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HPC Executive and Team Coach, Barry O’Sullivan explores some of the factors that impact team effectiveness and how team coaching can play a role in ‘re-launching’ a team and powering its future growth and success.

After working with many teams and identifying the 6 Conditions for Team Effectiveness, Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman of Harvard University framed the 60-30-10 rule. This simple rule of thumb became a guide to where leaders might place their time and energy to develop high performing teams.

It’s a simple idea. Place the majority, or 60% of your energy on the pre-work, where it will have most impact. Spend 30% of time and energy on building a solid foundation and spend the balance of 10% on coaching the team in real time, simply paying attention to the factors that impact team effectiveness.

But what if you already have a team in situ? What happens when a leader realises that the team is not performing at its best? What happens when stakeholders, such as the board or key clients, demand more? Sometimes teams get stuck, lose their direction and motivation. What can you do with this team?

As team coaches, we have vast experience of working with teams to enhance their performance and deliver on their organisational mandate. We partner with senior teams over an extended period, to shine a light on the factors that impact team effectiveness. Rather than just coaching one member of the team, the team becomes our client. We aim to increase the capacity of the team to coach itself.

How do we do this?

We work closely with the team to understand what’s happening in real time and how the team is functioning as a collective. While diagnostic instruments can play a role in understanding the factors impacting team effectiveness, our greatest skill is in identifying what is being said and what is not being said. By playing this back to the team, questioning and through constructive challenge, we can begin to tackle the key drivers of an effective team. Key questions such as:

– Is the team a real team? Are they a stable group of individuals capable of working with each other brilliantly?

– What’s the team’s compelling purpose? Does everyone on the team understand how critical they are to the delivery of the common purpose? What is it that the team can do better than the members can do as individuals? In our experience working with senior teams, it is this issue that surfaces most commonly as a blockage for teams.

– Have you got the right people, with the right task and teamwork skills to deliver?

– How can you establish a solid structure, the best work practices and behaviour norms to help achieve team goals? While many teams will have tools such as team charters in place, they may not observed in practice. Unhelpful behavioural norms can quickly undermine a team’s effectiveness. What happens within the senior team is observed by colleagues outside the team, leading to a further erosion of impact.

– Finally, leadership can ask if they are providing a supportive organisational context that provides the necessary resources to the team and its members.

Through team coaching, we work with the team to pay attention to what happens in real time. We actively work with the team to reduce the barriers to their effectiveness. While interventions, tools and diagnostics all play a part, the added value we provide is the real partnership we form with the team to understand itself and the conditions that impact on its success.

While you can’t “launch” an existing team, it is possible to “re-launch” a team with team coaching. In our experience, time spent bringing the team together and engaging with their purpose, process and dynamics is time well invested. It raises their capability and builds their credibility throughout the organisation. Supporting the team in the re-launch process and giving it the attention it needs is invaluable. Re-laying the foundations for effectiveness by improving the conditions in the team will pay dividends long into the future.

Barry is a member of HPC’s Executive & Team Coaching Panel. He has worked as a senior executive for over 20 years in financial services, sales management and operations to director level.

Barry has worked as a Coach since 2010. His experience includes coaching senior leadership in Financial Services, IT, Professional Services, Retail, Wealth Management and Utilities.

Through team coaching, he has enabled senior leaders and their teams to achieve a sustained step change in collective performance and growth.

HPC’s approach to team coaching is based around our core strengths in discovery, diagnosis, design and delivery. But also, our deep commitment to helping your team transform the way they think and act, which leads to a significant and sustained impact on business results.

We have researched, structured and implemented our leadership team coaching solution around a number of leading psychological schools of thought and our experiences of working directly with senior teams. While team coaching is still an emerging field in academia and L&D, our approach is already delivering pivotal results.

Download our Team Coaching Brochure for more information or get in touch with our team for a more in-depth discussion at info@wearehpc.com

We asked some of our coaches for their observations on the importance of coaching for individuals and teams as they enter a hybrid working environment and how well companies capture and communicate the impact of coaching.

Daire Coffey

HPC Executive Coach

Q: Why is coaching important as we enter a hybrid working environment?

As we edge closer to returning to the office, we will encounter a new working environment where a new set of challenges and opportunities awaits us. Covid has changed our relationship with work and the workplace and so a lot more is required of our leaders to step up to this challenge and adopt a more flexible and supportive leadership style. The adoption of a hybrid working model in many sectors will lead to an increased focus on people leaders and people leadership. This will be exacerbated by increased opportunities for mobility as the global economy recovers.

