Leadership Now – What You Need To Do

We’re in some unprecedented times, and it’s crucial now that leaders take on certain actions. This article will go through quickly and simply what you need to be doing.

(Click here if you’d prefer watch & listen than read)

If you’re in a managerial role, leadership has never been optional, it’s always been a requirement of the job. Manager means you’re accountable for the work of a team, leadership’s required to get that done. Team Leader roles are similar. Even if you’re not in a formal leadership role, leadership is actually a verb. It means the actions that get people to move towards the direction that’s required. This means that if you have influence, if you have some sort of power, and things need to happen… these same leadership ideas apply to you too.

Take Charge

Now is the time to take charge. This is not the time for consensus leadership. However, do not make the mistake of thinking ‘take charge’ means you get on your angry face. Taking charge means you have to be decisive. If you’re in that manager role, you’ve got the authority to make decisions. Use that authority, but take charge in a way that says, “We are making a decision. I need everyone’s angle.” Get people’s angles, get people’s views, understand what’s going on, but then make a decision.

It is crucial that decisions are made. Stress levels go up more when there is no decision made, than if they did if you said out loud that the situation is hard, it’s going to be stressful, so we are going to take action. The stress will not increase further if someone actually says it out loud. So take charge.

Taking charge also means explaining what’s going on. You don’t have to protect people from reality, but you don’t have to be mean about that reality either. You simply have to lay out, “This is what’s going on,” and you need to stay with them while it’s happening. Take charge, be decisive, explain what’s going on.

Clear Actions – rules and principles

When you make decisions, make sure you give clear actions on what this means. We’ve had some great examples of this – the distance of 1.5 metres has never been so popular! Guidelines also can get used in strange ways – when the initial guidelines came out with no more than 100 people in the one spot (seems like months ago!), there were large groups gathering in rooms that meant 1.5 metre physical distancing was not possibile. There was a cry for more guidelines, so the government then had to outline how many people per square metre!

You might think to yourself (as I initially did) ‘can’t we figure this out with some obvious maths?’ And the answer is… NO! In times of stress and confusion we can’t figure this out. Your people can’t figure this out when there’s this much pressure going on.

So give clear actions. Provide rules that say, “We do not get within 1.5 meters of each other. We do not shake hands.” One of the key things you do when you’re taking charge in any sort of leadership role is make weird behaviors not weird anymore. It is weird not to shake people’s hands until everyone knows not to shake people’s hands. Then the person shaking the hands is the weird one.

Leadership allows weird behavior to become normal. So you need to outline that for your people by saying “This is what’s now normal,” and we do this through saying, “These are now the rules.” And, yes, they’re rules! We are talking about the health of the planet. So these are rules.

Yet…the rules will never cover everything. In situations like this, we had Jacinda Ardern giving one of the best examples we’ve seen by saying (paraphrasing here) “If you’re not sure what the rules tell you to do, act as if you have COVID-19.” In other words, she provided a principle to apply.

Give your people clear rules: “This is the deal. We no longer do this. We now always do that.” Clear rules. And then principles – “where there’s not a rule in place, this is the principle to apply”.

Match Affect

There is a concept from the social sciences called ‘match affect’. This means matching the emotion coming through, the energy you’re feeling from other people. This does not mean, however, if people are freaking out, you freak out. It does mean that if someone is freaking out, which means high energy, you don’t react with a calm, “Oh, it’s all going to be cool.” That’s not matching the affect and would cause the person to think you have no idea what they are feeling or going through.

If people are freaking out, your response is to lift your energy and say, “Yeah, I agree. This is really worrying. Here’s what we’re going to.” And if people are seeming unreasonably calm, suggesting they are not quite understanding the situation, if you raise energy up to 11 in an attempt to let them know the urgency, they will disregard you as extreme. Instead, lower your energy and agree “Yeah, we do need to approach this rationally.”

Matching affect does not mean you have to go all the way to their energy. Go at least half to three-quarters of the way from your natural affect towards theirs. That way, you connect, which creates a channel for what you need them know.

Stay Connected

People can handle the truth if they feel like they are still connected to the whole. The fundamental fear people have is they’ll be cut from the herd, that they won’t exist socially. Remember, work is a social system where people are able to get themselves valued. To be in a situation where you can’t communicate and be useful to someone is heading toward not even existing! This is why connection is vital for mental health. We’ve got the technology, so stay connected to people.

This means you create some rituals. Perhaps at the start of a meeting, you already check-in (something I recommend to clients). Now we’re allocating extra time, regardless of whether meeting on video or still in-person to ask, “So how are you really going?” and ensure space for listening. Instead of it being five minutes at the start of the meeting, it’s now 15 because we need that time to hear from other people and provide them the ability to actually talk.

Make regular meetings compulsory. Use your managerial authority if you have it, and if you’re not officially a manager but people will respond to you, instigate a 9:00 A.M. meeting every day, just on video for 15 minutes. Influence peole to get involved as it won’t happen naturally, as everyone will be busy doing their own stuff to be valuable. Stay connected during this period. Lots of checking in, lots of asking, “How are you going?”

In summary

Managers – leadership is not an option. You’ve always had to do it, now you need to do it more than ever. We need you. And if you’re not a manager but are the sort of person that people listen to and you have influence, take the lead. We need you too.

What does this mean? Take charge, be decisive. Get input, get it fast, make decisions. No decision increases anxiety more than a decision that lets us get at least halfway towards the right answer. If you’re decisive, we can actually make another decision down the track.

Give clear actions. Clear rules. And where rules don’t apply, give people principles from which the rules will emerge. This lets people know what to do when the rules don’t work.

Match the affect of people you’re communicating with, or the groups that you’re communicating with, which means move towards their energy. And stay connected to your people, to the people around you, to your horizontal colleagues too. Stay connected as we go through.

Follow these guidelines and you’ll be doing what you can as a leader to get people to focus on what needs to be done, whether it’s work they have to do, whether they need to not work, whether they need to stay at home. If we can stay connected, we might just be able to get through this.

Good luck!

(Click here if you’d like to watch or share me going through this on a video)