Hybrid working - Maximising success through the 4-D system

Once the Covid pandemic restrictions eased and the novelty of home/remote working wore off, managers and leaders have continued to be presented with some new challenges. How to manage the work-flow and work environment when people are working both remotely and in the office?  It is so much easier to gauge how people are feeling, how well they are interacting with colleagues and clients when they are all in the same workplace, especially if its open plan. Knowing how the members of a team are feeling is critical information for a leader/manager to help them encourage their team members to deliver what is required in a timely way and ‘enabling’ them to do the best they can.  And while, for many, remote working has offered greater freedom, it also brings with it a unique kind of anxiety borne of isolation. We can over think our problems and lose any sense of perspective.

So, if we already have the skills for effective leadership, what is the best way of scaling these up and adapting them to the peculiar hybrid world we are learning to inhabit?   How can we successfully lead more people over a longer period of time, especially when only some of them will be in full view. What do those people want from each other at work and their leaders?

Most people want to be valued and want to make a meaningful contribution. When people feel valued, they contribute more and are likely to give more freely of their discretionary time and energy.  In high trust environments people feel they have 106% more energy and are 50% more productive (The Neuroscience of trust. Paul J Zak. Harvard Business Review. January 01, 2017).

Additionally, when people are relaxed and confident in their role, they have more capacity to deal with challenging situations. If they are fearful, they tend to become preoccupied with keeping their heads down and avoiding responsibility. 

So we need to ask ourselves, are we appreciating our staff as much as we can?   And we need to be sure that our appreciation is perceived as genuine.  Authenticity is critical.

Another way of appreciating and valuing people is to involve them - ask for their views, opinions and ideas. You may not be able to adopt all of what they say but just the fact that you take them seriously adds value to their position. Jim Collins, in his work to uncover the keys to effective leadership found that in addition to the usual skills needed for effective leadership two other qualities are observed in highly effective leaders; a strong resolve to achieve results coupled with humility. So one question that arises is, how often do you ask your direct reports for assistance or their advice?

What stops us valuing people more? Perhaps it is something to do with risk, or fear of failure or a culture of blame. Often, along with an eagerness to blame, lies a tendency to complain.  (‘If only the IT worked better’, or ‘If it wasn’t for the CFO’, etc).  A culture of blaming and complaining is toxic.  It leads to becoming risk-averse and to endemic distrust. It wastes time and energy.  It also ensures that critical information is unlikely to be shared and that others’ failures are savoured.  Organisations that have successfully transformed from a culture of blame to one of learning and trust are demonstrably more innovative, cheaper to run and tend to retain talent longer.

Dr Charlie Pellerin, in his book ‘How NASA builds teams’, explored why the Hubble telescope failed to work when first launched into space.  Luckily, in most organisations we don’t have such expensive errors of communication to sort out. One of the key points he makes is that if the culture is mainly negative (‘It’s all too hard’; ‘It won’t work’; ‘It’s too difficult’; ‘I don’t trust them’) then improvement cannot occur until these perceptions are addressed.

Dr, Pellerin devised eight simple questions to make teams more effective, including exploring authentic appreciation, avoiding blaming and complaining and being outcome focused. At NASA it achieved 600 times return on investment if used a couple of times a year and gave a 5% improvement in performance. Dr Pellerin’s 4-D system is a quick and easy tool to measure how a team interacts and identifies areas for improvement. It highlights behaviours that all team members can do whether in the office or working from home and gives leaders and managers clear pointers on what they should focus on to get the best from their teams.

By Alasdair Miller and Tim Kemp