Based on my conversations with leaders, I see three areas of focus for them:

Personal: What behaviours and mindset do I need to adopt to best navigate the new model of work? How can I develop a more focused and positive mindset? What resources do I need to support me personally on this journey? How do I sustain my performance over the long term?

Team: How can I best adapt my leadership style to support and empower my team individually to stay engaged and productive? How do I best foster a healthy level of collaboration and trust? In light of an increasingly global recruitment market, how can I retain my top talent and keep them motivated?

Organisation: What do others now need from me and my team? How will create a sense of agility that will allow us to respond to the next crisis? What opportunities does Covid create for us as an organisation?

Coaching becomes really important in this environment in that it offers a personalised approach to support and empower leaders to hone the skills they need. Coaching:

– Offers a trusted sounding board to ignite fresh thinking around new challenges and opportunities.

– Supports and empowers individuals based on their individual circumstances – the CEO , the line manager, the new employee working from their bedroom and who has barely seen their desk since they started – all with different multigenerational and personal circumstances.

– Gives space to explore goals and develop practical strategies to build their overall impact, enhance collaboration with their team/stakeholders and ensure wellbeing of themselves and people remains front and centre.

– Provides a meaningful incentive to develop and retain top talent in a highly competitive global market. We know that the growing millennial workforce particularly value this.

There is no doubt that those who invest in a personalised authentic and motivating development experience will enhance their own capabilities and their capacity to hold onto their talent, strengthen individual, team and company performance and deliver an improved bottom line. Coaching offers the perfect solution to do just that.

Jenny McConnell

HPC Senior Facilitator, Executive & Team Coach

Q: What new challenges and opportunities can coaching help to unlock in leaders and teams as we enter this next phase of work?

Coaching helps leaders and teams to identify the new questions they need to ask of themselves, their customers and key stakeholders. For example, “What Covid losses do we want to recoup or remain as lost? What are our ‘Covid keepers’ – the changes that we want to retain and strengthen?” As the answers emerge, leaders and teams often find themselves in that uncomfortable space between what has been versus what must become. This transition demands a complex personal and organisational systemic shift. When you feel the searing heat of a ‘burning platform’ underfoot, change becomes the only viable option. Coaching plays a critical role in unlocking the shape, pace and impact of that change.

Deirdre Foley

HPC Senior Facilitator, Executive & Team Coach

Q: In what ways can coaching empower a team to overcome the challenges of working in a hybrid environment? What are the primary challenges teams should anticipate and prepare for?

In the past year, teams have had to quickly adjust and flex how they work, collaborate and communicate with each other. They’ve developed a wealth of experience in new ways of working. Where they may once have felt that it was impossible to collaborate effectively unless they were all physically sitting together, they have now developed ways of interacting and collaborating via a range of virtual tools from MS Teams, Zoom and in house tools and resources. This experience provides a rich learning opportunity for team coaching to empower them, as we move to a hybrid working environment, where a mix of onsite and remote working will soon start to become the norm.

The move to a hybrid environment is certain to present more unique challenges as teams negotiate what the ‘new normal’ will look like for them. What will the new norms of behaviour be? What are the positives from the past year that the team will benefit from bringing forward into a hybrid model? Are there old ways of working, prior to Covid, that the team would benefit from re-instating? By working with a team coach, each team can reflect and consider the best approach for their particular team. While each organisation may have over-riding policies, the organisation will benefit from team coaching where teams are empowered and accountable for how their team can perform to their best potential. A team coach will ensure that all voices on the team are heard and each team considers the challenges they will face and how to overcome and prepare for them.

Louise Molloy

HPC Executive Coach

Q: How well do companies capture and communicate the impact of coaching?

When your people commit to coaching, as a company, what are you hoping will be different and how do you capture the benefit? Often the focus goes on the delivery of support for our people. Return on investment can often be quantitative, linked to staff engagement; promotions; improved performance. Creating the conditions so that coaching impact is ‘pushed’ back to you rather than ‘pulled out of people’, is a strategy I’ve seen work really well.

What would that look like? Greater collaboration, better listening, more explicit reflection on how groups and teams work together and might work together better. Increased advocacy and more constructive feedback. All standard coaching outputs – but what about sharing our successes? What about telling these stories, it’s the stories that connect, not the numbers. When you or your board hears that sales and compliance are suddenly proactively collaborating on processes before they land – rather than retrospectively tweaked for compliance, that’s cultural gold!

We coach for purpose and balance between the individual, the team and the organisation. So, to really take delivery of the benefit of coaching, we need the individual to surface what’s different and then share this with the team and the organisation. No numeric assessment will ever catch a micro moment…but micro moments are what create (or break) trust and cultures. And coaching catches those moments, one conversation at a time.

