.

In learning organizations, however, the organizational chart is (mentally) turned on its head. This puts the employees right at the top. You get more power and a certain freedom of choice. This makes use of the intelligence and knowledge of all employees. As a result, the system is more flexible and faster, and the employees are more motivated and more responsible due to the extended authority.

adaptability, self-responsibility, and reaction speed of all employees and thus of the entire company. Through high agility, organizations can adapt to changing circumstances and volatile customer needs more quickly, giving them a massive competitive advantage over their competitors.

Being a leader in the VUCA world means having to realize that rigid long-term planning does not always make sense.

For many projects as well as departments, an agile approach is more effective: Following the agile mindset, more space should be created for courageously testing new ideas. And more emphasize should be put on “learning while doing.”

Agility. Act, reflect, adjust, repeat.

In a nutshell, our world has become more VUCA than it was before. To gain a competitive advantage in this unpredictable, quickly changing business environment, business leaders should commit themselves to work on their NOPA competencies. They should create the right networks and use their power. They should create an organizational climate of openness rather than punishing mistakes. They should gradually allow employees to take more and more responsibility and thus allow them to participate. And they should apply an agile approach, wherever it makes sense. AQ

Agility means the cyclic back-and-forth between planning and implementation—that is, between “reflect” and “act.”

Each mini-test is reflected. Each intermediate result is analyzed, and on this basis the next test balloon or the next step is developed. The agile procedure in iterative loops explicitly includes the possibility that a decision made is revised and a path taken is completely abandoned or at least corrected. This permanent readjustment promotes

Martin Emrich, PhD, has worked for both AMA and Management Centre Europe for more than 12 years on three continents and in five different languages (English, Italian, Spanish, French and German). In 2018, he published a bestseller book about the NOPA strategy. For the first public presentation of the NOPA strategy in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2019, he won the African Speaker Award. He is based in Germany and works worldwide as a keynote speaker, author, and executive coach. His works mainly pivot around leadership-related topics.

A modern leader should always try to care for employees and systematically develop them. The most effective way to do this is by sharing your power. A good approach is to start by delegating simpler tasks. Then, when things go well, allow your employees to participate more and more, even in complex business decisions.

MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020 I 13

Deriving Long-Term Strategic Advantage from

MANDATED TELECOMMUTING

BY ANDREA “ANDI” SUMMERS AND T.J. TOPERCER

The most successful leaders will prove able to fully embrace the new normal, reorient management practices, and drive efficiency through more purposeful meetings.

14 I MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020

As CEO of a mid-size, private equity-backed company, Steven is anxious about the future of his business. Since stepping into the role five years ago, he has watched the company grow from a few dozen people to more than 200, taking enormous pride in its success. Now, the swift onset of a global economic contraction is forcing him to revisit the organization’s priorities and strategy. While he orchestrates an enterprise-wide pivot, he’s optimistic about his ability to succeed. Still, he worries whether the changes he’s implementing will be enough to keep his business viable and his people employed, especially in a vastly different and uncertain climate.

Steven’s fears are common in today’s unprecedented times.

Rapid changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic gave leaders little time to make strategic decisions in preparation for the anticipated recession, while forced telecommuting added significant challenges and pressures. Executives were forced to reboot established policies and practices even as they fought to keep businesses afloat.

Fortunately for Steven and others, there are opportunities for companies to emerge from this crisis stronger and more agile, especially among those that can quickly adapt to the realities of remote work. The most successful leaders in this new era will prove able to fully embrace the new normal, strategically reorient their management practices, and drive efficiency through more purposeful meetings, while ensuring that any fears about the future of work don’t hinder potential and progress.

EMBRACE THE NEW NORMAL Even as leaders anticipate the business environment “returning to normal,” they need to accept that the new world will likely look very different from the one before. Significantly, remote work will be much more accepted, even preferred, as organizations and leaders begin to acclimate. Many will jump at the chance to lower office-related overhead expenses, expand talent pools beyond limited geographic areas, and offer employees a highly coveted, zero-cost perk.

Adjusting to this new reality is less about making telecommuting work during self-quarantine, and more about determining how it will best function even after the pandemic is behind us.

This will require that leaders understand the development of telecommuting-focused policies and practices as more than just temporary measures. Such thinking will help them adapt in ways beyond learning how to conduct videoconferences, as just one example. They’ll benefit from considering the much larger picture, including how to engage employees, ensure productivity, build and sustain culture, and maintain focus, all while people continue to work from home.

REORIENT MANAGEMENT PRACTICES The abrupt end of a management era that relied heavily on face-to-face meetings, office “pop ins” and conference room brainstorms will undoubtedly pose a challenge for many

leaders. That said, various organizations and industries have already pioneered remote work models, formalizing best practices for those new to large-scale telecommuting.

These include: Ensure accountability. With teams working from home, leaders will need to create and utilize new avenues to determine how initiatives are advancing and whether their people are in sync, need support, envision future challenges, and so forth. One way to manage this is for leaders to conduct regular, one-on-one calls with those they supervise to ensure they have a direct window into their work and understand how various potentially hidden challenges—professional and personal—might be impacting their ability to concentrate.

Focus on information sharing. Companies that used to rely on impromptu physical encounters to get their people up to speed on priorities, challenges, changes, and the like now need to bridge physical distances. They can accomplish this via the strategic use of internal communications, focusing on more than just tactical matters; they should also account for enterprise-wide outlook, strategy, mission, and vision.

While pushing information out is vital, ensuring a two-way exchange is equally essential to position leadership to pivot as priorities change and empower employees to help solve problems. When in doubt, companies should seek to overcommunicate versus risking that information gets lost.

Assess and streamline technology. The world shifted to telecommuting so rapidly that companies had no time to determine which programs best suited their needs. Moving forward, leaders need to formally review available tools for videoconferencing, digital project management, and collaboration, and direct their people to the ones they’ve deemed best. It’s crucial they clarify chosen platforms, explaining the rationale and instructing employees how they can best use them (providing tutorials as needed).

Otherwise, individuals will be resistant to change. They’ll also need to commit to using such platforms themselves, modeling the behavior they hope to instill in others.

Sustain culture. A dispersed workforce requires organizations to rethink how to build and sustain culture, as they’ll no longer have the ability to display mission and values in highly trafficked spaces, to name a common practice. Instead they’ll need to take a much more orchestrated, deliberate approach. For example, leaders can weave their values into regular communications and celebrate them through formal recognition and occasional shout-outs. They can also deepen bonds and bolster trust by encouraging personal connections between team members, modeling constructive methods for addressing conflict, and creating forums for two-way, transparent feedback. Crucially, they should seek to re-ground everyone in the mission and vision of the organization, explicitly reinforcing how these two elements drive enterprise-wide decision making and strategy.

MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020 I 15

“ Mandating that meetings have explicit purposes will help leaders better determine who needs to attend to achieve set goals.”

DRIVE PURPOSEFUL MEETINGS Among leaders able to embrace change and find silver linings, the sudden transition to large-scale telecommuting unearths several potential efficiencies. Beyond saving on brick-and-mortar, today’s evolution creates avenues for significant productivity enhancements by prompting leaders to rethink how they organize meetings.

Across companies and industries, many leaders have acknowledged, though usually privately, that a widespread overreliance on meetings has taxed employees and limited productivity. As companies adapt to remote work, they have an opportunity to rethink when meetings are truly necessary and who needs to participate, potentially freeing many individuals to focus on their specific deliverables.

The best way for leaders to scrutinize their use of meetings is to set a standard in which every scheduled meeting has a specific purpose. These might include making strategic decisions or generating ideas. Meetings that simply allow for participants to share updates might not be necessary at all, since such information can often be relayed easily via email.

Mandating that meetings have explicit purposes will help leaders better determine who needs to attend, as inviting the wrong mix of people can make it difficult to achieve set goals.

