Courses Details

Leading in a Crisis: Lessons in Leadership

COVID-19 has proven to be the ultimate disruption that brought the future of work crashing into our living rooms with neither invitation nor warning. It has tested the skills of even the most experienced leaders, demanding they become overnight experts in managing remote and flexible teams, and redefined what it means to be an agile workforce.

I often find that when I introduce the topic of managing flexible work arrangements and remote teams, the most pressing concern is how to manage performance, or trust a person to do their job when you can’t see what they’re doing. COVID-19 made virtual work teams an imperative and with these mechanisms at play, I sought to better understand the impacts of remote work arrangements on public sector workplaces. 1 Trust and compassion I asked one senior executive who leads a branch responsible for delivering corporate functions in a Commonwealth government agency what they had done to overcome this challenge. They described their agency as having a traditional approach to work arrangements. Flexible work arrangements were an option, but they were frequently regarded with suspicion and bias around how performance would be managed. The transition to remote working arrangements challenged all of those assumptions. Trust is an important tenant of their leadership style and this experience has reinforced that when leaders demonstrate trust by giving employees autonomy to do their jobs, they are sending a strong message that people are valued. They found that not only was underperformance a non-issue but productivity increased; the question is no longer why, but why not work remotely?