HPC Executive Coach, Tom Armstrong argues that despite the huge changes experienced during lockdown and home working, for most people, core obstacles, challenges and opportunities haven’t changed as much as we might think.

When Covid-19 struck in March 2020, I wondered “what new challenges will people in businesses and organisations face” – now that our working world had been turned upside down. Initial challenges ranged from teamwork and team meetings to Wi-Fi to tech anxiety. And on the positive side, people cited the joy of the lack of the daily commute and greater flexibility.

Home working issues

For sure, most people are sensing a loss of connection and belonging, and the physical sense of people. There is a general feeling of fatigue related to the general consequences of lockdown. However, on questions around ability to collaborate, set boundaries, remain productive and perform, there is a much wider range of opinions and no clear consensus – with almost equal numbers favouring home / remote working and office working – a clear nod to blended working.

When I ask clients ‘what would you like to talk about and explore?’, and I follow their story, the conversations move towards more familiar themes, albeit in different surroundings.

Coaching issues during home working

This surprised me initially. So, I looked back over my notes to see what were the most common themes that emerged over the last year. They look remarkably familiar, but on reflection I’m not surprised.

– Self-doubt / fear of looking foolish

– Being courageous

– Limiting beliefs and assumptions

– Empathy

– Adapting and being flexible

– Empowering the team

– Vulnerability and leading

– Managing relationships

– Authentic leadership

– Career Presence / gravitas

– Personal values / organisation values alignment

– Assertiveness

– Self-awareness and habit changing

What does this mean?

Home working, and especially if and when we move to a mix of blended working, is mainly an issue around how we work. And yes, there is significant fallout and consequences – many of which are not fully apparent yet. Home working will need to be handled carefully if it is to succeed for all stakeholders. However, people are flexible and if this pandemic proves anything it is the adaptability of humanity. In terms of productivity, the Irish economy grew by 3% in 2020 (GDP of course, is boosted by medical and pharmaceutical exports). While this is a crude measure, I believe it demonstrates how quickly human beings can adapt and respond, especially in the short term. Most of us ‘do what it takes’ – we survive. The fax, the telephone and the internet have all changed how we work in recent centuries. The constant factor is the human being at the centre.

The long game

The long game and the challenges people face have not changed as much as we may have first thought. Issues around courage, leadership, empathy and more, will continue to test us. We could be deflected from tackling these constant themes based on recent positive experiences around adaptability. Also, because of home working, some issues are less visible than if we were in the office. However, the key issues that people face remain and are part of being human. The choice is whether to tackle and overcome the barriers and challenges, and help people thrive – or not. Whether there is a lockdown – or not. Whether there is blended working – or not. To quote Stephen Covey, “we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and obstacles.” Taking actions that have long term reward requires long term focus, vision, patience, and courage.

What can we do?

Concerns around connection, belonging and collegiality have increased during home working and I believe these are red flags for the long term. The more familiar challenges, obstacles and opportunities that people face are still there too – it’s part of being human. The surest way to facilitate our people to help themselves is through supporting them in their development, like a sports coach working tirelessly with their team no matter how good they ‘think’ they are.

Well-functioning humans are at the heart of healthy businesses and organisations. Executive coaching helps people manage and find ‘their way’ through the multitude of challenges that working and living throws at them – to draw on their own reserves, to survive and thrive – both now and into the future, whatever it holds.

Tom is a member of HPC’s Executive Coaching Panel. In addition to his coaching qualifications, he has over 25 years’ experience working as a senior executive within various sectors.

Prior to joining HPC, Tom worked at a senior level in the Motor, Investment, Leisure, Equestrian and Property sectors. He was the Finance Director of Toyota Ireland for 10 years and CFO of Killeen Group Holdings for over 4 years. In addition to operating as part of the senior management team, he had overall responsibility for Finance, IT, HR, and Company Secretarial.

Tom’s executive coaching experience has enabled him to coach in a wide variety of environments including executives in small, medium and large private sector companies, as well as private individuals and leaders in public organisations.

In celebration and support of International Women’s Day 2021, we wanted to share the personal and professional views of our colleagues, clients and contacts on diversity and inclusion.

The initiatives of many organisations are to be applauded – clear diversity targets, focused recruitment practices, unconscious bias training, individual development programmes for women, including mentoring, sponsorship and coaching. Progress is in hand but alongside all of these initiatives, leaders have the most important role to play. They set the standard for the culture and behaviours that should be adopted across the organisation so that diversity, equality and inclusion becomes a fundamental way of working.

