Focal Leadership

Leadership

Is homeworking killing family life?

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homeworking

Whether or not homeworking is impacting family life is a question that urgently needs addressing. Why? A report from Stanford in June 2020 stated that 42% of the US labor force was working from home full-time. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that 50% of his staff will likely be working from home within the next 10 years. Many other companies are also following suit. Of course, the biggest stimulus for this is the global pandemic that has restricted access to offices, travel, and many types of employment. There is also a realization that much work can be done as effectively from home as in an office.

There is some evidence that people who work from home are putting in more work hours than when they would otherwise travel to an office or a place of work. There is also converse evidence that people need closer monitoring when working from home to ensure that they get work done. These diverse perspectives depend largely on the individual, but also on the type of work being done.

There are many remote working examples where employees enjoy greater relaxation and connection between their work and home lives – kids in the background, pets invading the meeting, or flexible workout times. While this has had a positive impact of “humanizing” people, and bringing a lot of flexibility, it may also have negative implications due to the blurring of work and home life. There is an argument that work and home life can exist very well together, especially when they are supportive of the passions and balance enjoyed by those involved.

A recent survey conducted by OnePoll on behalf of CBDistillery, found that 56 percent of respondents are more stressed about work than ever before. 62 percent of respondents felt pressure from their company to be working beyond what is required of them as they work from home. 67 percent of respondents also said their company has pressured them into being available at all hours of the day since their work from home period started. This kind of data does not evoke a healthy work/home balance.

The instances of employees working all hours, responding to every email as soon as they can (regardless of time), and working at weekends as well as vacations, are many. The duty of care for employers not to build cultures of expectations such as these is paramount. Also essential is that employees establish clear boundaries for work and home life. Indeed, I champion employees checking out of their work life at weekends and during vacations. I recently read a report that taking a true vacation is important to avoid burnout, reduce vulnerability to illness, protect family relationships, and generally build a healthier outlook on life. All very significant benefits! Seeing people work double the amount of their contracted hours and compromising the time they spend with family and friends should not be a cause of happiness.

As we see the embedding of new working trends following the pandemic experience, we will undoubtedly witness homeworking increase as a proportion of the whole. Homeworking saves companies money on real estate, travel, and other benefits. What companies must do, but often do not, is understand their responsibility to their employees who transition to homeworking. Having worked in Europe for many years, one of the good things that came out of European working rights legislation and directives, is the requirement for employers to bear some responsibility for the homeworking environment of their employees. In my opinion, this should not just be the physical environment and financial implications, but also their mental health and work/life balance.

When work and home life are under the same roof, many people will need to establish new ways of living and being. Exercise routines, breaks during the day, eating habits, and work boundaries are just some of them. I would also suggest that homeworking requires intentional planning as to how to build and maintain healthy relationships and friendships. These will become increasingly under threat if not enough attention is given to them. Spending quality time with your spouse, children, extended family, and friends should be as much a part of everyone’s calendar as answering emails and attending meetings. Homeworking has and will kill family life. To build a healthy and sustainable culture where family life is the foundation of a balanced existence, means ensuring that homeworking should be an enabler not the executioner.

3 Reasons to be a Passionate and Patient Leader

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yin yang

Being a passionate and patient leader embodies a combination of virtues that demonstrate a very powerful style of leadership. Taking each of these virtues to the extreme, with the exclusion of other complementary attributes, could have damaging outcomes. Just demonstrating passion can mean being overly excited, over-powering, or having a disregard for others. Just being patient can mean being slow, unfocused, or lacking drive. Here are three reasons why passion and patience are such good companions.

  1. Be intentional about both

    Leadership is never about just one style, one approach, or one dominant behavior. It is about different attributes working together. Emphasizing these behaviors at different times and being intentional about practicing them in the moment. For example, passion is so important when people need to see a vision, need inspiring, and motivating. Patience is so important when people need to be listened to, understood, or change is not immediately evident.

A passionate and patient leader can balance these attributes in a skillful way to demonstrate energy and drive while simultaneously showing the capacity to engage, listen, and wait for others to get on board. An agile leader can show more passionate leadership when the need is to enthuse and inspire, while practicing patient leadership when the need is to help others understand implications or when events need to align before progress can be made. Great leadership is being able to consciously flex styles and not to be overcome by personal impulse or preference, nor to be swayed inappropriately by external events.

  • Increase your emotional intelligence

    Being emotionally intelligent is to understand your own emotions and their impact on others, and also to understand how your own emotions are influenced by those around you. Where this plays into passionate and patient leadership is to grow a personal level of emotional intelligence and understanding that consciously impacts behavior. For example, if a leader knows that they are particularly passionate, then knowing whether to let this come across full-bore or to moderate it is an emotionally intelligent state. Alternatively, a particularly patient leader will know when to raise the pace and move the agenda forward rather than slip into procrastination or indecision.