This process will inevitably lead to smaller, more focused meetings, provided companies have done the work of clarifying roles so that potential participants fully understand what they bring to each discussion.

CONFRONT FEARS Many leaders adapting to remote work will benefit from looking inward to confront nagging fears about the accelerated timing of today’s new normal. From loss of connection to loss of control, the long-term dispersion of teams will present challenges for many executives who might have resisted telecommuting in years past—primarily, though perhaps unknowingly, because of fear.

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Understanding that left unchecked, fears can severely limit an individual’s capabilities and an organization’s trajectory, it’s wise for leaders to be mindful of them, acknowledging their presence and triggers, as much as possible. Executive coaching can play an important role in helping leaders recognize and work through long-held fears for the strategic benefit of the companies they serve.

One fear that is particularly likely to arise from COVIDrelated workplace changes relates directly to worth and purpose. Specifically, as teams begin experiencing success in seamlessly advancing key initiatives, even while afar, some leaders—accustomed to being physically present for such victories—will suffer from feelings of being adrift. Many will even experience anxiety that the future of work has shown their bench of talent to be so strong that their presence, virtual or otherwise, is no longer needed.

Leaders able to recognize and confront this particular fear have an enormous opportunity. They can better empower and elevate their people, seeing how they perform when no one is looking over their shoulder—a process that will reveal a new wave of superstars. Further, they can begin focusing themselves on the much bigger picture, thinking strategically instead of tactically, freeing up their time and brainpower to best ensure their organization’s long-term success. AQ Andrea “Andi” Summers and T.J. Topercer are consultants at human capital advisory firm FMG Leading. Summers has introduced systems, processes, and best practices to formalize ongoing work for teams of varying sizes and responsibilities, most notably leading Learning & Development for a globally dispersed organization of more than 9,000 employees. Topercer is an outcomes-focused leader with a strong background in team performance and strategic planning and execution.

He brings experience from both Big Four consulting and military leadership. He led teams in high-stress environments for seven years as a Surface Warfare Officer in the U.S. Navy where he was deployed to both the South Pacific and South America.

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Developing Leadership Talent During the

NEW NORMAL of Remote Learning

BY PAUL ECCHER

The concept of working from home (WFH) may seem like the latest novelty fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic.

For some companies that needed to outfit employees with home-based offices for the first time, this may be true.

However, the statistics show that the percentage of remote workers has been steadily climbing over the past decade.

An analysis from FlexJobs and Global Workplace Analytics1 found that between 2005 and 2017, there was a whopping 159% increase in remote work in the U.S. Upwork’s “Future Workforce Report”2 predicts that 73% of businesses will have remote workers on their teams by 2028.

WFH is not a novelty. Its roots, in fact, go way back in time to the 11th century in Europe, when banking dynasties opened their luxurious homes to conduct business. In Medieval Europe, artisans and craftsmen used their residences as workshops for anything from baking bread to making shoes.

So, in a way, home-based offices are actually riding a “back to the future” wave.

The bigger question is, are remote workforces part of our future? Without a doubt, yes. WFH isn’t just a trend or a passing fad, but a reality that’s here to stay. Technology continues to enable dispersed teams, and there’s a growing realization that employees can be just as productive—and, in some instances, even more productive—WFH than

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in a traditional office-based setting. No matter where organizations were on their journey toward embracing the concept of WFH before the coronavirus outbreak, now almost all have had to adopt this model to some degree.

Learning how to involve, manage, and grow team members that work remotely poses many challenges, but by following proven principles and best practices, employers can create highly engaged, focused teams. One thing is for certain: Development and training of high-potential workers should not stop just because employees are offsite. One could argue that now more than ever, nurturing and engaging leadership talent is even more important to position an organization for what’s to come.

Let’s take a closer look at some best practices for developing and cultivating future leaders in the new normal of the virtual business community.

BENEFITS OF REMOTE LEADERSHIP TRAINING First, what are the benefits of remote learning programs to employees?3 Compared to traditional leadership training, which is typically delivered onsite through a workshop or classroom-style format, virtual education gives employees a

sense of increased control over when and where they receive training. Individuals can access knowledge and expert systems on an as-needed basis when it’s most convenient, whether at 7 a.m. over their first cup of coffee or at 10 p.m. after the kids go to bed.

A second key benefit of remote learning is the ability to create a highly immersive experience, so that leaders are fully engaged. We’ve found that when employees are offered a variety of formats—online, video, phone, and print—their learning is enhanced through the use of multimedia and live interaction with their managers, outside consultants, and even other trainees within the organization.

Third, remote leadership development programs can be delivered to geographically dispersed teams, so that no matter where employees are based, they can access leadership training. A fourth major benefit of remote learning is that employee progress can be tracked and measured in real time, since training modules are virtual.

TWO TYPES OF TRAINING: SYNCHRONOUS VERSUS ASYNCHRONOUS Which virtual leadership training program works best in a WFH setting? There are two basic types to consider: synchronous and asynchronous. In synchronous communication, the trainers/facilitators interact with each other live and in real time, much as they would in traditional learning.

In asynchronous communication, there are no real-time interactions. Learners access information on their own time,

can stop and start when they choose, and replay/review material even after the course to continue to master the skills learned during training. Because they digest the content at their own pace, they can take the time they need to fully process and understand it. Of the two styles of training, asynchronous is usually the more preferred method that yields higher learner engagement and better developmental results.

VIRTUAL LEARNING TRENDS SHAPING EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT The term “virtual learning” goes by several different names, such as computer-based training, online learning, eLearning, web-based training, webinars, and so on. While it’s not a brand-new concept, we’re seeing a few major trends emerge.

For one, there’s a movement toward improving trainee engagement by incorporating both instructional text and interactive methods such as simulations, games, video, blogs, social networks, and hyperlinks.

Second, employees are more invested when they have greater control over their training schedule, yet have direct accessibility to their managers and professional third-party coaching consultants to receive feedback and ask for help.

Finally, there’s a shift toward incorporating online forums that allow collaboration and information sharing among managers, mentors, and colleagues. The more immersive and interactive the user experience, the more effective the training and the more rewarding the outcome.

MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020 I 19

MAKING A CASE FOR ONLINE LEARNING VERSUS TRADITIONAL TRAINING

size of 40,000 learners, eLearning proved to be 78% less expensive.4

On the topic of effectiveness, what makes virtual training typically more successful than traditional leadership programs? There are several reasons.

Even when evaluating computer-based training methods, there’s transfer of learning to consider. This happens when trainees apply information, strategies, and skills they’ve learned to a new situation or context. We’ve discovered that online (or internet-based) training has a higher transfer of learning rate than basic computer-based training that does not integrate other external media sources. Leveraging adaptive training methods, games, and simulations also improves transfer of learning.

Online training works better for longer courses, and employees get more from virtual learning if they take the time to practice their skills as part of the overall program.

Web-based leadership development is also more effective than traditional training for learning new concepts and improving employee retention, or “declarative knowledge.”

One concept that we’ve seen really work well to form new, long-lasting habits and optimize skills retention is the application of neurolearning. This “practice-reflect-refine” methodology helps to deliver measurable results as users test their online learning in real-world scenarios. Trainees then reflect on what they did well or could have done better to improve the situation by gathering feedback from managers and peers. In the refinement phase, they make the necessary modifications to ensure that application of their leadership skills makes an even more meaningful impact.

However, it’s important to note that online and traditional education are equally effective in teaching procedural knowledge, such as skills-based training. For the most part, virtual learning provides a high level of satisfaction for the majority of employees, with the exception of those with low computer self-efficacy.

