Imagine you are driving a car with a passenger beside you. In the back are a bunch of people laughing, mucking about and munching on snacks. In the front, your face is grim. You can see the road ahead and it doesn't look good. Black clouds are coming over and you have an uneasy feeling that you are lost. You catch a sideways look from your passenger and realise they see it all too. The noise from the back and the seemingly carefree behaviour is beginning to grate on you. Can't they see the challenges ahead? Why don't they help? Why is it always you who has to sort everything?

We use this analogy to describe what happens when senior managers don't communicate with the rest of the team. Challenges and problems are not shared with those in the back seat who are kept in the dark about the road ahead.

This often results in a feeling of "them and us", which is probably one of the top unproductive behaviours in organisations. When push comes to shove, it weakens an organisation. Have you ever tried to restructure a region, close a service, implement a new CRM system or introduce a new procedure? How did it go? If it went smoothly, you probably don't have a" them and us" issue. A change led well is a beautiful thing full of communication, honesty, transparency and a feeling of being in it together. If those changes went badly, is it because no one knew why, it came out of the blue and no one knew things needed sorting out? Was there a privacy screen between you in the front and them in the back?

We work with teams at all levels of organisations and watch out for the "them and us" syndrome. Here are some ways we can spot it:

• Team members talk about 'them' and 'they'. When pushed, they cannot name them and they, but they know they are up there in the organisation somewhere.
• Regional teams talk about 'them in head office' as if they are a separate organisation. This disassociation can go further. We worked with a client, let's call them ABC, who ran schools as part of their service provision. The headteachers talked about the organisation as if they were separate entities. When we suggested they were ABC, we saw confused faces.
• Senior managers use a telling phrase, "why don't they?". They wish that their staff would mysteriously rise up and read their minds.
• Staff accuse senior managers of not understanding the jobs on the front line and they have never done a hard day’s work in their life and get paid too much.
• Blame is scattered around – how could they do this to us?

How do you turn this around? By inviting the people in the back seat to lean over the front seat and see the road ahead, the black clouds, the map and how lost you are. Once they know they can help, you are still accountable, but harnessing everyone's skills will make sure you get to your destination successfully. You create understanding and that brings creativity and teamwork.

What does this look like?

• Communicate, communicate, communicate the why, what and how of your change.
• Get out more – go and walk the job but not just a royal visit. Ask questions, be curious about roles, challenges and the delights of the jobs people do. Sometimes we think we should know, so don't ask which is a missed opportunity for understanding.
• Enable your teams to do what you wish for. Give them accountability for getting tasks done, be clear about what you expect, push decisions down as far as you can. You can then free yourself up and dial down your stress levels.
• Share your career path, let your staff know what you have been there and done. Not to boast or justify yourself, just a natural conversation about your background. You were not born fully cooked and talking about your past can be so revealing for others.
• Explain your decisions carefully without leaving things out you presume others will not understand. Try not to worry that your people will struggle with a decision – through struggle comes learning.

Gripping the steering wheel of your car and not sharing the burden is a lonely place to be. You have a wealth of talent in that back seat who can help shape and transform anything in your organisation. So, look after yourself, pull over before you feel tired and lean over the back seat, grab one of those snacks and join in the fun of teamwork.

During a recent coaching session, a CEO admitted that when he headed up an Engineering firm he was a great engineer, but as a leader he was a pain in the neck.  Too much nit picking and not enough enabling.  He just couldn’t resist getting stuck into the work of others and what was intended to be helpful was received as interfering.  When he then went onto a role leading an organisation in a totally different field – a field he knew nothing about – he had no choice but to lead.  He couldn’t do the work of the people below him, so his role was clearly defined:  to put energy in to leading and managing the organisation and its people to achieve better things.

This year has taken the skill of backing off to a whole new level.  Without having people under our noses, we couldn’t engage in close contact managing (for that, read meddling in some cases) so we had to learn to trust and enable.  Now that we are entering our next phase of working, which for many is shaping up as a mix of office and remote working, it is time to take yourself by the scruff of the neck to avoid unlearning the good habits the pandemic forced us to embrace. Let it go, let it go…

It helps to remember what got you to this point.  Did you rise up the ranks due to your technical abilities?  You were so good at the work it earned you a promotion. Or perhaps you entered through a different route. You were good at leading teams and managing projects and able to apply those skills in a range of settings.  Neither route is better; it just is what it is.  You can’t help what you don’t know, and you can’t unlearn what you do know, but you can make the best of either situation and avoid the inevitable management traps.

