HBR: What Great Managers Do Differently

This article from #harvardbusinessreview about #remotework and #remoteleadership really struck me. https://hbr.org/2022/10/what-great-remote-managers-do-differently

A few items that stood out for me:

employees were weary of forced fun — like Thursday night bingo — while appreciating beginning formal meetings by acknowledging someone’s personal accomplishment or a birthday.

This seems part of a theme I’m seeing more frequently but to which I’ve not seen a label applied: Since the pandemic, and before that in the Silicon Valley set, there has been an effort, deliberate or not, to make work the center of the employee world and provide everything they need socially. Pre-pandemic this meant game rooms in the office. Since the pandemic this has meant Zoom-based game nights and other attempts to provide social outlets and connectedness.

I don’t think this has been done with malintent. As leaders, we knew people were cut off from outlets and so we did our best to help fill a known gap. And while the world was on lockdown it was right of us to do so. But times have changed again.

As a self-avowed uber-introvert, it’s very weird for me to say, but people need broad social networks. Those need to include work friends, but also people in their physical community as well. For the health of our teams, we need to now encouraging them to not be at work; to, as dbt Labs says, “work hard and go home.”

One way to help encourage that broader interaction may be to, as the article says, take a few minutes to celebrate accomplishments outside of work.

More sinister is the manager who shows fake flexibility. One study participant told me: “My boss called and asked me why I am not taking my summer afternoon off as per the company’s new flexibility policy. I then frankly asked him, ‘Okay, I will take off, but will you cut me some slack on the deadline I am supposed to meet?’ He awkwardly suggested that I could still enjoy my Friday afternoon as long as I had met my deliverable by the following Monday morning.” I call this fake flexibility.

I’ve seen this latter point play out a few times, particularly in customer-facing roles. It’s hard to set expectations with customers that their projects schedules will be extended because the team is taking partial days. Whether it’s a reduced summer schedule or a defined “no meetings” day, expecting that the directly customer-facing team is figuring out how to make it work without impacting the client just doesn’t work.