3D Leadership in a 2D World

Innovation

Nov 10

7 minute read

When the world moves online and everything becomes 2D, how do you nurture a 3D mindset? Here are our 9 top tips.

With the world reeling from a global pandemic, the trend for home-working is unlikely to change any time soon. Leaders everywhere need to be considering their long-term strategy to keep their teams at their best.

Having a clear purpose helps teams stay focused and motivated. At FiveAndCo. we understand that leaders need a “people plan” to help them grasp where their team are, how they are doing and what they need from each other. Thriving leaders need to make sure teams are able to regularly see, talk about and align to their purpose.

The challenge for the 2D world of online meetings is that what we rely on to enrich and add meaning to our work and relationships is dulled or completely missing. How can team culture thrive when you’re not face to face?

Culture is reinforced, not just by what we say, but also by what we do. The behaviours we engage in and the impact they have on others (for better and for worse) become the topic of conversation. In our view, communication is part of culture, but it’s the behaviours that give us the talking points for positive, purpose driven communication and which provides a context for effective working relationships.

So, what does that mean for the 2D world of online meetings and digital encounters? We believe leaders of ‘online teams’ need to adopt a three-dimensional mindset. The three dimensions to consider are:

Relationship | Effectiveness | Culture and Values

Here are our top tips for getting these three dimensions into your leadership:

Relationship

Digital platforms have revolutionised relationships; from connecting as a family to finding new love. In the business environment, teams are often confused about ‘where’ they can be relaxed, and ‘where’ it’s a business-only space. It’s important to have both.

You can address this confusion by making a short list of the available platforms and what they are for. If your distributed team uses a particular set of tools for communicating and collaborating, make sure your onboarding process for new team members makes that clear too.

Allow 5 minutes at the start of each meeting for people “to arrive”. The space is there for people to connect, to chat and to share stories about their day. Try seeing it as a virtual corridor where people bump into each other on the way to their meeting. It may need some encouragement from you to start with, so come prepared to encourage people to join in.

Take time to send analogue messages to your team to let them know you appreciate them and their contribution – don’t use email! Be creative and remember how long somethings take to arrive by post so consider the content of your message carefully.

Effectiveness

Effectiveness is about the measures that matter and why they matter. Articulating those in the 2D world takes more than simply screen-sharing charts. Here are some useful talking points to help team effectiveness come to life:

Remember not everyone connects data with performance. Up to 43% of your team may be more interested in the people behind the numbers (and yes, we see the irony in that sentence).

Changing the tone of voice when presenting results can help engagement; before a team meeting try asking different team members to speak on different data points. Ask them to bring their personal opinions on what is working well and what isn’t – not just whether a number is high or low.

Explore how you can use asynchronous and synchronous[1] content to remind people what the measures are and why they matter. Don’t assume that everyone has read the strategy or background. See if you can create white boards or short videos that clarify purpose and explain progress so that people can review them in between meetings.

Ask your team to use simple gestures like ‘thumbs up/down’ or even draw a smiley face on a piece of paper to get feedback on an issue. Then take screen shots of the feedback to provide simple data on how various discussions ended.

Culture and Values

Culture can be defined in lots of different ways, but we like to think of it as “the way we do things around here”. Culture is often made up of the seen and unseen – the behaviours above the surface show the impact of values and beliefs below the surface.

Whilst that’s fine to unpack when you are occupying the same physical space, what happens when you don’t see or physically interact with each other? How can you understand what’s happening below the surface? Here’s our top tips for building the right culture and values in your team:

Be upfront about difficulties in communicating. Working from home (or living at work as it can sometimes feel) is not as perfect as some would suggest; there are many challenges for teams and their leaders to overcome together.

The first step is to remind everyone of that reality and make sure you are constantly giving real-time permission for people to reach out to you or each other when things are not working for them. When you check in with team members, remember it might take longer for issues to surface. Just because you can do 1:1s quicker, doesn’t mean you should.

Trust is hard fought for and easily lost. The great thing about digital platforms is that you can communicate how you feel quickly. The downside is that you can communicate how you feel quickly! Take time to consider what you post, when and to whom. This was always true for leaders, but context in a message can be lost very quickly in a 2D space; even a simple misstep can be amplified very quickly. As a simple rule, remember this - if you get it wrong in public, apologise in public.

Take time out with your team to ‘re-imagine’ your values for a digital space. Engage with your team and ask them to tell stories about times it went well and times it did not. From those stories, what would each value look like in a different setting, for e.g. in a video call or group chat? Are there any words or phrases you like to use that really reflect your values or any you should avoid? This is a great conversation to have with your team from time to time to keep your values front and centre. Remember to capture the results of this engagement and think about how you can re-present them in a creative way to your team.

Taking a little time to invest in your team values and well being now will win you a more satisfied, more productive team in the long run. As it’s clear this isn’t just going to be “a week or two working from home” anymore, it’s worth the investment.

[1] Asynchronous: delayed time communication e.g. email, threaded discussions, wikis, recorded vlogs.

Synchronous: real time communication e.g. instant messaging, live webinars, phone calls, etc