So, for leaders and managers who are experts in the work of the people in the team:

1. You will always have credibility. You’ve been there and done it and you have wisdom to offer, so mentor others to grow and develop in their knowledge and skill.
2. You might find delegation and letting go a bit of a challenge. Will they do it as well as you?  As it happens, they may do it better, which is great, but even if they don’t, they may just do it differently, or cheaper, or quicker than you and all of those have value.
3. Be careful that all roads don’t lead to you. Technical experts often become fixers of others’ problems rather than coaches who help people work it out for themselves.  One day you may leave and whilst you want a decent send off, people to be a bit sad etc., you don’t want the place to fall apart.  So, encourage people to sort their own problems, with your support.
4. Your knowledge is not in question here, so take time to develop your leadership skills. Leadership is a skill to be mastered, like any other and the great thing about it is that you can apply it in a variety of settings.
5. Watch out for meddling tendencies dressed up as “being helpful”. If you do it because you are missing something you love (management roles can be very lonely for technical leaders), find something else you love, or be a contributor on another project rather than overpowering others who have a job to do too.

And for leaders who didn’t take the technical route:

1. Listen hard and learn fast. You don’t need to be able to do the jobs of everyone in the place, but you do need to have intelligent conversations with them about their work and what you can do to smooth their path to success.
2. Consider a stint on whatever happens to be your version of the shop floor, more than one if you can. It’s a first-hand experience you can discuss with people, will give you a better insight than just observing and may well up your credibility with others. At the very least it will give them something to laugh at.
3. Attend forums where you can develop a bit more technical knowledge. As well as benefitting you it shows commitment to the team respect for what they do and can help you develop some great networks.

Whichever route has got you to where you are now, make a commitment to using your knowledge and skill to be the kind of leader people want to have around.  Meddling is so 2019.

2020 forced us to embrace remote working and many have fallen in love. It makes sense, it saves time, money and energy and helps life feel more balanced. Apart from the home-schooling part as many a frazzled working parent will tell you. So in love are some that they claim they never need visit an office again; that they can connect with their colleagues perfectly well from a distance. As usual love is blind and if you look closely, the cracks are starting to show, so to avoid a splinter becoming a full-blown shatter, read on.

Firstly, some context. We haven’t worked permanently in an office for 30 years. We’re not sure we’d know how to anymore. We’d probably make endless faux pas and get hauled into small rooms for someone to have a word about speaking too loudly, snorting when laughing and upsetting Anna by drinking Vimto out of her favourite mug which says “Be grateful every day” on it - grateful for the mug indeed but that is beside the point.

In our many years of being office based, field based and managing both remote teams and ones who sit back-to-back, we can conclude that we are great fans of remote working. Follow the rules of good practice and any fellow nomad will tell you it’s an efficient and effective way to be a strong contributor. It is interesting then, that a one year enforced ban on office working for most, has highlighted the real value of being together with colleagues in one place and what we’re losing by being apart.

You may have observed working patterns in 2020 when the pandemic hit and then hung around. We can summarise these into three stages:

Stage one: Set Up and Reassure. Many industries moved fast to get people what they needed to function at home, set up morale building initiatives and a rash of one to ones and team meets to ensure everyone was coping and smiling. And if you were lucky, standards were adjusted, and expectations managed.

Stage two: Keep Calm and Commute. With home working now the norm, standards were restored. As restrictions eased, albeit temporarily, some ventured back into offices whilst others preferred (and in many cases were encouraged) to remain at home. Office returners welcomed more space, resources and human contact but had to navigate one-way systems, handwash stations and the shock of being only one of two people in the office.

Stage 3: Back in Solitary. A winter lockdown held little of the novelty of its sunnier predecessor and motivation levels waned. And that is pretty much where we are now, with hope on the horizon that we will emerge blinking into the light at some point soon.

These stages have served to show what we are truly missing by being apart and what we can do without. Here are three of each – add them to the mix when you discuss your longer-term policy for where work is located in future and how that impacts on business, team working and the sector in general.

Three reasons you don’t need to be in the office:

1. For team members to do their individual work. Provided everyone has the resources they need, space and peace to work and a bit of self-discipline, we’re all discovering we can get more done apart. We benefit from less chatter and “can you spare me a minute?” type distractions. No commute for many has been a game changer and we’re getting our heads down to deliver to tight deadlines.
2. To check up on your team. You really don’t. Remember what you had before all this upheaval - your employees were trustworthy, worked hard and the last thing they needed was micromanaging. They still don’t. This is an adjustment for team leaders – it’s tough not to have face-to-face access to people and what they are up to, but it’s a vital adjustment to make, if you want to lead a high performing team.
3. To perform the comms basics. Updates – one to one, team or business can be done perfectly well through the range of remote tools we’ve all mastered. And if point two is bringing you out in hives, remember you can check up on progress during these catch ups.