ADVANTAGES OF COST AND TRANSFER OF LEARNING When comparing eLearning to traditional classroom-style employee education, virtual learning is typically more cost-effective, especially when training large groups. For a one-hour course with a class size of 100 employees, eLearning was shown to be 40% less expensive than traditional offerings. For a one-hour course with a class

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SUPPORTING REMOTE EMPLOYEES TO IMPROVE TRAINING SUCCESS Now that we’ve addressed the merits of delivering leadership training virtually to WFH employees, how can organizations best support them?5

Tips for Creating a Positive Learning Experience for WFH Trainees To nurture emerging leaders and increase engagement, keep these pointers in mind when administering virtual training:

1 2 3

ake sure to personalize the training content M to each individual—no one size fits all.

20 I MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020

ffer clear expectations upfront on performance O and what great leadership looks like. nsure that training content is clear and to the E point. People typically skim the page, so having the most important information available upfront (with supplemental resources offered) is key to digestion and retention.

First, take into account that most employees working remotely struggle with common challenges such as lack of face-to-face supervision, limited access to information, social isolation, and distractions at home. Managers should establish structured daily check-ins to offer encouragement and support that helps to address these obstacles.

To further enable productive manager-employee interaction, managers should offer several different communication technology options, such as phone, video, chat, email, text, and so forth. Managers should look to build connections with their employees and to foster connections between colleagues on their teams. The value of peer-to-peer interaction and manager collaboration motivates emerging leaders to do their best and helps to dissolve some of the traditional barriers that prevent effective leadership development when WFH. Lastly, managers can greatly improve remote learning success by following these simple guidelines:6 Before training. Lay the foundation. Send employees several

short articles or videos, one at a time. It should not feel overwhelming or like homework. Ask them to consider the big-picture themes and inform them they will learn more in the training. Follow up with each participant via text, email, or phone before the training to ask what he or she thought of the pre-content.

During training. Follow through on the content previously sent. Have workers share reactions and pose questions. It’s important to get them involved in active discussion.

After training. Send resources to the employee on how to apply their learnings. Videos of role-plays, for example, are highly effective. Also, present personalized practice challenges that spur trainees to apply what they have just learned over the course of their typical workweek. AQ Paul Eccher, PhD, president and CEO of Vaya Group, has more than 25 years of experience partnering with Fortune 500 clients to leverage talent and improve business results. He is an expert in the areas of executive assessment, coaching for performance, and talent management.

1 Braccio Hering, B. (Feb. 13, 2020). Remote Work Statistics: Shifting Norms and Expectations. Flexjobs. Retrieved from: https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/remote-work-statistics/

3 Noe, R. (2017). Employee Training and Development, 7th Edition. New York, McGraw-Hill Higher Education. I SBN: 978-0-07-811285-0

2 Upwork (March 5, 2019). Third Annual “Future Workforce Report” Sheds Light on How Younger Generations are Reshaping the Future of Work. Retrieved from: https:// www.upwork.com/press/2019/03/05/third-annual-futureworkforce-report/

4 Ibid.

4 5 6 7

6 Mattson, D. (July 9, 2018). 3 Tips for Making Remote Training Sessions Work. Training Industry. Retrieved from: https://trainingindustry.com/articles/remote-learning/3-tipsfor-making-remote-training-sessions-work/

5 Larson, B., Vroman, S., Makarius, E. (March 18, 2020).

A Guide to Managing Your (Newly) Remote Workers. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/2020/03/aguide-to-managing-your-newly-remote-workers

xplain key concepts thoroughly and have E tasks associated with concepts.

8

I nclude relevant visuals and words in the instruction, and make sure that complex visuals are explained with audio or text.

9

se multimedia effectively; be sure to include U videos, blogs, podcasts, photos, and pop culture examples to improve relevance to your employees.

I ncorporate exercises and activities that are closely related to content and distributed throughout the lessons.

10

nsure that managers are accessible and E supportive throughout the process, offering encouragement and developmental feedback.

Establish a centralized point of contact for content and technology issues that may arise, so that participants know who to reach with questions or concerns. ork with a proven talent development W partner who can provide the training platform, educational resources, and coaching expertise to advance leadership success.

MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020 I 21

Remote Learning for Executives

CREATING NEW OPPORTUNITIES

BY ANGELA L. KEGLER, PhD

22 I MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020

One of the biggest complaints regarding executive education and training prior to the pandemic was the lack of application of skills learned in the workplace.

Executives have unique competency needs that range from strategic planning to personal resiliency. They require a blend of business acumen that is used on a day-to-day basis with organizational agility that may only be tapped into during a crisis. To add to the unique needs, executives are frequently “too busy” to spend multiple days out of the office to attend traditional classroom-style training designed to enhance their skills. Consequently, meeting the training and operational needs of an executive has become challenging for many organizations.

LEARNING IN THE NEW NORMAL Despite the pandemic’s upheaval of businesses around the globe, one consistent positive occurred: the adoption of remote operations and remote learning. The rapid movement toward social distancing and telecommuting forced many resistant organizations to rethink their traditional views of operations, meetings, and training. With this rapid pivot in operations, executives were challenged to put their skills into action to navigate changes associated with the pandemic toward a new, unknown normal.

Social distancing and remote work will likely be woven into the fabric of most organizational operations well into the future.

Therefore, using remote learning capabilities for executive education and training should be woven into the fabric as well.

How might organizations choose to accomplish the new normal? Those that embrace and strengthen remote learning capabilities will not only help their current executives develop necessary skills but also establish a foundation for training their future leaders. Online education and learning opportunities range from on-demand recorded courses and short webinars to courses delivered by live instructors in formats from three hours to multiple consecutive days.

Effective use of remote learning for executives entails the development of Personal Learning Programs (PLPs) that engage the executive in the selection of courses specific to the skills required, as well as tools that measure how the skills are being applied. Effective executive PLPs involve selfevaluation of skill gaps, as well as feedback from supervisors, peers, and direct reports. The education and training included in a PLP mirror the competencies and skills unique to the executive’s profession, organization, and industry.

Many remote education programs require pre- and postassessments from the executive learner and individuals within the executive’s 360-degree sphere of influence. Obtaining

perspectives of others is critical to exposing skill blind spots and closing skill gaps that an executive possesses.

How an executive schedules and engages in training can also play a significant part in the effectiveness. Many executives find it difficult to free themselves from daily operations to attend training. By engaging in remote learning, they have the opportunity to block off a portion of the day for coursework while using the remainder of the day to tend to work responsibilities. Strong executive training programs leverage this by engaging the executive in immediately seeking out opportunities to apply the class-learned skills in the workplace the same day. This approach mitigates the complaint about traditional programs that the skills learned in the class are not applied after the executive returns to work.

Remote education through PLPs provides the option of developing both short-term and long-term skills depending on the unique needs of the executive. Seasoned executives with the need to develop cutting-edge skills can opt for short webinars or single courses with built-in skill enhancers or post-learning measures for how to apply the new skill. Those with more long-term skill needs can develop longer plans with courses spread out over days and months that build upon one another.

HIGH-QUALITY IMMERSIVE EVENTS Remote education and learning for executives should not be limited to the external courses offered by training industry leaders or the on-demand training lessons included in most corporate universities. Organizations that wish to capitalize on the use of remote education and training should explore how to integrate coaching, mentorship, lunch-and-learns, job rotations, and internship programs into the development of their executives. The sustainability of these programs into the future will require an innovative approach with highquality immersive events in a remote environment.

Executives have traditionally engaged in coaching and mentoring via face-to-face or phone interaction. The coaching and mentoring experience has been revolutionized by the introduction of online platforms including Zoom, Webex, Adobe Connect, ON24, and GoTo. These remote tools allow executives to be the deliverer and/or the receiver of coaching and mentoring. All of the tools can be accessed from mobile devices, which makes them ideal for engaging learning on the job. A mobile device’s camera can share more than the participants’ faces and voices; it can enable MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020 I 23

“ Executive learners should be able to access the technology easily, accomplish the learning during convenient times, and learn from subject-matter experts.” the coach or mentor to see and hear real-time challenges in the workplace to address.