    Others may want a leader to be more passionate or patient at any given time. Reading the situation and understanding the source of this insistence is also how an emotionally intelligent leader decides whether to adjust their style or not. Passionate people may wish for a passionate leader. The same goes for patient people. But wholeheartedly passionate or patient people may need a leader with different attributes to get the best from them.

  • Be future-focused and present-conscious

    Agile leaders can often plan to adapt their levels of passion and patience depending on the circumstances. For example, if a leader is giving a presentation about future vision, a passionate description of the future might need to be accompanied with a more patient representation of timeline expectations. Or a patient conversation with an underperforming employee might need to be accompanied with a passionate commitment to their development and confidence in their ability to deliver better performance.

    Mindfully developing a passionate as well as a patient response to circumstances is the mark of a leader who understands that leadership is not just being in the moment, but who also understands the impact their leadership has on future engagement and commitment.

Passion and patience are just two leadership attributes. Comparing and contrasting them in the manner above demonstrates how leaders need to flex behavior to be at their best. During the Covid-19 pandemic, both passion and patience are essential leadership attributes – passion to bring energy in finding ways through current difficulties, and patience to lead those who are inundated by circumstances beyond their control.

3 ways organizations are investing in people not buildings

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Investing in people not buildings has never been more pertinent than the present fall-out of the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only have office buildings been less accessible due to shut-downs, travel restrictions, and hygiene concerns, but virtual working has proved more effective than many would have dared to anticipate. Very large companies, as well as many small to medium size ones, have chosen to extend some virtual working arrangements for employees indefinitely. Many are re-evaluating their commercial real estate portfolio and creating strategies which have a much greater component of virtual working. The main reasons for this being (a) virtual working can be effective, (b) technology has enabled more virtual working, and (c) virtual employees can obviously be located anywhere with reduced overheads.

The three examples below highlight how companies are investing in people not buildings:

  1. Build your talent pool

    The pandemic has resulted in significant job losses across the world. Not in every industry, but some sectors have been very badly hit. Taking decisions to rationalize the workforce, retaining those who have most potential to win back business, and investing in employee development for remote working, are all strategies that companies are investing in. Organizations should always have a lean employee population, all of whom add definable value to current and future successful performance.

    Corporations have had to make tough decisions about lay-offs and furloughs. While many of these decisions have accompanying stressful personal implications, they are primarily made with survival and organizational health in mind. With the increasing effectiveness of virtual working, the reduction in employees can be mirrored by a smart real estate strategy. This is sometimes not achievable swiftly, mainly because of lease clauses or just because disposing of real estate is very difficult in the current climate. But organizations can and should be shifting the balance of cost from real estate to value-adding employees wherever possible.

  2. Cost effective & flexible

    Not every role is possible to carry out remotely. But many are. The cost of engaging remote employees is more attractive than providing office space for them. I would add that managing remote employees requires a specific skillset that is different to office-based supervision. Managers need to be much more proactive in connecting with their team members, ensuring they have the right skills and training for remote working, establishing networks and collaborative opportunities, and proactively engaging employees who are experiencing remote working challenges in abundance.

    Hiring remote workers provides a great deal of flexibility in building the skill-base of any organization. Re-imagining compensation options for remote workers is also an opportunity to change things up, e.g. they do not need commuting assistance, or staff restaurants. But considering how remote employees access stationery, copying, and office furniture for home use, all provide an opportunity for HR departments to use their imagination. There is also the significant reduction in the cost of services (electricity, etc.) for organizations who reduce their real estate footprint.

  3. Fuel your strategy

    People strategy should never just be a short-term reaction to an external event. The opportunity for more strategic planning with an increasingly remote workforce means that a more inventive people strategy can be considered. The overheads of investing in buildings can be replaced by the investing in people. Not only from a skills perspective, but from a resource type and location perspective. Strategically, is it better to consider a more flexible mix of permanent, interim, contract, consulting, and on-shore/off-shore resources?

    The presence of global pandemics can only fuel the advance of AI and other forms of automated services/manufacturing. But some industries rely heavily on buildings in which to build products, hold inventory, or deliver services. For jobs that do not require presence in a building provided by the employer, remote working opens up many diverse strategic possibilities.

Investing in people not buildings is smart. But a world without buildings which house corporate employees is hard to imagine. I also do not know if the world-at-large is ready for the wholesale psychological impact of permanent remote working at scale. But if you are looking to buy or renovate a house, make sure you have a home office!

Values lived not just spoken or written

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Value

I cannot think of many organizations who do not aspire to the notion of values lived and not just spoken or written. In times of stress and economic pressure, the consistency of practicing organizational values is under severe pressure. Predominantly because leaders have to make choices, and this can result in taking decisions which at face value do not align with the organization’s values. Or decisions are taken which do not actually contradict the organization’s values, but the way they are implemented does.

Why do organizations have values statements? There may be many reasons. Perhaps the one that seems most obvious is the wish to characterize the culture and behavior that they aspire to. For some, organizational values can be part of the corporate wallpaper, i.e. organizations have them for decoration with little function other than to appear once a year as a reminder during the performance review cycle. Some organizations do make efforts to embed them in practices such as talent reviews and leadership selection. The differentiating question is, “do these values characterize every decision and mean more than tenure, influence, expertise, or financial return?” Application sometimes contradicts sentiment.

