Writing for the Leaders Council, Adam Norsworthy, managing director of secure telecom and payment services specialist, Fusion Telecom & PayGuard®, shares his thoughts on how business executives must adopt a fresh approach to leadership that is fit for the post-pandemic workplace.
Leadership has been a strong theme in my life, ever since captaining the Rugby team in primary school! Over the past 25 years I have been lucky enough not only to have learnt from some great leaders, but also put into practise different leadership ideas with staff in various organisations.
My style is certainly still changing, and it is a good thing too, with people now working from home rather than in the office to avoid Covid transmission. Change is the only thing we can count on and transforming our leadership practise to meet the current climate is a change we need to embrace if we are to succeed.
While fear and reward are, and will always be, strong motivational tools, I have come to embrace wherever possible a more intrinsic motivational approach. This is important with the greater physical distance we now experience as our working environment.
While management deals with the detail of organising resources to meet objectives, leadership opens up, bringing vision, clarifying purpose and unifying the efforts of each individual.
With regards to the effort of our employees, many leaders have been concerned about a reduction in productivity with the move to work from home. It appears these concerns were largely unfounded, as more and more businesses leaders report the opposite. Regardless, working remotely from the office is here to stay as many are seeking a hybrid approach as we return to the new normal, part working from home and part working from an office.
During my early leadership years, I was intent on placing the power of success in the hands of each employee, and I did so by building a system of progression that took away subject judgement when it came to advancement, and replaced it with a system of tasks, goals, and ongoing targets.
It was spectacularly successful in the early months, as each person felt they could drive their own future and jumped in to complete the tasks and learning that resonated most with them. Because it was ‘right up their street’, they complete these tasks quickly.
Then they were stuck with the areas that inspired them the least. And that is where everything started to fail, just as spectacularly. While in the initial period I simply had to sit back and watch as people motored through the early tasks at great speed, I found myself working hard later to motivate and cajole staff to complete the rest of the programme requirements.
People became stuck, demotivated, and it required an enormous amount of energy from me to help drive them forward. I look back now and see quickly how unsustainable that was in the medium and long term.
Today, I practise a very different approach. Fundamentally, intrinsic motivation comes from within each of us, and key to this is ‘discovery’. That is, the sense that each of us discovers what we need to do, which in turn engenders ownership, and this leads to responsibility.
Really understanding this has led me to change the way we recruit, the way we train, and manage our staff. I say manage, but actually they manage themselves. I have found this is an ideal system for the remote working nature of today.
It starts with placing the employee’s opportunity to discover at the very centre of the organisation’s methodology. For example, rather than training a staff member on how to use a system, they need to discover this themselves, asking questions as they see fit. Rather than teaching the employee about the organisation’s approach to customer care, the employee needs to develop their own customer care system that think would work well for the organisation, and only after this, do they compare their ideas with the company’s standard.
It is the employee’s responsibility to manage themselves, not their line managers. To ensure they have the support they need, each staff member selects a mentor, a trusted confidant that, for junior staff, show them the ropes and for more senior staff, help support them through whatever challenges crop up.
Responsibilities are given before training happens, which usually drives the employee into asking “how am I going to do this?!”, a perfect first question to lead them to direct their own training. We have no training manuals, as each employee creates their own as they go along. This approach stimulates ownership. They own their training; they own their behaviour, and they own their results. This level of responsibility taken by staff significantly reduces the burden on management.
Meetings are structured in a way allowing each employee to add something to the agenda beforehand should they wish to, and everyone is asked for a contribution. Efficiency is not paramount; this is replaced by a focus the experience. While results are useful to report on and play an important role in measuring progress [or lack of], better results are often obtained not by focussing on results, but by focussing on ensuring a positive experience for those involved.
Think of a tennis player. While the score is important to measure whether they are winning the match, it is not helpful for them to be dwelling on the score when they are about to serve. They are more likely to win the point when totally absorbed into the experience of serving the ball.
The difficulty here is not at all for the employee, who feel empowered by this approach and embrace it. No, the difficulty is for the administrators and managers, who feel a loss of control over the process as they must allow different people to arrive at a certain place in their own way, rather than with the process prescribed.
And this is where strong leadership is needed.
In response to the changing working environment post-Covid, we can either develop a level of hyper control, technologically driven, to support our need to track and gauge every movement, or we can lead with confidence. A greater degree of trust is required whether we like it or not as people work more and more independently, and while this will pose an issue for some, it is a real leadership opportunity.
Earning trust has always been a fundamental part of good leadership, and leaders now have a chance to develop a stronger confidence within their organisations, reducing management overheads, increasing productivity, and improving the experience for most. I hope they take it.
