5 people leadership skills learnt through COVID

The wave of change that happened in March in response to COVID 19 was like a tsunami of change and although the wave is receding with the sight of familiarity returning the landscape will remain forever changed.

COVID, I feel accelerated the change in how we manage our employees, rather than alter it completely. In a whitepaper I wrote in February I shared research that identified 5 key leadership skills (link) we will all need in the future of work:

·         Collaboration

·         Decision making

·         Creative thinking

·         Interpersonal skills

·         Emotional intelligence

The focus on the employee experience to deliver excellent customer service will require HR to equip our organisations with the policies and procedures that will deliver engaged, empowered and energized employees. This can only be done if we also develop leadership skills in our people managers in these 3 key areas:

·         Purpose

·         Culture

·         Wellbeing

I believe the change we have seen through COVID will see a forever changed employee expectation of flexibility in the workplace, in the same way women viewed their rightful place in organisations and industry after they stepped in to cover the absence of the male workforce in WW2. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle!

That’s not to say there isn’t going to be some steps backward and changes needed, but I believe we should recognise these 5 key lessons learned in how we manage people and keep going forward.

1.    Developing a Growth Mindset

2.    The need for Emotional Intelligence

3.    The Power of connection

4.    Care for our wellbeing

5.    The agility to change

When COVID hit we needed employees to rapidly learn new skills, like how to use online meeting rooms like Zoom, as well as move into different areas of the business to provide support where it was needed. Like a Business Analyst, I spoke to last week who moved to the call centre. This requires an ability to learn and deploy new skills rapidly. Therefore, leaders who can support employees to develop a Growth Mindset will ensure they are better positioned for any future disruption.

The crisis sent shockwaves across the world and industry, but the impact has been a mainly human one with fear and uncertainty affecting us all. This required managers to step up and provide support and guidance to employees and react in emotionally intelligent ways to ensure individuals were cared for. Our diverse and sometimes extreme reactions and changes in emotions in this period made this even more challenging, but individuals and leaders who understand and are able to use emotional intelligence faired far better than those who don’t have these skills.

Our need for human connection and communication became critical. We needed to trust one another to deliver what we promised with the ability for oversight reduced.  We needed to be open and transparent with our colleagues and feel safe in reaching out for help and assistance. We were also able to see into each other’s lives more than we ever have, which has, for some, deepened those connections even further.  Finding a way to keep that deep connection once we are back in mixed locations for work will require effort from leaders, particularly when bringing new members into the team.

The impact on our individual and social wellbeing was significant with anxiety and stress increasing for most people in this time, with already high numbers (21% a year suffering from mental ill health symptoms) the number of people feeling isolated, overwhelmed and anxious rose during COVID. Leaders can help reduce this by making sure employees are connected, have in place good boundaries and by promoting wellbeing in their teams. Companies need to balance their priorities in the future ensuring that resilience becomes just as important to their strategic thinking as productivity.

The unprecedented forced mobilisation of workforces to work from home, had companies who had been looking at introducing home-based call centres for 4 years achieve it in a week or lose their business. This showed we have the ability to make decisions quickly and put them into action, showing we are more agile than we thought possible. Having clear goals and purpose for teams to work toward enables them to keep focused and deliver results keeping us agile while navigating through change.

In summary we need Leaders to develop the Neurofit skills of:

·         Setting goals that develop a growth mindset in line with the organisation purpose to deliver performance.

·         Developing resilience and using emotional intelligence to look after employee’s wellbeing so they are energised to do their best work.

·         Putting in place behaviours that are in line with the organisations values and keeping communication open will keep people connected so that the culture that is right for that team to succeed is in place.