The same tools can be applied to lunch-and-learns by inviting participants to bring their “brown bags” to the online session. Online tools, such as Adobe Connect, provide the capability to place participants in breakout rooms for smaller group discussions and then return to the larger group for debriefing sessions. These online tools can be incredibly useful for executives who are seeking to gain qualitative information and learning, as well as practice skills in a controlled and safe setting.

DESIGN, DELIVERY, AND SUPPORT Just as each executive has unique skill needs, each has unique learning styles. And all remote learning is not made equal. The old adage “you get what you pay for” is all too accurate in the world of remote education and training.

Organizations investing in remote executive education and training should explore the design, delivery, and support provided by a course or program.

Professional education and training institutions may carry a heavier price tag, but they utilize greater technology-enabled learning environments that focus on providing the most effective online experience for the participant. At the most foundational level, the program should focus on the best technology, appropriate timing, and most qualified talent to deliver training. Executive learners should be able to access the technology easily, accomplish the learning during convenient times, and learn from subject-matter experts on the topic who have also had experience as executives.

Instructors with executive experience understand that executive learners need ongoing engagement that is relevant and thought provoking.

Less expensive training, including webinars and on-demand learning, may offer refresher information; however, many are designed with too broad of an audience and rarely have support mechanisms built into the program. Executives engaging in remote learning will quickly disengage if the technology platform does not offer user support or is too cumbersome. In addition, on-demand learning has minimal

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engagement and rarely provides an enriching practice experience that will meet the executive learner’s needs.

BEST PRACTICES How does an organization ensure that executives are engaged in the best remote learning opportunities? The following best practices will yield positive learning results: Personalization. Seek out a remote executive personal learning program that fits the unique needs of the learner.

The executive education or training should meet all the needs of the executive as it relates to skill, learning style, pre- and post-learning assessments, and ability to develop skills at the short- and/or long-term pace required by the executive.

Immersion. Executives learn from executives. Consequently, remote learning for executives should promote engagement through interactive practice sessions, group discussions, and thought-provoking ideas. Understand the experience of the instructor as well to determine if his or her experience level matches the need of the learner.

Digitization. Choose remote learning programs that utilize platforms that will be easy to navigate from any device (desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile device). Know ahead of time what level of support is offered to avoid user frustration and disengagement.

Transformation. Executives who seek training are already motivated to learn. Ensure the remote learning program is designed to close the skills transfer gap. Recognize that not all remote learning is created equal and seek out opportunities that will most effectively allow the new skill to be applied on the job.

Innovation. Effective remote executive learning can and should offer innovative, cutting-edge learning opportunities.

Whether the executive is learning a new skill or coaching another executive through a workplace challenge, the environment should offer innovation that will advance the future of all involved.

In summary, meeting the training and operational needs of an executive no longer needs to be challenging for organizations.

By leveraging technology and embracing remote learning, organizations can provide executives with the competencies required to navigate daily operations and its workforce to create a new normal. Maybe what will be discovered during its creation is that remote learning for executives is the new normal that should have always been. AQ Angela L. Kegler is director of human resources and organizational development for the city of Myrtle Beach, S.C. Her consulting and training experience ranges from small businesses to global organizations, with her clientele spanning across multiple entities and industries such as government agencies, municipalities, utility companies, educational institutions, financial institutions, healthcare organizations, manufacturing facilities, and nonprofit organizations.

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9

BEST PRACTICES

to Lead and Manage Your Virtual Team

BY SUZANNE BATES

A crisis has a way of bringing out the best and worst in people, and that is twice as true for teams. Teams are, after all, groups of individuals who have come into the new pandemic world with different capabilities, viewpoints, and experiences. Now they must work together in the most challenging time of their professional lives, in a virtual setting. Prior to this global disruption in business, they may have been thriving, doing just OK, or struggling. In a crisis, teams are learning as they go. However, the degree of difficulty is exponential for all of them, and the learning curve is steep.

This is a moment for leadership. You must help your team navigate this new world. As they look ahead, embrace the new normal, set a course, and make decisions on complex issues, they have to do so without the benefit of being face to face. They must tackle critical issues in the unfamiliar world of videoconferences, as well as by phone, email, and chat.

These less personal ways of working together are stressful and fatiguing, especially when the team is juggling additional responsibilities at home.

Your business is, and will be, in hyperdrive for an extended period of time. You will very likely have to embrace virtual for the long term. Even as you begin to bring people back to the workplace, virtual work is here to stay. This means creating new approaches to work. You will be adopting new technology and attending to new security protocols and logistics. As a leader, you’re going to have to model how to communicate, collaborate, align, debate, and problem-solve as a virtual team.

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In working with and advising leaders in some of the top companies in the world, we are observing how they are making it work. We have been studying what makes teams work for decades, and we are now seeing it in action in the virtual world.

Drawing on our work and experience, here are nine strategies that will help you lead and manage your team virtually.

1

Rethink your driving purpose in the new normal.

Where you are going has not changed, but how you’ll get there will (and must). Hit the reset button on what the new normal means to your team and organization. Take a clear-eyed look at what has changed. This analysis will inform your team’s mission and strategic priorities. You must do this even as you juggle the day to day, to avoid wasting time. Now is the time to set a course and agree on strategic priorities so that you are working together as one enterprise team.

2

Build trust through honesty and transparency. This is a time for teams to be straight with one another. Admit to the challenges and barriers you face. All of us are managing brand-new issues. We are doing this while juggling family life, personal health, fatigue, and outsized responsibilities.

When you are just a little more open and vulnerable, your team will be too. Many find working at home inevitably enables them to reveal more of themselves, and that’s a good thing because it builds the bonds of trust that are gold in teamwork.

3

Establish the new norms for how you will work together virtually. Productive team interactions are too rare, even in the best of times. It’s easy to miscommunicate, even when you are face to face. Right now, you have a chance to rewrite the rules for working together virtually through technology. Take the time to assess and codify what is working well and make it a standard practice. This includes how you will stay in touch, inform, collaborate, and make decisions. These protocols are powerful and self-reinforcing. They will pay off during times of both crisis and stability.

4

Get ahead of the swirl by keeping people in the loop.

In times of uncertainty and change, anxiety blooms.

This is greatly exacerbated in the virtual world. It can be difficult to keep people apprised. As the team leader, you need to model good communication by being intentional in your messages, with a frequency and cadence that are appropriate. Avoid allowing people to fill the void with rumors, hearsay, and imagined worst-case scenarios.

Address issues as soon as you hear about them, head-on.

And fill the pipeline of communication with real but positive messages of encouragement, thanks, and praise. When people feel acknowledged and appreciated, they engage and work harder even when they are virtual.

5

Use the appropriate virtual channels to meet and make decisions. Video is surging forward as a tool for teamwork for a reason. It is the next best thing to being there. As human beings, we are wired to look for nonverbal signals. Body language, eye contact, and voice all are critical

tools we need to interpret and respond, and video is the key to that process in the virtual work world. But a good strategy for virtual work takes into consideration all the channels of communication and leverages the right ones for the right purpose. Use email to inform, create a record, or handle detailed issues. Use online chat to ask a quick question.

Pick up the phone when it is time to get off chat and have a conversation. Use all the channels, and model this for your team as well.

6

Create the environment for constructive conflict. Make sure the team knows that just because you are virtual does not mean you don’t want to have the good fight to encourage vigorous discussion and good decision making.

In a virtual team setting, it is more important than ever to surface issues, uncover ideas, and engage in a healthy debate as you work to solve problems together. Debate gets to the best answers, creates alignment, and gets people working together toward common goals. Allow time for real discussion, ask opinions, be inclusive, hear people out, and make it comfortable to disagree.

