Have You Led Differently This Year?

Leading one person, five people, one hundred people, comes with daily challenges. Add a global pandemic to the mix, and suddenly you find your natural leadership style is not as effective as it once was.

This article was published on the BBC News website last week. It focuses on gender and leadership styles.

Have female CEOs coped better with Covid than men?

An interesting article, perhaps a bit light touch, but it does raise an interesting question – How has your leadership style changed since the pandemic?

You will have done a lot of work focusing on your leadership style. As you know, your style is defined by your consistent patterns of interaction; you will be comfortable with both your strengths and weaknesses, how you self-sabotage and how your style can impact others.

However, you may have abandoned your characteristic style this year. We have all been faced with a crisis never to have been experienced before, and this will have led to a variation in your leadership style.

Why?

The forced closure of workplaces around the world, has changed the way people work and in turn, the way people lead.

People look to CEOs for empathy and understanding. Yet, at the same time, their actions need to be based on fact. CEOs are expected to take a long term view over business decisions but have also needed to provide short-term fixes. In 2020 where the future has been so uncertain, and lives and laws have changed rapidly, many leaders have found themselves faced with no answer whilst simultaneously trying to lead a team that's looking for direction.

Add to that the very fact you are doing this sitting in a much more vulnerable place – home. Working from a personal space has forced people to reflect on how they communicate and empathise with others.

Often, I hear clients, senior business leaders, say that they have strong empathy. What this period has helped them really see, and feel, is what strong empathy requires – the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes. And when you are sitting across a zoom window from a colleague with an ironing board behind them because they have been relegated to the utility/junk room in their house, you have a very different perspective and understanding of what their space is now like. It's what Sarah Beale describes in the article as "taking a step back, and placing yourself in the position of those that you're trying to work on behalf of."

Have women fared better than men through this?

It is not that clear-cut. It depends on many factors: industry, level of seniority, levels of responsibility in term of caring for others, self-awareness, ability to manage change.

I think it also depends on whether you believe women have a different leadership style to men. This has been heavily researched (and debated) for years. Bernard Bass, a well-known leadership scholar, stated 'the preponderance of available evidence is that no consistently clear pattern of differences can be discerned in the supervisory style of female as compared to male leaders'. This was 1981 and was a typical view of the time.

Some argue that these findings were due to identity bifurcation – when women in positions of authority abandon more stereotypically feminine qualities – and therefore, men and women lead in a similar fashion. Thatcher springs to mind.

And then, as the BBC article implies, women who lead in their own way – the Jacinda Ardens and Ruth Bader Ginsburgs of the world – are perceived to be more successful (and caring) than their male counterparts.

I don't want to spark huge debate on the influence of gender on leadership. We can leave that for another time.

What I do know is that half of my clients are female, which means the other half are men and most fall into the category of CEO/Founder. And they have been working on the same things in order to remain a successful leader despite the challenges of 2020.

Communication

All of my clients have upped their game when it comes to communication. This doesn't necessarily mean more communication, but it does mean clearer communication. Listening to what is and isn't being said by their senior teams, not assuming that everyone is having the same working from home experience. Clearer communication around expectations.

Maybe this comes more naturally to women? I deliberately pose that as a question. In the BBC article, Yvonne Wassenaar, chief executive of US technology firm Puppet says "What I've found is that if you're willing to be vulnerable, then people are willing to be vulnerable to you, and that's when you get true dialogue and true progress." But, this is true to both genders and is more reflective of a leadership style than a specific gender trait.

Boundaries

Most of my clients still have some way to go when it comes to boundaries. There is a strong sense amongst many that days merge into each other. Working from home has blurred those lines, and people are working longer hours. We need to teach ourselves how to transition between our roles and responsibilities.

One client decided to reintroduce a 'pretend' commute because that is the only way he can decompress and put a line in the sand at the end of work each day. Another uses the Deepak Chopra meditation for the end of the day, where you close your eyes and take 5 minutes to go back through your day like watching a movie – so that you can recognise the day is over. Taking the time to switch from work mode to home mode is highly beneficial. Is this something you need to focus on?

Control

The other much harder behaviour trait for many has been around control. The original BBC article doesn't mention this.

Control is often thought of as a very male trait. Leaders that are thriving at the moment have learnt to loosen their grip, realising how many things they can't control. If anything, I hope that our shared experience has helped people reflect on how much we cannot control. Yet, the gift we do have is our ability to manage our behaviours, approach, and how we show up. The ability to be flexible has undoubtedly aided many leaders this year.

I think it is worthwhile to point out that I have noticed increasingly people walk during our coaching conversations. They want to be in a different space from 'work' and away from 'the screen'. It reminds me of how intentional we need to be about the spaces that we create. What meetings could you take in a different room, outside, standing up? Do you encourage your teams to do the same? Sometimes you need to encourage by doing this yourself. Like taking a holiday! Our brains and eyes crave different spaces.

Self-Reflection

It never hurts to stop and reflect on your behaviour. Take a moment this week to consider your leadership style. Try the simple exercise of imagining looking down at yourself from 30,000 feet. Perhaps you're in a helicopter. What do you notice about your leadership style at the moment? What needs tweaking? What could you do differently? Don't judge yourself from up in that helicopter, be curious, what do you need to focus on?

Most importantly, when the world is re-set, and we head back to workplaces and people, which of those changes will you keep?

I'm Sally, and I'm a leadership coach. If you want to re-focus and reflect on your leadership style, get in touch via Linkedin.

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