At a distance

Published on March 5, 2021

Series - Engaging leadership for a new post-covid world

One: "At a distance"

“Virtual Leadership is not just about running an efficient Zoom meeting, it’s about ENERGISING effective teams”
Ray Atkinson – Henley MBA alumnus & Henley Alumni & Development Board member

Like thousands of other leaders, I am currently grounded in every sense of the word, but still need to engage my team during yet another Lockdown. Couple this with the longer-term pressure to reduce costs and the impact of travel on our environment, and this becomes a particularly appropriate time to consider whether our experience from this current crisis might lead us to change the story forever!

For us, changing the story is about understanding three barriers common to all virtual team situations: geography, isolation and history. Geography: people seeing themselves as separate; Isolation: keeps them from knowing one another and History: their long-term experience of working in independent, not unified teams. Although these are all obvious, the solutions to the five challenges they generate are less clear. How does a virtual leader

  • Create unity behind the whole team, rather than the local goals?
  • Move the decision-making focus to the whole team priorities?
  • Increase the tangibility of the whole team objectives?
  • Move disparate teams from competition to collaboration?
  • Establish trust?

Having already researched effective Virtual Leadership, at Wadenhoe Centre for Contemporary Leadership we can provide some immediate help in addressing six key challenges:

  1. How to give local leaders and local teams control over themselves.
  2. How to build trust in the leader, the project or the organisation and other team partners.
  3. How to develop strong symbols around the values and benefits of partnership.
  4. How to design practical processes for learning and sharing.
  5. How to nurture intellectual/emotional links for prioritising work and effort.
  6. How to communicate using visual, physical and verbal anchors.

This is the first in a new weekly series of articles exploring the idea of "Engaging leadership for a new post-covid world". 

If you would like to see more of the detail behind this work or get involved in more leadership of change discussion around this topic, please email [email protected].  Mob: 07899796993
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