7

Be visible in the virtual world. This is not the time to hunker down or disappear. Increase your checkins—one-on-one with your reports and together with your teams—to ask how things are going, what they are learning, and what they think could be coming up that needs to be addressed. Ask about the bad news too, so you can address issues immediately. Your visibility will encourage people to be in touch. Visibility also creates systematic lines of communication.

MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020 I 27

8

Inject some fun and humor into your team culture.

One of the things people miss most about the more casual interactions of an in-person office is the opportunity to have some fun and joke together in between meetings and work at their desks. Consciously find ways to replace this, such as: •A 5 p.m. “mingle.” Have everyone put aside their work, bring a beverage, and raise a glass to the accomplishments of the week. Some teams enjoy games and activities, so if your team has creative members, let them inject fun into the virtual get-togethers.

•V irtual celebrations. If you usually have a cake in the office for birthdays and celebrate other events, be sure to do this virtually. There’s nothing like a group trying to sing “Happy Birthday” virtually to bring a smile to the team.

•C hat channels with appropriate humor. Set up an all-team chat channel and encourage people to share stories, ideas, jokes—and make sure to participate yourself.

Humor is one of the best ways to manage the stress and make things feel more “normal.”

9

Make virtual team meetings work. The first step in making meetings work is to make sure you don’t have too many. Review and declutter the meeting calendar.

This is very important when working virtually because of the demands and fatigue that come along with it. Make sure every meeting has a purpose. Audit the calendar and eliminate what is unnecessary. And then employ good meeting management. Have an agenda for every meeting.

Ask people to do prework so the time together is productive.

Let people out of meetings if they don’t need to be there. That includes you. If you don’t need to be there, delegate and hand it over to the leader on your team who should manage it.

Many leaders embrace the “PLAN” rule for team meetings:

Purpose • Establish a need and clear purpose for the meeting.

• Start with the end in mind and determine the desired outcomes.

Logistics • Consider the right group, the necessary roles to have in the room.

• Leverage the right technology tools to maximize potential engagement.

Approach • Be purposeful and prioritize options for more efficient decision making.

• Clarify roles from the start, including decision making, agenda tracking, participation, notes.

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Next steps • Focus on deliverables, not topics, outlining clear and specific actions and accountability.

• Distribute meeting minutes with assigned next steps shortly following the meeting.

MANAGE YOURSELF, WHILE MANAGING YOUR VIRTUAL TEAM Managing a virtual team, or a virtual organization, will take a toll on you. Take care of yourself. Manage your time, energy, and emotional well-being for the long haul to protect yourself from the mental and physical stress.

A few do’s and don’ts that you may work valuable: Do balance your own time at home. Remote work can take over life if you don’t set boundaries. Keep a schedule that includes time for family, exercise, meals together, virtual chats with friends, and personal time.

Don’t try to replicate your in-office meeting schedule and cadence remotely. Longer meetings can work fine in an in-person setting. In a virtual environment, fatigue sets in after a few hours, and often even sooner if the calendar is filled with meetings.

Do close your virtual door occasionally. As you work to keep the lines of communication open for informal talks, balance this with time for yourself, just to think. Block this time on your calendar as an appointment so people know when you can be reached. If you do this, you’ll model it for your team and help them maintain a healthy balance too.

Don’t waste time worrying about how much people are working. Now is the time to trust in the team and focus on outcomes. It can be hard to shift the mindset away from needing to see people working to believe they are, but there is no more important shift in leading a successful virtual team. You will be surprised at how well people rise to the occasion, and how much they care about the success of the company.

Virtual work is here to stay. It is no longer just a matter of convenience, work-life balance, or cost mitigation. It is a requirement now and in the future. You have the power as the leader of your virtual team to make virtual work better than ever. What has accelerated in these unprecedented times can be a fantastic opportunity to become a highperforming team in any environment. What you learn from this experience will make you better now and in the future. AQ Suzanne Bates is CEO of Bates, a global consulting firm that helps organizations improve performance through communicative leadership.

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LEADING REMOTE TEAMS

BY RANDY MOON

30 I MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrust many leaders into the unexpected and unprecedented role of managing their teams remotely for the first time.

Employees accustomed to seeing each other and their managers every day at work have been relegated to conducting business and interacting with each other via the computer and telephone.

This distributed workforce raises new leadership issues for organizations. Some leaders are more prepared than others for this new environment. And even while most organizations were caught off guard and possibly unprepared, leaders have been expected to project confidence, set the proper tone, and clearly communicate expectations to the members of their teams.

There is a lot of discussion right now about the use of today’s amazing technology tools in managing remote teams. These tools help connect employees, teams, and their leaders in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago. But the tools are just a means to help get the work done. Employees working remotely still need guidance, development, and encouragement from their leaders for the organization to progress toward achieving its goals.

As businesses and offices reopen, the work environment may be unrecognizable. Many employees will have remote working skills they did not have before the shutdown. That creates an opportunity for leaders to restructure the way their organizations operate. They can take advantage of these new or enhanced skills and incorporate more staffing flexibility through the use of remote teams. To adapt, leaders can learn not only from their recent experience with individuals working from home but also from global companies and other organizations that have operated with distributed workers for many years.

Regardless of whether a workforce is distributed, each employee in an organization has unique capabilities and personal career goals. It is up to the organizations’ leaders to cultivate those capabilities and encourage those goals.

Through engagement and dialogue, effective leaders foster a connection with the people in their organizations and fulfill their employees’ desire to grow.

LEADERS HIRE THE RIGHT PEOPLE When putting together a team to work remotely, a leader should seek to hire those with the potential to work independently yet participate as members of coordinated teams. Successful employees in these roles tend to be hardworking, self-motivated, and disciplined. They must be

willing to take initiative yet operate consistently in concert with their colleagues toward achieving the company’s goals.

The talent pool for hiring remote workers is much deeper than for a localized team. Since remote team members can work essentially from anywhere, employers can hire anyone living anywhere.

LEADERS LISTEN Leaders of a distributed workforce need to ask questions, seek input, and listen intently. Genuine listening is especially important in an environment where the relationship with remote team members is maintained primarily through a technology medium—be it a telephone or a video feed.

Sometimes those interactions will be one-on-one by telephone, and at other times there may be a team meeting held on a videoconferencing platform like Zoom.

Like all ambitious employees, remote workers want to be recognized and have opportunities to develop their skills and grow in their organizations. By engaging individual team members in dialogue about the training, knowledge, and skills they need to develop to fulfill their career goals, a leader can create an environment that allows each individual to thrive.

Remote teams will likely have a very different working dynamic than localized teams. Individuals participating on remote teams may not be in the same time zones, may not live in the same countries, and may speak different primary languages. Leaders must be mindful of those differences and respect diverse cultures attendant with the team members’ locations and backgrounds. Leaders need not micromanage or be directive, but instead should listen and probe for the meaning of what is being said— and not said.

LEADERS COMMUNICATE The leader of a remote team should establish a clear and defined communication infrastructure with the team.

Protocols should be established as to the appropriate modes of communication for different situations. Examples of such protocols are “Regularly scheduled team meetings will be held by video,” “Matters that can be addressed within a day or so can be emailed,” and “Informal matters can be discussed on chat and urgent matters should be handled by telephone.”

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“ Remote team members can feel like they are on their own in figuring out where they fit in an organization.

By providing feedback and coaching individuals, effective leaders give them a framework for development and understanding their role in generating results.”

Frequent communication is essential for remote teams.