“A challenged world is an alert world,” say the organisers of the International Women’s Day, who are asking us to “raise our hands” in support of #IWD2021. “Individually, we’re all responsible for our own thoughts and actions – all day, every day. We can choose to challenge and call out gender bias and inequity. We can choose to seek out and celebrate women’s achievements. Collectively, we can all help create an inclusive world. From challenge comes change, so let’s all choose to challenge.”

Our contributors have shared their responses to a specific area as well as posing some questions that leaders need to consider as part of their diversity and inclusion effort.

Jenny McConnell

HPC Senior Facilitator and Executive Coach

& Lean In Newry Leadership Team Member

Q: In what everyday ways can we help to overcome the barriers that hold women back?

Be an ally at work. Raise your hand to endorse a woman’s contributions publicly, invite her to speak at a meeting, recommend her for a stretch assignment. As a leader at Lean In Newry, I work with a fantastic team that is dedicated to helping women achieve their ambitions. However, to create a more inclusive workplace, we must all raise our hands, especially in those micro-moments at work. From challenge comes change.

Jenny is pictured in the header image above.

Sean Fitzpatrick

Director Human Resources, John Sisk & Son Ltd

Q: In your opinion, what are the top priorities when it comes to challenging and advancing gender equality at an organisational level?

I think that the first thing we need to challenge is ourselves – are we aware of the impact of our words and actions, and more importantly, what are we doing about it? Gender equality isn’t something owned by the Board or by the Executive team – we all own it and we have a responsibility to ensure that we continue to work towards it. As well as being conscious of our words and actions and their impact on others, we need to be brave and call out inappropriate behaviours where we see them, regardless of the situation or the people involved.

We need to challenge our hiring and promotion

processes and how we allocate work and how we appoint people to various roles across the company. We need to work hard so that there are role models across our company so that women can see a role model and ‘someone like me’, and that they can get to the most senior roles in the company.

All of these challenges contribute to ensuring that our work environment is welcoming and inclusive to all. By driving initiatives and supporting actions that sustain a positive work environment, we will ensure that we retain and advance the women who work with us today (that’s a top priority), and that will attract more women to construction/John Sisk and Son, leading to greater representation across all levels in our company.

Deirdre Foley

HPC Senior Facilitator, Executive & Team Coach

Q: How can corporate culture help leaders influence real change in challenging gender bias and inequity?

Diversity and inclusion go hand in hand as organisational priorities for leaders. However, this responsibility does not just rest with a handful of senior leaders, it needs to be embraced by every member of the company as part of the corporate culture. To ensure complete alignment across every team, leaders must foster a culture that embraces gender diversity and values, rewards and supports individual differences.

Organisational culture forms the basis of behaviour at all levels and is therefore at the core of changing workplace attitudes to gender and diversity. A shared culture at all levels of the organisation brings a shared accountability to embrace positive practices and initiatives, which support diversity and inclusion. By championing positive change that supports these priorities, leaders can embed a culture that is owned by every individual and transcends the whole organisation.

Tara Doyle

Partner & Chairperson, Matheson

Q: What does gender equality mean for you and why is it important?

As a lawyer and a business owner for me gender equality means maximising available talent. The focus needs to be on equal pay, equal treatment and equal representation within the business. If you exclude one gender from a profession or workplace, or make it more difficult for one gender to succeed, you are limiting your talent pool by 50%. That does not make business sense. A diverse talent pool ensures a broader range of skills and perspectives, which produces better results for our clients.

Dr. Tanya Harrington

Chief Regulatory Affairs Officer, An Post

Q: What is the message that you want to send to young women thinking about their careers?

Three Ps- Passion, Purpose and People: My single biggest message for young women thinking about their careers is simply this: follow your passion. In addition, I think it is important to know your values and your worth and find work that respects both. Remember that while the company owns the role, you own your career and you own the responsibility of developing it and finding the opportunities to enable you to grow as a person and as a leader. Finally, at every step of the way, nurture each and every professional relationship. Irrespective of your role or position, it is these relationships that are the very lifeblood of your career.

Daire Coffey

Executive Coach and Chartered Director

Q: As an Executive Coach, what advice would you give to women wanting to accelerate their career growth?

We all know that operating in a diverse and inclusive culture facilitates increased engagement, creativity better decision making and business outcomes. It goes wider than gender but gender is a really good place to start!