Just recently I heard a CEO describe how decisions had been made with the well-being of employees being paramount, knowing that this in itself would spin off into corporate value. But this is not universally the case. There are also leaders who make decisions based on financial, strategic, or geographical factors, with less concern about any adverse impact these decisions have on people. Even though regret is expressed, values get lost in action.

It is not just leadership teams who have conflict around values. Many individual leaders are also challenged in this respect. They know about the values statements, and they are proponents of them for measuring performance and managing talent. But bringing them to life with real application and demonstration is sometimes not as evident. Role modelling and holding themselves accountable for living the values is sometimes overlooked because it is not seen as having more importance than other performance measures.

So, what is to be done? Living values means holding a constant plumb line to decisions that are made and practices that are implemented. As well as having a Return On Investment (ROI) measure, organizations should also have a Return On Values (ROV) measure. As part of the review process for critical decisions which impact the organization and employees, an ROV step should measure not only whether the decision is consistent with the organization’s values, but also whether the implementation of this decision will embody these values. For example, performance review processes need to be designed, implemented, and communicated consistent with an organization’s values. Managing the day-to-day performance of these employees also needs to be consistent with these values.

Assessing leaders for fit and potential is a massive industry. There are some assessment tools that explore the values that a leader holds, and many others focus on competencies or behavioral traits. The greatest source of leadership impact and effectiveness over time is character. The Cambridge Dictionary defines character as the particular combination of qualities in a person that makes them different from others. This distinctiveness is often associated with moral values and not just personality traits or experiential prowess. The need for organizations and leaders to embrace moral values that champion the best of human behavior is much needed in an increasingly stressful world.

It is the choice of every leader to live by the highest values, not just to acknowledge them as written or spoken aspirations, but to apply them in practice every time.

Emotional Leadership

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Leader_resize

Emotional leadership probably triggers many different images in your mind. Enthusiastic? Unhinged? Tears? Mood swings? Passionate? Oppressive? Authentic?

Reflecting on leaders in the public eye, there are many different emotional styles of leadership. There are leaders who do not display much emotion, those who are known for demonstrating a lot of emotion, and those who control the emotional content and style of their leadership.

Why consider emotional leadership as a topic in the broader consideration of leadership? There is already a lot of commentary on emotional intelligence, executive presence, and leadership impact.  Leaders with high or low emotional content in their leadership have an impact on others with varying degrees of significance. Emotions in leaders are critical as they are a major influence on the emotional response of those they lead.  And the importance of emotions is well noted – in addition to impacting mental health (commitment, stability, feelings), emotions also have a profound impact on the immune system. Scientists have found that negative emotions reduce antibody levels and lower the ability of the immune system to ward-off sickness and disease. Hence, poor leadership that invokes a negative emotional response results in lower engagement and lower employee well-being.

A leader who exhibits a lot of emotion as part of their leadership, either arising from their personality or convictions, should expect different reactions. Some people may be inspired, energized, and motivated. Others may be switched off, unimpressed, or unconvinced. But is there anything wrong with showing emotions as part of being an authentic leader? No! In an increasingly virtual world, connecting on an emotional level has never been more important. Engaging hearts as well as minds is so important. Having to lead through a laptop screen instead of in-person, is stretching leaders more than ever. People need to feel valued, inspired, and connected. When the laptop screen reverts back to an email or document following an interaction with a leader, what are employees meant to feel? If they are not self-motivated, they need regular emotional sustenance from their leaders to connect them with the wider world and infuse them with energy and purpose. Now more than ever leaders need to discover the power of emotions in leadership.

Building and maintaining positive emotions is like a drug for many – a supply needs to keep on coming. Leaders are in the floodlit zone of providing emotional sustenance. A leader who just turns up without consciously or sub-consciously doing a self-inventory of personal motivation and emotional health, needs to reflect on the impact they are having. Being indifferent to the emotional legacy a leader delivers is poor leadership. Turning up with a positive mindset, a buoyant attitude, and credit in your own emotional bank account will leave a positive legacy.

What about controlled emotional leadership? In my opinion, this can go two ways. First, a leader who knows how to control their emotions, how to accentuate them, and how to suppress them appropriately, is a skilled leader. A skilled leader knows how to use emotions to motivate, communicate, and liberate others. They know how to keep disappointment or frustration in check – sharing if it is appropriate, and with a sensitivity for how it might impact others. But leaders who control their emotions so much that they come across as void of feeling, empathy, or authenticity, need to understand the lack-luster impact they are having.

Emotional leadership does not mean over-the-top exhibition of random emotions. It is the appropriate demonstration of emotions as part of communicating, connecting, and changing. Emotional leadership is above all the mark of character in a leader – appreciating that people need an emotional connection as well as cognitive. It is an aspect of leadership that has never been more critical.