Leaders of these teams need to be thoughtfully prepared for these meetings because there is no chance for hallway follow-up. The communication can take place between the leader and the team, the leader and an individual team member, and among team members. Keep in mind that, just like employees who show up for work at the office every day, remote employees want to know what’s going on in the organization. Keeping them informed is a key function of the leader. It is very easy for a remote team member to feel out of touch, isolated, and even forgotten without regular interaction with the leader. It should be remembered that almost by definition, remote employees can be very transient if they don’t feel a connection with the organization. This connection will only occur with the active participation of the leader and members of the team.

Feedback from leaders is an important type of communication for remote team members. Through periodic feedback, a leader can support individuals to actively manage their careers and generate results for the organization.

Leaders in many traditional companies provide formal annual reviews in which the individual is given feedback with respect to attainment of the goals set the year before.

That is certainly insufficient when leading remote teams.

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Leaders should provide continuous feedback to members of these teams. Effective leaders regularly monitor individuals’ progress, listen to their input and ideas, and then provide timely, constructive, and actionable feedback.

LEADERS COACH Remote team members can feel like they are on their own in figuring out where they fit in an organization. By providing feedback and coaching individuals, effective leaders give them a framework for development and understanding their role in generating results. For instance, an individual may discuss with his or her leader a need for guidance in how to establish broader networks inside the organization and learn more about the enterprise. Leaders can facilitate and encourage this by providing opportunities for the remote team member to participate with colleagues on some key initiatives outside his or her normal areas of engagement.

Coaching can be the key to developing healthy working relationships, because the idea of surfacing and addressing issues and solving problems is central to coaching. This in turn will remove obstacles to getting business results.

Coaching can also help individuals align their behaviors with the values and vision of the organization. By helping people understand how they are perceived in the organization and

“ Coaching can be the key to developing healthy working relationships.”

among their team and listening to their concerns, coaching can foster trust between leaders and employees.

LEADERS EMPOWER Leaders of remote teams must set realistic expectations of desired results, with clear guidance and appropriate resources, and then, to the extent possible, get out of the way and let the team handle the process of how to achieve those results. For this to occur, there must be an open, trusting environment to communicate and share information. First, the leader must provide team members with the information and instruction they need to understand their tasks, roles, and functions within the organization. Empowering these individuals then requires the leader to give them the opportunity to apply their training and capabilities to business problems and opportunities. The leader must let go of control that is not necessary and empower remote team members to make decisions.

That can be easier said than done. For employees to feel empowered, they must have confidence that they can make decisions with their leaders’ support. They must have the tools and knowledge they need to act upon those decisions.

They must feel safe in their jobs. The leader does not just abdicate responsibility to the team. Instead, it’s necessary to have a constant dialogue among the leader, team members,

and others in the organization. But this scenario illustrates the difference between being a leader and being a manager.

A manager would focus on the business and the necessary results. A leader focuses on growing people not just for the short-term results but also the longer-term benefits for the company and the employees.

When employees are allowed to return to their offices or places of work as restrictions associated with the pandemic are lifted or relaxed, it is likely they may return to work environments that do not resemble the ones they left. Social distancing guidelines may dictate that only a portion of a company’s workforce return to an office setting while the rest continue to work remotely. But many businesses are probably better equipped now to have employees and teams work remotely than they were before. Some that have not encouraged remote teams in the past may do so. Leaders of these teams need to keep in mind that remote teams are comprised of individuals who, like their colleagues who show up for work in the office every day, will be most successful if they are treated with respect and provided opportunities to grow and develop. AQ Randy Moon is the managing director of BRG’s Washington, DC, office and a respected professional with 30 years of experience as a human resources executive, advisor, and attorney.

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ENGAGING (SUDDENLY) Remote Teams Virtually

BY NIKKI EVANS AND HUGH MASSIE

34 I MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020

In the midst of the unexpected and unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, most organizations have found themselves managing at least part of their workforce through a sudden shift to working from home.

For many employers and employees, the work-from-home (WFH) experience is new.

There was insufficient time to train managers about the adaptations necessary to make this kind of environment successful. What should managers and leaders do to help team members succeed when everyone is in a different location?

COMMUNICATION MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER You will be relying on communication, both to ensure your team is working on the right priorities and to understand what support they need from you. As a leader, you will need to communicate more often than you may think necessary and repeat your message more than feels comfortable. Saying something once when it comes to key directives and changes is not going to be sufficient to ensure everyone understands you.

People process information differently, and because you are the one communicating, you’ve had some time to process the information you are sharing and understand the context for your communication. Remember that your team doesn’t have the same benefit as you in seeing the context of what you are trying to tell them.

Some team members are going to need more time to process new information than others. Some are going to need more one-on-one contact than others. Work to communicate the important things multiple times and in the way that is easiest for each team member to hear and understand.

REMEMBER TO PAUSE AND UNDERSTAND Start by knowing your people and the way they innately best receive information, and make the effort to ensure effective individual communication. If you don’t know them, get to know them. This may seem like a ridiculous investment of time during a crisis, but just knowing if your people tend to be more results or relationally focused, and whether they tend to move at a faster or more careful pace, can give you all the information you need to adjust to their needs and support getting the best results from each team member.

You can figure out these things about your co-workers in a few ways. One is to ask them—most people will have a sense

of themselves and the way they prefer to work. You can also observe the behavior of your team members. Do they speak up quickly and talk through thoughts aloud? These members are probably faster paced. Do they need time to think, prefer to have an agenda, and hate to be put on the spot? They are probably your more careful team members.

How do conversations go with team members? Do they get straight to the topic of the meeting? These may be your results-focused team members. Do they prefer to talk about more personal things to start or finish a meeting? Do they like to know who’s going to be involved in what you are planning? They may be your more relational team members.

USING BEHAVIORAL INSIGHTS TO TAILOR COMMUNICATION Results-oriented team members need a clear goal and mission, the information to move toward that goal, and the freedom to make progress. They tend to be logical and visionary and determined. They like to see accomplishments and get a sense of satisfaction at seeing a job completed or turned over to someone else to fully finish off as they move to the next project.

More relational team members need a sense of community and belonging and to see how they fit in the group. They tend to be collaborative, amiable, and engaging. They like to see what others are doing and get satisfaction from contributing to a group and being part of a community.

Under stress, which we may all be experiencing in some form or another, these behavioral patterns are even more difficult to change without intentional effort. Fears emerge and people have fewer cues like body language, proximity, informal or impromptu chats, and social invitations to use to combat ideating on worst-case scenarios.

Results-focused and faster-paced team members may fear losing control—finding it hard to trust that good work is being done from home. They fear a lack of authority to drive results and will resist being too confined to a set routine.

These results-focused and more careful team members fear appearing incompetent to others, lacking time to prepare or being rushed to make a decision, or being left out of decision making. So you may see those fears emerge.

MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020 I 35

“ While you may all have a common goal, the approaches to reaching the goal may be quite different, and the support your team needs from you to reach that goal will look different for each of them. It means that, with a bit of intention, you can make each team member feel heard, supported, and engaged, even while everyone is working remotely.”

Faster-paced relational team members fear public failure or being taken advantage of, and these behaviors can emerge under stress conditions. They may be feeling excluded or anxious about unresolved conflict. For your more careful relational team members, stress brings a fear of instability when facing sudden surprises or constant change in routine and responsibility. They also may shut down if they feel a lack of cooperation or are pressed to come to decision before processing both thoughts and feelings.

This means your team members will experience the current situation, current goals, and current agendas in potentially very different ways. While you may all have a common goal, the approaches to reaching the goal may be quite different, and the support your team needs from you to reach that goal will look different for each of them. This doesn’t have to be bad news. It means that, with a bit of intention, you can make each team member feel heard, supported, and engaged, even while everyone is working remotely.

START WITH YOUR “UNIQUE,” UNDERSTAND THEIR UNIQUE As a manager who wants to get the best from her team, you can start by knowing your own preferences. This will help you in a few ways. First, you will understand your own needs and how to ask for what you need when you are in stress

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mode. In addition, knowing your starting point will give you an idea of how much effort and intention you need when adjusting to meet the needs of your team.

