How to work from home, when you're already working from home.
You should read this if you are a newly home-based leader managing other newly home-based leaders. It will remind you why you need to urgently create leadership thinking time and suggest a couple of ways you might do that.
If your people's performance against their objectives is interdependent on other managers' people then you are already working with uncertainty and you will either have worked out how you need to operate to cope with it or you'll have absorbed your organisation's prevailing operating culture when you joined. Home-basing your people adds to that uncertainty.
For many leaders, working from home [WFH] is one of the ways they cope with operational uncertainty - it equates to precious and very necessary thinking time [Where are we? Where do we need to be? What do I need to do differently to get us there?]. Only two weeks ago, one CEO I work with told me their Friday at home is the only way she gets through the week. Another recently told me he can't understand why more of his managers don't work from home more often and couldn't understand where his people are getting their thinking time from if they're not regularly WFH. Both were speaking BC [before Covid].
Post Covid, the requirement for as many people as possible to get home-based means lots of people, and their managers and their manager's managers, have in effect undergone office relocations. Home isn't a temporary thinking retreat its our operational war room and our dining room table the base of our operations.
In this new operating environment it's easy for lost focus and momentum to result from our efforts to keep focus and maintain momentum. In the last 36 hours I've coached 3 executives in 3 very different organisations and all are saying the same thing...
It's getting more difficult
I'm on VC calls from 8 until 6
Everyone's in more meetings
If I even get five minutes... if my laptop's not pinging then my phone's ringing and that's before I've dealt with the dog barking at the postman or sorted the PC out for the children
The military have two great terms which I'm going to borrow to make an important point: Fog of war, and battle confusion.
In your new operating environment, if you fail to create sufficient thinking time to work out if where you are is where you expected to be, and if not to properly think about what you need to do differently to get you to where you need to be, then you're flying blind and you should expect to be directing action which shouldn't be taken and / or not directing action which should be taken. You risk basing decisions on confusion of direction, location and perspective.
In 2001, Wharton published a fantastic book called How Bad Decisions Can Lead to Billion-Dollar Mistakes. For example, when managers decided to launch the Challenger space shuttle, “the concerns about the O-rings that ultimately led to the explosion were buried in a vast sea of thousands of other decisions … leading up to the ill-fated launch.”
In 2018 Gartner estimated poor operational decision making compromises upward of 3% of every organisations profits.
Using cause and effect logic diagrams, a client told me this morning he estimates poor operational thinking has lost them 50% revenue this year alone.
I teach people how to think. I help them figure out what they need to change, what to, and how, so that they can improve their performance, their teams performance or their organisations performance - I know thinking time alone is not going to miraculously make you a fabulous thinker, but it is a necessary condition. So how can you WFH when you can't WFH?
The critical thing is finding uninterrupted time inside your own head. Time to reflect. Time to elevate 30,000 feet to assess your battlefield. Am I stating the obvious to suggest you diarise some time, or turn off your phone? Probably, but how many of you are doing even that? And how many of you are instructing your people to do it? We need new rules people, and I think this should be one of them.
If I can help you or your people with any of this, get in touch, I'd love to chat with you. candyperry@concinnityltd.com