Leaders are only as good as the people they surround themselves with. The challenge is to be proactive about building a diverse and supportive network or ‘personal boardroom’ of trusted colleagues, mentors, sponsors and coaches to challenge your thinking, open doors and fuel personal and professional growth. We all need a challenger, a nerve giver and a rock of sense around us when facing challenging situations, career moves and big decisions.

Never be afraid to ask for help. From experience, I know that knowing who to ask for help from and how to help others in equal measure is a recipe for success.

Dr. Sandra Healy

Founding Director of the DCU Centre of Excellence for Diversity and Inclusion, Founder & CEO of inclusio software

Q: As young women prepare to build their career, how important is internal dialogue and asking for help to overcome challenges?

The quality of your life is the quality of the conversation in your head. Push through the doubts, believe in yourself and be outstanding!

I would also encourage people to think about mentorship and sponsorship. If you are new to an organisation or the minority in the room, reach out and begin to build a network. Ask for help, do it early and build on this throughout your career by adding to your internal and external networks.

People love to be asked for help and finding a mentor or coach early on in your career will help build confidence, bring clarity to your internal dialogue and challenge your thinking.

Wider thoughts of the HPC Team

We asked our team of Facilitators, Executive and Team Coaches what important questions leaders should be asking themselves as they embrace and embed diversity throughout their organisation:

A study conducted at Harvard Business School found that a daily 15-minute habit can increase your productivity and effectiveness. The daily habit is as simple as they come – making time every day for reflection will help boost your leadership.

Reflection can help you make sense of your day, help you make decisions, set a course of action, break out of habitual ways of thinking and restore focus on new ideas and opportunities. According to university research, the best learning happens in moments of quiet reflection.

We asked our team about some of their positive learnings from 2020 and a resounding theme came through – time to reflect. Whether in the midst of a pandemic or not, reflection should be a constant habit.

In this article, our team share their collective thoughts on making the most of this precious time – professionally and personally.

Click on the image to download and read our team’s collective thoughts in full.

Once upon a time (or at least before the pandemic), the Away Day was at least an annual occurrence and sometimes more than that. A chance to connect with your colleagues who you didn’t see on a day-to-day basis, a chance to reflect on the successes of the previous quarter or year and an opportunity to plan.

Like everything else, Covid has changed all of that and we now find ourselves thinking wistfully of days in remote hotels listening to presentations and trying to eat finger food politely. Human connection aside, there was a real need for away days and they evolved to allow us the time and “white space” we need as a collective to celebrate our successes and prepare for the challenges ahead.

Can away days still happen in a virtual world?

At HPC, we still think so and over the past few months, we have helped a number of our clients structure days for their teams, functions and in one case, the entire organisation.

How do you do this? Here are three quick tips:

1. Reimagine your day

People are already on Zoom/Teams/Blue Jeans all day so asking them to join a session for 7 hours is not going to enthuse them. The old model was a break away from the norm so your new model of Away Day has to represent a similar break.

2. Consider what people value

People didn’t go to away days for the Custard Creams – they went to connect with their colleagues. Consider what people value most from their days and prioritise that in the design of your day.

3. Give people something to do

Staring passively at the screen for any longer than 5 minutes will energise nobody! Create opportunities for engagement and interaction throughout the design of your day.

Away Days remain important to teams and organisations but like everything else, they need to be reimagined if they are to stay relevant and valuable.

Kevin Hannigan is Head of Talent Consulting at HPC. He is a highly skilled consultant and facilitator with a wealth of experience in designing the systems and processes that support effective learning, measurement and talent development.

In our upcoming instalment to this series, HPC’s Head of Research Justin Kinnear explores what it takes to design Virtual Away Days.

You have spent the time building your Employer Brand, spent years assiduously cultivating your profile on social media and have carefully recruited the graduates who you believe will become the backbone of your talent pipeline in the future.

Yielding the benefits of all of this effort is however contingent on retaining your graduates. You could not have expected 2020. Neither you or your graduates could have contemplated that they would be onboarded and developed in a virtual world. The issue you now have to consider is how do you ensure that your graduates remain engaged in the absence of the infrastructure that makes graduate programmes such an attractive proposition and such a powerful development tool.

Our experience is that most organisations approach graduate development using a blend of formal learning, mentoring, on the job experience, projects and most importantly, feedback. In a virtual world, many of the organic opportunities that graduates had have been reduced. The opportunity to pop into a manager’s office, to ask a question, to shadow a colleague or to be part of a project is reduced. Tucked away behind a screen in a bedroom or at a kitchen table can make graduates less visible to the mentors, champions and leaders that provide many of the informal development opportunities.