If you are fast-paced and results-driven and you are managing a more careful relational team member, you will need to be very intentional about slowing your pace, spending time checking in on the personal with your team member, and helping him or her feel safe and supported before driving toward the result you want to see. You can do this successfully, but it will take intention and effort to do so.

Consider it the path to getting your result. On the other hand, if you are working with someone who is also resultsfocused and fast-paced, you won’t have to adjust much at all to convey the same goal or information.

If you tend to move quickly and are more relational, and you need to work with a team member who is more careful and results-focused, you will again need significant intention and effort to match that style of communication.

You will need to slow your pace down, give the person time to think through answers, and be prepared to provide details or to review information in detail. This will likely feel extremely uncomfortable, as it doesn’t feel fast enough or is too “in the weeds,” but your careful, results-focused team member will appreciate it and feel supported and understood.

PRACTICING WHAT WE PREACH In our organization, we do more one-on-one calls than we used to. Our leaders reach out to each team member every day or every few days, depending on the team members’ needs. These conversations range from just checking in on how people are feeling and what they are struggling with to getting more specificity on the planning or delivery of projects.

Our leadership team meets every morning for 15 minutes.

This allows us to check in on each other, provide updates on our team’s projects, and ask for help where we need it.

In addition, during this pandemic, we have added sharing something we are grateful for. This simple addition has increased our connection with one another tremendously and is now one of the things many team members look forward to the most about our daily check-ins.

We have also leveraged video calling much more than in the past. We find it helpful to see each other as we conduct our regular meetings. Occasionally, we will ask on these calls that everyone share something from the space they are working in—like the time everyone introduced dogs or children to the team. This show-and-tell was another fun way to connect. A virtual coffee break or happy hour could serve the same purpose in keeping team members connected and creating a shared experience for the team.

We have also leveraged chat capability and are using that with each other more. We had that capability in the past, but we standardized on a platform and have really encouraged real-time sharing. We have again seen that our team feels more connected, gets answers faster, and can have “hallway” conversations even with everyone being remote.

We find that this unscheduled way of connecting is an excellent addition to the more formal remote work processes we have, such as our daily check-in meetings.

While the work may need to get done and the circumstances and priorities may have changed, you need to communicate those changes to your team in a way they can connect with and that makes them feel understood and supported. Doing so can be the difference between teams that come out of the situation stronger and more connected and those that have to reestablish trust and norms for work when they return to an in-person office or hybrid environment. AQ Nikki Evans is chief learning officer for DNA Behavior International. She leads training programs, team events and workshops designed to guide people to achieve greater self-empowerment, make Behaviorally SMART decisions and accelerate their performance. Hugh Massie, a global pioneer in human performance acceleration through the practical application of validated behavioral insights, is CEO and founder, DNA Behavior. He is co-author of Leadership Behavior DNA: Discovering Natural Talents and Managing Differences (Freedomstar Media, January 2020), with Lee Ellis.

MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020 I 37

How

GRATITUDE Can Help Leaders Navigate a Crisis

BY ADRIAN GOSTICK AND CHESTER ELTON

38 I MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020

The expression of gratitude for employees’ efforts can be a huge motivation and productivity booster, especially during the worst of times.

And yet, while practicing gratitude may appear easy, it is one of the most misapplied tools of management. That’s a shame, because it is also one of the most critical skills for managers to master if they want to enhance their team’s performance during a crisis.

Research shows a staggering gratitude deficit in the work world during normal times (let alone a pandemic). A recent study by the John Templeton Foundation found that “people are less likely to express gratitude at work than anyplace else.” Meanwhile, a survey by Glassdoor found that 81% of working adults say they would work harder if their boss were more grateful for their work, while only 38% report working harder when their boss is demanding and just 37% say they work harder if they fear losing their job.

The kind of gratitude we’re talking about is not just showering more “thank-yous” and “I think you’re awesome” statements on employees. This is not a rote checklist item.

Expressions of gratitude must be genuine and specific.

Leading in this way is not only about giving credit where it’s due, it’s about actually knowing where it is due. We find that managers who lack gratitude suffer, first and foremost, from a problem of cognition—a failure to perceive how hard their people are trying to do good work—and, if they’re encountering problems, what they are. Ungrateful leaders suffer from information deficit.

There are real, tangible benefits to leading in this way.

A 300,000-person study conducted for us by a research partner in the midst of the last great recession (2008-09) found that more grateful managers led teams with higher overall business metrics, with up to two times greater profitability than their peers, an average 20% higher customer satisfaction, and significantly higher scores in employee engagement, including vital metrics such as trust and accountability. We’ve also found that when gratitude is regularly shown to employees, they feel more positive about their on-the-job contributions, are less stressed, and overall have a better sense of well-being. Don’t you? In addition, receiving gratitude tends to lead people to be more aware of and helpful to their colleagues and builds reciprocal appreciation for the work their managers are doing and the challenges they’re facing.

HOW A TOP LEADER PRACTICED GRATITUDE Just days after his retirement as chairman and CEO of American Express, we had a chance to interview Ken Chenault. In 17 years in that company’s top job, he led his company through downturns and intense competitive pressures. To survive and thrive, he created a culture focused on employee engagement and gratitude for work well done—and the results for stockholders, customers, and employees speak for themselves. He told us, “I think one of the things people get confused about is they see gratitude as simply being nice. This view of ‘I want to be very stingy with gratitude’ gets confused to mean I’m not being demanding.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite. You can be very demanding and bestow gratitude very often and be authentic.”

Let’s just say this about Chenault’s practice of gratitude at American Express: He never left home without it. Thank you.

Thanks so much. Please, keep your seats.

Yet we find in tough times, some leaders think it is necessary to withhold positive sentiments at times in order to keep pressure on team members. “If we keep them on edge, they’ll work harder” is the thinking. That mentality is about as valid as a Blockbuster Video free-rental coupon. Pressure that comes with a crisis increases anxiety, and anxiety undermines productivity over time. In comparison, research from Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis, in his essay “How Gratitude Can Help You Through Hard Times” in Greater Good magazine, shows that a leader who is more grateful amid difficult circumstances can help people cope better. “In the face of demoralization,” he explains, “gratitude has the power to energize. In the face of brokenness, gratitude has the power to heal. In the face of despair, gratitude has the power to bring hope.”

REWARDING REMOTE WORKERS A challenge we hear about practicing gratitude during this pandemic is the number of employees who have been forced to work remotely. How am I supposed to thank people now?

The good news is there are online systems or apps that have been developed to facilitate team-based gratitude called social recognition systems.

A research team from the University of Washington, MIT, and Microsoft Corporation found that “appreciation systems—a

MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020 I 39

“ Social recognition systems can help build bonds outside of immediate teams, break down silos, and help workers in different locations feel more connected to one another.” genre of messaging and microblogging systems that mediate digital expressions of appreciation in the workplace—have become widely adopted in recent years.” Some 35% of companies were using some form of online peer recognition system before this crisis, with social recognition overtaking top-down efforts, and this will only increase in this new world of social distancing.

Social recognition systems can help build bonds outside of immediate teams, break down silos, and help workers in different locations feel more connected to one another. In addition, the more we can do to recognize and appreciate the small efforts of our remote team members, the more we help them feel included in the bigger team. Of course, managers shouldn’t just leave this to their teams to do peerto-peer, but rather should participate in the system as well.

The researchers found “thanks” messages in social recognition systems are most often sent to co-workers outside of one’s own team—breaking down silos. Employees said they specifically wanted the other team member’s manager to see the thanks they were sending, “and most managers do report seeing the messages and mentioning them to team members,” the report said.