Having flown the flag for remote working, here are three powerful reasons why we need a return to base camp, for some of the week at least.

1. To learn from more experienced colleagues. What got you to the level you are at now? I’m guessing a lot of it involved grafting, being thrown in at the deep end, falling down, wiping your grazes and getting back up again to be better. But you will also have learned a lot from others, from just being around them. When you saw your line-manager excel at a negotiation, overheard a conflict well handled, shadowed a colleague and watched them deal expertly with a major client– that learning was absorbed without you even realising. The pandemic has wiped out these little gems of learning. We need to be back together again so less experienced team members can learn from the veterans. So many of these nuggets happen by chance, it’s impossible to recreate them virtually.
2. For team cohesion. At some point, teams need the warm body experience. Teams who were geographically spread pre-Covid still knew they were going to meet up at some point in the year. If these events are well facilitated with meaningful agendas, they create a sense of team so powerful, it keeps us going until we meet again. The shared experience stops people getting scratchy with each other from a distance. We recognise the value in the relationship and keep collaboration levels high. You spot the mole hills before they expand to mountains. You get a feel for how people are in a way you just can’t on screen.
3. For a sense of company culture. Despite all the work your business has done to develop company values, behaviours and guidance on “the way we do things around here”, there’s a missing piece. As it turns out, culture also has a postcode. We need to be in a building to truly get a sense of the company we have joined. No one is more surprised by this than us, but we have been involved in a number of virtual onboarding projects and it is a bump in the road we keep hitting. There is something about co-habiting while working that gives us a clear sense of culture. Central operations dictate the primary culture with regional hubs adding vital subcultures. They help us work and behave as one brand. It’s official, you have to be there. Not every day, but some of the time.

As with most things in life, balance is boring but key. Let’s create a future that combines a respect for remote working with a newfound energy for the office. For the good of team, we must once again learn to live together - and apart and maximise the benefits of both.

When we ask a group of leaders about the best leader they ever had, they tell us about the one who supported, stretched and believed in them. It is never a leader who gave great speeches, spun awful news, or kept them in the dark. At the root of the relationship, with their favoured leaders was trust. A firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.

Think about who you listen to through this pandemic. Chris Whitty is our choice. He is knowledgeable, consistent, and human. He can speak to us straight; have our back and wants us to avoid the virus. Not a whiff of hot air from Professor Witty.

How do we get to the nirvana of a trusted leader? Let's explore its four elements.

Credibility – you know what you are talking about, you know what you don't know, and you treat those with less expertise with respect. You speak with an air of authority, not superiority and never trip people up with your knowledge.

Reliability –doing what you promised. It includes being on time. We worked with a team whose leader was always late to sessions. His team were resigned to it. What they really thought was, "why can't he get up earlier, be more organised and show us some respect by being here on time?". It undermined so many of his great attributes and was so simple to fix.

Intimacy – do not panic, this isn't about any weird exercises or confessions. It is about your people feeling psychologically safe with you and valued for their differences. We recently coached a young woman who was terrified of public speaking. Her last boss often ridiculed her when she presented, delighting in any mistakes. It had a profound effect on her and was holding her back. Who wants to be that boss? Needless to say, she didn't trust her boss as far as she could throw her.

Self-orientation – this is the secret sauce. High self-orientation is to be avoided. It is all about you – how you are coming across, feel today, and how this is all impacting you. You have to be managed; an email is sent round every morning by reception warning everyone of your mood. Instead of spending energy working, your people are steering you around the hurdles like a toddler.

Low self-orientation is the aim. You are okay with yourself, so use your energy to grow fabulous people and to make sure everyone achieves. Yes, deep down, you allow yourself a little smile of satisfaction when someone in your team is impressive, nails the pitch or gets promoted. You deserve a quiet moment of reflection on being a trusted leader and what that does for the team.

Finally, a few ideas for you around trust.

1. Keep up to date with your area of expertise, allow others to teach you about theirs, be curious, love learning.
2. Aim to promise what you can deliver.
3. Examine your leadership mindset. Do you challenge and support your people? If you do too much support, you risk de-skilling your team, too much challenge creates stress. Just enough of both keeps you in the safety zone.
4. Explore emotional intelligence. Can you reason with and understand your emotions so that you can regulate them and channel them usefully?
5. Pass on your wisdom around trust to your team. Help any individuals who find any of the elements difficult. Sometimes when we teach, we learn.

 

 

Another question we ask groups we work with is about who has influenced them. Mothers are top of the list way above David Beckham and the Queen. We like to think our children would mention us if asked that question.

Aim to be the leader your team members name when we ask them who is the best leader they ever had.

