Episode #411: The New Diaspora Leadership Challenge

Winston Churchill said, “When you are going through hell, keep going”. We have all been going through hell, compliments of the pandemic. If you are Chinese, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Thai, Kiwi or Aussie you have popped out the other side, now living a normal life, albeit one with many more restrictions and closed borders. Virus mutations, great power self-interest and the breakdown of trust in institutions, threatens to make the pandemic a semi-permanent fixture for the next few years at least. For leaders, that means we will be facing a new order, where our subordinates no longer congregate in the workplace. Effectively they have become invisible. Consequently, the traditional method of driving performance has become much more difficult.

An acquaintance of mine is on Clubhouse many times during the working day. I know this, because I keep getting notifications about meetings and his name is there as one of the organisers. If I was his boss, would I feel I was getting my monies worth from his work contributions? How do I know my team members are not skiving off doing something equivalent? Do I have to enforce discipline by sitting them all down in the office, under my constant view, to make sure they are working and not goofing off? Probably not.

Hybrid Work Styles Will Predominate

We have been working from home for over a year now and there is a logic to not wasting time in the cattle crushes that are Tokyo’s morning and evening rush hours. Spending every day at home isn’t the answer either. Japan is a particularly group oriented society, so my team definitely need time together. The exodus will become a partial phenomenon. We will spend two to three days a week working from home and the rest in the workplace. Why? There is value and efficiency in being alone, beavering away without interruption. There is also value in being interrupted.

The X factor, the serendipity, the accidents, the vague chemistry of interactions when we are together cannot be reproduced when we are in isolation. Chance conversations, unscheduled meetings, instant feedback, the buzz and energy of the workplace all have value and we don’t want to lose it.

Culture Rules OK

Culture is key to value creation and maintenance. Culture is based on the agreed direction of the organisation, the commonly deduced precision of what we do and don’t do. Our core values drive our behaviour and our WHY. We are constantly surveying companies about their challenges, looking to match our training solutions to their issues. What we have found is that companies without strong internal cultures have struggled during the pandemic. These leaders were operating off old notions of authority power and hierarchy. They found it hard to coordinate activities and drive results, when working with a dispersed workforce.

It is time to fess up. I have stolen from the Ritz Carlton Hotel group. Many years ago, I attended a week of training with them on how they create such a strong internal culture, expressed across their dispersed properties around the world. They had central principles about how to deliver customer service and these were repeated every day, in every shift, for every work group. I pilfered that idea and previously applied it to Retail Banking and now to my corporate training Franchise. It works. It works because the behaviours and the WHY are re-created every day. Each person in the team takes the leadership by turn, expressing their own take on what the values and principles mean to them. This personal identification with the direction of the firm is a critical piece of the puzzle.

Recreate Your Culture Daily

Great, but how does this work in real terms? In the office and now online, we meet at 9.00am and we call it the “Daily Dale”. Each day we consult the spreadsheet which nominates by rotation, the name of the person leading today. We begin with Good News, to get us in a positive frame of mind. Next, we go through the Vision, Mission and Values. We have our motto and our mantra as well and then we get to today’s Dale Carnegie Principle, taken from his thirty human relations and thirty stress management principles. The leader of the session talks about what that principle means to them. We share who we are visiting today and who is visiting us. Then we go through our individual top priorities for the day and we end with a motivational quote. It takes ten minutes and we have reaffirmed our WHY and created a sense of common purpose and commitment. The Tech exists now, to simultaneously have some of the team in the room and some online. Consequently, there is no reason why we can’t keep this “Daily Dale” going, following our move to a hybrid work situation.

As the boss, checking on people doing Clubhouse etc., during work hours is a mug’s game. If the culture is made strong, then the commitment is there, regardless of where the people are physically located. Leaders who clarify and drive a common understanding of the desired culture in the organization, will manage the permanent exodus well. There are no maps for where we are going, but our culture is our compass. Get this right and everything else will fall into line. If we get it wrong then trouble and strife will consume our futures. The answer is obvious, isn’t it.