When these organic opportunities are reduced, we must become even more intentional about developing graduates. Here are five simple strategies you can employ now to help retain your graduates and avoid a very expensive talent drain in a few years’ time

Create a culture where feedback is invited

Graduates do need and want feedback. Most graduates, however will not seek out feedback due to several factors – shyness, uncertainty and even lack of clarity on how to go about it are just some reasons.

To address this, invite graduates to identify specific areas where they would like feedback. This allows graduates to decide what, if any, feedback they need. An article published in the NeuroLeadership Journal in 2018 by Tessa West, NYU psychologist suggests that this approach increases the likelihood that people receiving feedback are more likely to stay rational, calm and open. As a bonus, because the graduate is asking for feedback, your managers will find the process far less painful too.

Create intentional feedback opportunities

Like so many things in a virtual world, a bit more planning and organisation is needed to make feedback work. Impromptu calls and check-ins are more difficult to have when working remotely. Agree specific times at regular intervals that are earmarked to check in with graduates. Protect this time and work hard not to cancel, postpone or change at the last minute. Graduates will appreciate this commitment.

Facilitate networking opportunities

Networks and friendships are formed on graduate development programmes that can last a lifetime. Consider creating formal and informal ways to facilitate and encourage your graduates to develop their network both with their peers and with people in the wider organisation. The stronger these bonds, the more likely they will be to remain with their network.

Reverse Mentoring

Many people are struggling to work effectively remotely. Why not ask your graduates, who are very often the most tech savvy group in the organisation to develop some innovative ideas to help their colleagues engage in virtual meetings and collaborate in a virtual setting.

Communicate personally

In the rush to ensure that everybody is aware of what’s happening, it can be tempting to copy graduates on emails and assume that they will know what it is all about. This may result in confusion or a sense of obligation to act on an email that was simply for information. Take the time to explain why you are sending the information to them.

Like almost everything else in a post-Covid world, Graduate Development has changed. For those of us using a blended learning approach such as “High Performance Learning Journeys” or the 70/20/10 model, switching workshops from face to face delivery to virtual is relatively straightforward. The experiential and feedback components of your approach does however need careful consideration.

Facilitating and encouraging intentional opportunities for new experiences, network building and feedback will be key to ensuring that the graduates that emerge in 2021 and 2022 are sufficiently engaged and capable of leading your organisation in the future. We can be sure that this class of graduates are just as capable as others. The opportunities for learning in these strange times is immense. This learning will yield tremendous benefits in the long term as your graduates face new and diverse challenges in their careers. Our opportunity is to flex our development model to cultivate that potential.

Fergal O’Connor is a Facilitator and Executive Coach at HPC. Much of Fergal’s work with HPC focuses on the development of a high-performance culture with a particular emphasis on accountability and feedback.

We are heading into the New Year with more COVID-19 measures in place in Ireland. What are some of the risk factors facing leaders in organisations in Ireland?

With each additional month that passes in this pandemic state, there is a knock-on effect on every one of us. Most organisations have taken great care of their employees since March. However, there are increasing signs that leaders are now beginning to feel significant strain. Here are five risk factors that I have picked up from working with leaders in recent engagements.

Energy and motivation loss
It’s not just employees that face a dip in their motivation and energy, especially as we seem to be travelling a rollercoaster of restriction severity in recent weeks. Leaders often put everyone else’s welfare first, but that only works if you remember to loop back around and take care of your own welfare too. Leaders will experience occasional slumps and it’s vital to acknowledge that these slumps are important signals from the body to rest and replenish energy. I recommend extending kindness and care to every member of your team, including yourself. Notice when you experience fatigue or low motivation and recognise that this is a signal to rest and recover. Burnout ensues when you keep pushing yourself and you ignore these signals from the body.

Over-stretching their contribution
We know from various sources that employees are already working longer hours at home than they did in the office before COVID-19. We also hear that an increasing workload since the late summer is blurring the boundary between work time and personal time for many leaders. Not only is this unsustainable but you are setting a poor example to your team members if you expect them to be able to switch off in the evening. Many leaders are now lamenting the lack of their former hour-long commute home, observing that it created a clear boundary between “at work” and “not at work”. The hour-long commute provided a chance to decompress so that when they got home, they were free of work thoughts until the next day. With the lack of a clear boundary between work and home when we’re constantly in the home, this missing time to decompress and switch off is causing some to keep working and keep thinking about work well into the night. The best advice seems to be to encourage leaders to have one place in the home where work happens, but ideally not the kitchen table or sofa. When the work part of the day ends it’s best to leave that place and close the door, sending a signal to the body and brain that work is done for the day. Working at the kitchen table or sofa trains the mind that every place is a workplace, and every time is potentially time for work.

