A Taligens Insight
In the past year, all organizations, including families, have faced unprecedented challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting outcome, COVID-19. Simply keeping people connected to the organization, to their managers, and to one another became a first-order effort. Many employees may have had to adopt virtual work practices to solve problems rather than meet informally to get things done while others performed essential tasks that had to be done safely on site or at customer locations. Employees have seen colleagues furloughed and customers unable to survive. Customer orders may have diminished or stopped, temporarily severing relationships. The everyday difficulties in keeping people engaged and purposeful have been exacerbated.
Trusted connections have been broken in many cases, and leaders and managers’ reliance on relatively unused technologies such as virtual meetings of dozens of people have proven to be less thaneffective. In the midst of these novel challenges, corporate, business unit, and team performance issues confront leaders and managers almost daily. Some can be anticipated or are at least familiar: new competitors disrupting existing markets; unanticipated loss of key talent to competitors or to entrepreneurial ventures; a need for a different talent mix; reorganization to adapt to new strategic demands; a need to rebrand products in response to market changes. Whenever performance or productivity slip or need to be improved, responses are often difficult or painful.
The pandemic has required leaders to answer some new questions about maintaining an engaged, high-functioning corporate culture:
Even as the effects of the pandemic may diminish as vaccination rates increase and far more effectivetreatments of infection are deployed, risk and crisis management plans need ongoing re-evaluations and leaders need to convey to managers and employees specifically how thoroughly they are prepared for future crises. Businesses with a strong trust-based culture are better positioned to do this. When people feel threatened or see their futures in jeopardy, trust issues often surface, some for the first time. The lack of control over things they have taken for granted often makes people turn inward, abandoning one another and the trust that has been built up over time. If nothing else, the past year-plus is a reminder of two things: that trust is essential and that it is also fragile. Leaders and their organizations need to develop and maintain the skills for building and nurturing trust, especially in overwhelmingly difficult and unusual circumstances such as the ones we face today. Thoseskills can include:
Along with observation and listening skills, leaders must be comfortable exercising their skills for action, such as intervening when necessary without disrupting; cultivating an environment of openness, curiosity, commitment, and trust; and learning to communicate in ways that both build trust and achieve business/program results. Every team member should be a leader in building and maintaining trust. Once the new skills are there, it is everyone’s responsibility to recognize challenges to, and changes in, a culture of trust. Making that happen, making everyone think like a leader when it comes to understanding the power of trust in facilitating organizational success means that leaders must commit to trusting one another and their employees. That may require reimagining the role of leader.
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