Another benefit of these programs is they allow leaders to record and track data to identify top performers who wow clients or other team members regularly. Leaders can then spend more time with these employees and learn how they are able to maintain enthusiasm to serve customers during challenging times.

At Bonusly, which has offices in Colorado and New York as well as remote employees around the world, each employee is given a budget and asked to find ways to celebrate other team members through the year. When a colleague does express gratitude to another for doing something valuable, the entire team is notified on a dashboard and gets a chance

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to join in on the celebration. To make sure everyone knows of the great work that’s going on—despite the distance that separates them—they maintain an online dashboard that displays all the gratitude that happens during the day. They are trying to encourage more expressions of thanks by putting power into the hands of everyone, making gratitude more visible, frequently offered, and specific to what matters most. (And no, if you’re wondering, employees don’t get to keep any money they don’t use.)

Of course, it’s not necessary to use a commercially designed program. At our company, The Culture Works, everyone is now working remotely, and we use a Slack channel for collaboration and gratitude. Typically, Slack is used for work sharing, but we’ve found it’s a terrific resource for thanks as well. The channel buzzes all day with messages as our teammates cheer each other’s successes, and there is a pile-on effect as people chime in with their congratulations in real time. This has been a terrific way to keep our remote and gig employees connected. For instance, when our web developer Bryce recently completed an upgrade that allowed for the automated fulfillment of orders (instead of the manual way we’d been doing things), the Slack channel went wild with members of the team thanking him and telling him specifically how that would impact their jobs and free them up to do other work.

Regular gratitude for small wins for your remote employees doesn’t have to be expensive and doesn’t have to be timeconsuming, but it does have to be regular and always tied to one of the values you most cherish in your team. AQ Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton are the New York Times bestselling authors of Leading with Gratitude, The Carrot Principle, and All In. They own the global training company The Culture Works and work with organizations around the world to address employee engagement issues. Learn more at TheCultureWorks.com

How to Create and Sustain a

VIRTUAL WORK CULTURE

BY DIANA VIENNE

MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020 I 41

There’s no denying it: The future of work is upon us, and there’s no going back. More people are working remotely than ever before, whether by choice or because they must.

As companies around the world are learning, the necessity for virtual work in light of the COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a whole new level of complexity, and leaders have adapted quickly to meet the challenges head-on. However, now that virtual work is integrated into the temporary work world, what comes next?

Leaders need to understand how to inspire and engage people virtually, and still measure results. Employees need resources and guidance to help them stay healthy, engaged, and productive. To sustain a culture that engages the best talent for the long term, companies must shift their behaviors, policies, and mindsets about the ways work gets done.

Winning organizations will be those that integrate and master virtual work, community, and collaboration. To succeed, companies need to focus on four critical activities:

GET THE ORGANIZATION READY Companies must look at their work policies, practices, and behaviors to evaluate long-term remote-readiness. Then, they must address any gaps to prepare the organization for a long-term, productive virtual work environment.

Review your current people plan. Companies must align their “people plans” to their shift in business focus. During the COVID-19 crisis, they have quickly figured out how to serve their customers and clients remotely. From telemedicine in hospitals to remote learning for public schools and streaming fitness classes, every industry has accelerated its own digital transformation. As a result, the demand for highly skilled remote workers will continue to increase.

With a surge of candidates in the market, companies must recruit and integrate these key individuals into the organization quickly and seamlessly, so that they can capitalize on the cost savings and broader access to rockstar talent. To keep people on track and make progress toward their goals, companies will also need to provide managers with the tools they need to remain connected

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to their teams, reassess budgets, and determine what individuals can achieve, despite uncertainty about the future.

Establish and reward the right behaviors. Companies must establish new policies and reward behaviors that support virtual working. No longer can employers measure their employees’ productivity on “face time”—their actual presence in an office, day after day. Now, they must shift their focus to what gets done and the value of the work, not how long it takes to get that work done. To do this, leaders must provide clear expectations and metrics based on organizational priorities and goals, rather than discrete tasks.

Recognize and model true work-life blend. Perhaps most important, organizations must recognize their employees as whole humans who have lives beyond the work they produce.

Employers must work hard to remove stigma and support employees’ need to make time for self-care—including exercise, meals, and family time. Policies and procedures need to reflect these shifts, and leaders must model a true work-life blend so that it becomes part of the company culture.

PROVIDE TOOLS AND TRAINING Your employees can’t make the transition to remote work in a vacuum. To be successful, they need support from the organization to connect every employee and every team.

Make communications easier. Now that companies have gone fully virtual, individuals are communicating more efficiently and more frequently across a networked environment. To do this well, everyone, at every level, must make opportunities for dialogue by employing numerous channels.

Leaders can make communication easier for their people.

They can remove roadblocks, create a governance structure that pushes decision making out and down, and provide employees with the tools and training they need to empower them for ongoing communication and local decision making.

With traditional hierarchies gone, true leaders must step up to facilitate information flow across the organization.

Offer bite-size, interactive learning moments. Individuals are learning new skills every day, and the pace of change has never been faster. Some are taking on new roles and responsibilities and need to get up to speed quickly, some are learning new technology platforms, some are now managing teams remotely, and many are doing all these things simultaneously.

Converting in-person training into bite-size, digestible, and interactive learning moments is key to continuing to upskill employees. Once they are trained, they can use their skills to cross-pollinate into new areas that will drive innovation, growth, and productivity.

STEP UP COMMUNICATION Leaders need to be accessible, authentic, and more communicative than ever. Take a hard look at your internal communications strategies and make the changes now.

Review strategy and engage senior leaders. Companies must review their executive communication strategy and engage senior leaders from across disciplines to develop messages that will resonate with their people. Those leaders who show up as human, vulnerable, and genuine will inspire people to continue moving forward. They need to be honest and compassionate and share the message that even though they don’t have everything figured out yet, they are working on it. This transparency will pay steep dividends in garnering loyalty and support.

Listen and respond. Leaders need to listen to their people and respond to their concerns in a thoughtful, consistent, and empathetic way. Many leaders are embracing the current moment to make deep connections with employees. They must continue the dialogue they have begun and maintain momentum long past this crisis to sustain employees’ engagement over the long term.

CREATE A SUSTAINABILITY PLAN Creating a roadmap that balances short-term urgency with

long-term strategy is difficult in crisis situations, but now is the time to plan for sustainability. To do this, companies must assess and maintain the components of a successful virtual work culture, establish protocols to support their employees with the most modern tools and communications, and create a plan that can evolve as the landscape shifts.

Envision the future of work in small steps—beginning with reentry. Leaders need to set expectations now for the ways of working that will benefit the organization down the road, so that employees can focus on the strategic business priorities of the future. Creating a vision of “possibility”—even if the details are unclear—provides the guidance to begin planning for the future.

Refine your long-term people plan. Understanding how the new normal impacts the overall talent lifecycle will be critical to steadying employees into the future of work.

Nurturing a culture that embraces virtual work will inevitably impact recruiting, onboarding, performance management, development, succession planning, and advancement.

Companies need to create and communicate a new baseline on measures of success to set expectations for how employees will continue to grow and evolve, and they must train leaders and managers on how to bring these expectations to life every day.

If there’s one thing everyone can agree on, it’s that the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing us to rethink what we know, and our ways of working are no exception. To begin shifting our idea of what’s possible for remote work after COVID-19, leaders must take hold of what’s working today, integrate it quickly into the everyday, and make a flexible plan for sustaining remote work long into the future. AQ Diana Vienne is a senior partner with Notion Consulting, a global change-leadership consultancy that helps leaders tackle complex business challenges. She has more than 20 years of change, talent, and transformation experience working externally for large and boutique consulting firms, as well as internally as chief talent officer in the advertising industry.

MCE QUARTERLY I SUMMER 2020 I 43

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