Dark nights and reduced exercise
Sitting in front of the computer between March and September, most leaders recognised how important it was to maintain some form of physical activity away from the computer. Some people took up walking or exercising early in the day, others exercised over the lunch hour, while others again took advantage of the evening light to exercise as they wished. As the nights have darkened and evening temperatures have dropped, it has made exercising outside less appealing and less safe. Working all day with no form of exercise, no matter how short or simple, is not good for the body or mind. We derive huge benefits from exercise for the body and brain, so suddenly denying the body and brain these benefits doesn’t make much sense. You may not be able to exercise like you did earlier in the year but there is surely some form of activity you could do. Look out for opportunities to get away from the computer and outdoors whenever you can, even for 15 minutes. Fresh clean air and some exercise for yearning muscles will do wonders for your focus and productivity and your general wellbeing. Of course, you need to pay attention to the COVID-19 rules as they apply to exercise and distance, but don’t let that be the excuse that causes you to stop all forms of exercise.

Network drift
Leaders made significant efforts to keep in touch with their teams since March. Many team members have reported dramatic improvements in their relationship with their direct manager, and engagement has held up remarkably well and even improved in some cases. We hear how this narrowed focus by leaders on their own teams has caused their connections with other leaders to weaken. Witness how leaders behave excitedly on Zoom calls when they finally reconnect with managerial colleagues that they have not had contact with for months. The focus on their own team is of critical importance to leaders, but leaders need to maintain their networks too. Don’t wait for the CEO or some other executive to set up a leader’s meetup. Go ahead and reach out to people with whom you have not had contact for some time. Nourish your networks before they wither away.

Head down leadership
The final risk factor I see is what I call ‘head down leadership’. The lurching from full lockdown to Level 2 to Level 3 to Level 5 has thrown many of us into a survival mode. We struggle to see very far ahead and focus instead on just maintaining performance and momentum. We don’t know what’s going to happen and don’t see any point in speculating about it. That makes good sense for a time but remember that followers look to leaders for hope. Followers expect leaders need to paint a picture of a better day, and to set out a plan to get there. When did you last look up, and talk about what six months from now might look like, with your team?

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you engage in some crystal-ball gazing. However, I am suggesting a conversation about the future, to even acknowledge that it won’t be like this forever, and that there is a point to us continuing our work as a team because it’s part of the journey to that better day. Ignoring the future and spending all your time in the head down “let’s not talk about it” mode is a potential source of worry for your team who surely wonder what you think about all this. Leaders are dealers in hope, so I’m asking when did you last have a conversation that gave a sense of hope to your team? I wrote previously about “bounded optimism” and how important it is to be grounded and realistic with your team. This is still true, but it doesn’t take away from the need to acknowledge that there will be a future. A discussion about it might reveal whether this future is something you and your team will play a part in shaping, or if instead the future is something that will just happen to you and your team.

Leaders are not immune from the very things we try to help our employees avoid. Don’t ignore your own needs. Watch out for these risk factors that are very much alive in the business world right now.

Justin Kinnear is Head of Research at HPC. Justin is a highly experienced facilitator and coach who advises HPC’s clients on their most pressing development issues. As well as his extensive research and facilitation experience, he was formerly Head of L&D at IBM and Britvic.

Recent research from the University of Bath shows that trust in leaders remained high during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. As we enter the next phase of living and working alongside Covid-19, how do we maintain those same levels of trust?

Research suggests that trust is likely to play an even bigger role in how effective your leaders and their teams are in the coming months. For virtual teams, high trust is positively correlated with team performance. When you think about it, it’s not surprising. If managed poorly, virtual teams can suffer from a reduction in performance due to communication issues, lack of clarity and lack of context.

In our current context, some of these issues may become even more manifest as leaders and teams deal with temporary school closures, restrictions on work and ongoing health concerns.

The good news is that research points to ways in which we can enhance our relationships with our teams and build even greater levels of trust. By adopting these five simple practices, we can minimise the concerns associated with virtual teams and maintain trust across the organisation.

Focus on the results that your team should achieve.

The ways of achieving results are being altered by the dizzying pace of events. It is a good time to abandon micro-management which, by the way, helps neither confidence nor outcomes. Re-establish short-range objectives and test how they are met. Create clear team metrics that everybody understands and accepts. Resist the temptation to ‘reward’ good work and high productivity with extra work and heightened expectations.

Clearly communicate context.

