The Hybrid Work Challenge, Part I
Our response to pressure reveals who we are as people and as organizations. Decision-making under pressure tests the stability and strength of our Core Identity and challenges us to be who we are when at our best.
During the COVID pandemic, how each organization responded to having everyone who could work from home revealed its Core Identity, providing a massive case study on the strength of organizational Core Identity. The case study continues as COVID subsides and people are asked to return to the office. The tension is real, and how organizations respond will impact their future sustainability. Even Zoom has recently requested that all team members within fifty miles of an office come in at least part-time. Zoom perhaps enabled and benefited most from the COVID-mandated work-from-home, and now they are challenged with justifying bringing their team members back to the office.
When You Are Under Pressure, Your Core Identity Will Guide You
In the good times when things are going well, and perhaps especially in the tough times when you are under pressure, your Core Identity will guide you in doing the right thing. This guidance is not just for a short-term expedient result. Your Core Identity will guide you in making decisions for sustainable success.
It starts with clarity on your Purpose for existing as an organization. What is your Purpose? If it is to meet a number by month- or quarter-end, then you may treat your team members like pieces of equipment to be ramped up to produce more.
If your Purpose is to provide a service that contributes to the benefit of others, including your team members, then you might ask your team members how this challenge can be overcome. Time and again, team members devise solutions that preserve the organization’s future. This Purpose—grounded in what we describe as a Stage III Level of Fulfillment: Benefiting Others—is what enables success for organizations over the long term.
Two Guiding Principles we find to be mandatory for all organizations, partnerships, and relationships to possess to be sustainably successful are:
- Trust or integrity, responsibility, honesty
- Caring or respect, compassion, love
Guiding Principles are felt all around the organization, up and down, and around the peers, clients, patients, and customers. They are not to benefit one over the other; they are shared Guiding Principles. They work to create flow in all directions.
In our blog series this month, we will go more deeply into how hybrid work has become a case study in the strength of organizations possessing a disciplined and robust Core Identity. We will look at hybrid work from the team member perspective, and then we will look at leadership’s perception of what the team members are doing to the organization.
We will share our observations from our experience with many organizations in this work, and we look forward to your contribution to enlightening all of us on this vital and sensitive subject.
#leadership #team #PeakPerformance #CoreIdentity #TeamDevelopment #ShiftFromMeToTeam #Trust #Caring #Purpose