Insights for Leaders of the Future
Welcome to our conversation about leadership—we want to help those who desire to become impactful leaders that make a difference in others’ lives. This week, we turn to the discussion about working from home.
#leadership #team #PeakPerformance #CoreIdentity #teamdevelopment #ShiftFromMeToTeam #purpose
In our book coming out this month, The Shift from Me to Team, we share the challenges facing leaders of tomorrow. One significant challenge: leadership being open to what motivates their team members, permitting the surfacing of creative ways for the organization to be even more successful. The responsibility of leadership is to develop/create/collaborate for the best answer, not to provide the solution.
Before COVID-19, many leaders believed that you could not trust team members to work from home; they would not get the job done unless they were supervised. One CEO of a major tech company went so far as to say they would discontinue remote work at their company. That organization’s culture floundered terribly, and the CEO was removed.
The pandemic began, and those of our clients who were in the medical field and other professions where in-person services or activities were required saw their businesses suffer. At the same time, many sales-oriented businesses saw a tremendous decrease in expenses while revenue stayed relatively the same, increasing net income in a manner they would not have predicted.
We have found that Americans have a work ethic not seen in most other parts of the world. Americans feel a responsibility to contribute, make a difference, and make things better, and to work hard in doing so. Americans who are permitted to have unlimited vacation time take only two weeks a year on average for vacation. Why, then, do we not trust people to work from home?
Let’s face it, when we go to our workplace, we are considered to be working, regardless of what we are doing. When we are at home, we had better have some objective proof that we are working, or we may be out of a job.
These leadership insights are supported in this Wall Street Journal article featuring Wharton School Professor Adam Grant and his take on leaders of tomorrow.
As leaders, let’s not be afraid not to have the answers. Let’s be open and recognize that most of our team members want to be trusted and to prove that they can be relied on to do the right thing—whether someone is watching or not. And for those who can’t be trusted, let’s find out who they are sooner than later. As leaders, give everyone a chance to prove who they really are, and be prepared to address your findings.