While goals are vital, context is everything in a virtual world. As your team consider how best to achieve their goals, they are making small decisions at each step of the process. Providing clear context supports their ability to make decisions and displays trust in them.

Follow-up more often than you think you should.

Report to your team daily. You have (or should have) better access to more information than they do, while they are more isolated from the day-to-day goings-on that they have been used to. Keep them up to date on the decisions that are being made. Done properly, it’s hard to over-communicate.

Don’t assume anything.

While the office is much maligned, one of it’s advantages is the casual access you have to colleagues (people stopping you as you pass, bumping into someone at the coffee machine). This access is typically how your team get to check understanding, confide concerns or misgivings, share thoughts and ideas etc. Just as your team may have been reluctant to set up a formal meeting to discuss something in the office, expect that your team are unlikely to set up a formal online meeting or call to have an informal chat. Consider a weekly check-in call, initiated by you, with no agenda other than ‘how is everything going?’.

Be kind.

This is still new to your team and there are as many reactions as there are team members. But people’s need for psychological safety remains constant. That’s why your number one priority must be to reassure your team that you’re there for whatever they need, that you trust them, and that you know that they’re doing their best.

This is all new to you too. You’re expected to support your team in new ways of working while at the same time trying to come to terms with the impact that this is having on you professionally and personally. Don’t be afraid to show your vulnerability; let your team know that you too are doing your best.

Bob Lee is a member of the Leadership and Management Development Team at HPC.

He is a highly skilled facilitator and he brings with him a wealth of experience and knowledge in organisational culture, specialising in the complex topic of trust.

Bob has been recognised as part of ‘Trust Across America Top Thought Leaders in Trust’, as well as being a sought-after international conference speaker, and best-selling author of Trust Rules: How the World’s Best Managers Create Great Places to Work.

This juncture in the COVID-19 pandemic marks a milestone moment. If the past six months were about coping with the onslaught of a global pandemic, for most of us, the next six are about re-establishing our teams and our organisations. But this moment is transitory. It is a wafer-thin slice of time that exists between a crisis and a crossroads.

Unfortunately, many leaders have already missed this milestone moment. Eager to make up for lost ground, they have moved at speed past the crossroads and launched headlong into the next phase of work. In haste, these leaders may have neglected to bring their people with them.

As their leaders have moved on, many teams are left feeling anxious and unsure about the future. They want to leverage the gains of lockdown and approach work in a different way now but there is little or no opportunity to do so. They want to understand their priorities for the next six months and be clear about how they will work with their stakeholders.

In a team context, such unspoken gaps come at a cost. It impedes progress – the very progress that a high-speed leader so desperately seeks.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Develop Dynamic Stability

The New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, observes that people who want to adapt in an age of acceleration must develop what he calls “dynamic stability”.

Rather than trying to resist an inevitable storm of change, Friedman encourages leaders to “build an eye that moves with the storm, draws energy from it, but creates a platform of dynamic stability within it.”

In turbulent times, this “dynamic stability” is a team’s most potent weapon.

In an earthquake, it is not the quake that causes the damage. Rather, it is the collapse of buildings.

Likewise, in your team it is not just the COVID-19 pandemic that creates the cracks. In order to thrive in this next phase, your team must move flexibly as an interconnected whole.

The bad news? Many teams and leaders are at risk because they will simply not pause to develop this “dynamic stability”.

And the good news? You and your teams can make a better choice.

Make Haste Slowly

To create this dynamic stability, it is critical to pause and to place your people at the heart of the process.

As an adaptable leader, how are you going to create a stable, dynamic platform?

One way to achieve this is to take some time to explore these powerful questions with your teams:

What are your needs, goals, expectations, roles and responsibilities now?
How can you harness your strengths to meet stakeholders’ changing demands?
What have you lost that needs to stay lost?
What have you found that needs to stay found?
What works now that may not work in the longer term?
What do you need from each other and from me to be at your best?

Harness Your Ultimate Competitive Advantage

As Patrick Lencioni asserts, “Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.”

For many team members, this crisis has drawn them together, mobilised with surprising vigour and resulted in them supporting each other.

Fail to pause and solidify these gains, and you may destroy the gains your team has made in the past six months. Act in haste, regret at leisure.

Don’t Wait. Create

Andy Gove, former CEO of Intel, reminds us, “Bad companies are destroyed by a crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”

Take the time now to pause and reinvigorate your team for the coming months.

To help teams emerge from this crisis stronger than ever, we at HPC have launched ‘R3BOOT Team Accelerator’. It supports teams like yours to reflect, refocus and refresh for the next phase of work.

To learn more about this high-impact, evidence-based programme, click here.