"Trust is the highest form of human motivation. It brings out the very best in people", Stephen Covey.

 

Happy new year and welcome to 2021! A probable game of two halves as we contemplate some dark months ahead before we emerge blinking into the warmth of a more familiar world as the year progresses.  That’s the hope anyway.

But Covid or no Covid, January has always been a rather dry month where our need to be terribly grown up and apply ourselves after an extended break doesn’t always match our motivation to do so.  So, looking January squarely in its dull grey eyes, here are three things you can do to bring some energy and fluidity to your working day.

Reconnect with your cause/mission

What gets you out of bed in the morning and skipping to work?  Granted, it’s likely to be a short skip at the moment but you know what we mean.  What is it that your organisation or business does to make the world a better place and how can you get closer to it?  A lot of our clients have reported feeling more removed from the raison d’etre of where they work.  Perhaps it’s the remote working, perhaps it’s just working very long and hard but it is easy to become disconnected and can be hugely motivating to remember just why you do what you do.  Perhaps you could make closer contact with your customers, service users or beneficiaries and discuss the impact of your work.  Is there a place that benefits from your good work that you could visit virtually?  Or maybe it’s just a case of getting together with your team and discussing what motivates you to do this job and hearing about people’s experiences of times when they worked more closely and felt closer to the mission.

Consider what you want to add to your CV by the end of 2021

This is a question we regularly pose to our clients because it is easy for the year to slip away.  It is one thing to work hard but quite another to work hard and embrace the new and gain skills and experiences.  Consider what projects you would like to put your hand up for and to get more involved.  Have a think about a new area of expertise that would benefit you, your work and your organisation.  Would you like to move in to management or expand your team leadership?  If you feel you’re suitably experienced, toy with the idea of becoming a mentor or coach to less experienced colleagues.  Or all of the above.  These are great things to master and add to your CV so you can look back over the year and know you’ve made yourself more marketable to your current or next employer.

Widen your networks and then get those within them to challenge you more

When was the last time you had a really stimulating conversation with a colleague or contact?  It’s great to work with people who know you well and think like you but it doesn’t necessarily challenge you.  It’s the people who bring different perspectives and approaches who make us slightly uncomfortable sometimes – and when you experience that discomfort, stick with it because it is likely you are learning and growing from it.  So, join some new groups with a special interest which you could gain from.  They are likely to be virtual for now and there are plenty of them, you just have to look around.  Sometimes you need look no further than your own organisation, just outside the teams and regular circles you mix with.  And when you do find them, consider what they could do for you and you for them.  It may be that the experience feeds back in to points one and two and through these newfound networks, you feel closer to the mission and gain something valuable to add to your CV. So, it’s a win all round.

January will be over before we know it so let’s make it a good one to set us up for the year ahead.  Tricky at times – highly likely, satisfying – definitely, dry – never!

Self-care.  It’s got to be up there with the most frequently used words and phrases of the year alongside furlough, new normal, resilience and “You need to take yourself off mute David!”.  Yet when we mention it, talk turns to bubble baths and box sets.  This makes the assumption that self-care is something you need purely to recover from work rather than something that is part of work.

On a workshop this week the group were discussing said subject and most of the ideas centred around ways in which you take care of yourself by taking breaks from work.

Is that all self-care means? We don’t think so.  Strategies which aid effective working and a healthy brain and body can be just as important while you work.  And you don’t have to take a break to do it.

Here are 5 things to consider doing to bring self-care in to your 9 – 5 that are part of work not an escape from it:

• Make thinking and planning part of the working day. Stop relegating it to before/after work time as if it weren’t real graft.  It very much is part of your professional skill set and the actions you take will be the better for it.  If necessary, block out planning time in your diary.  If more of us did this it would elevate the status of this underrated but crucial use of our time.
• Engage in joint problem solving. Grappling with problems alone can be a real energy sapper not to mention a time stealer.  Sometimes just talking it through with another person gives rise to a whole range of options you never considered.  Joint problem solving can be an extremely effective use of time as well as a chance to connect with others and get more heads working on the issue.  A problem shared is not just a problem halved.  Often, it’s a problem solved too.
• Prioritise caring for your essential resources. Make a list of the things you just couldn’t do your job without at the moment.  The list might include – stable Wi-Fi, your laptop, a decent desk and chair set up, your phone, access to online communications software, a quality set of headphones and an up to date system for filing vital information.  This may appear an unremarkable list but without those items working as they should, frustration builds, and time is lost.  So, make a plan to look after your essential resources, update them if necessary and keep them in top order.  Take care of them and they take care of you.
• Create alternative options to virtual meetings. We’ve written a whole other blog on this subject which you can access here so we won’t labour the point.  Suffice to say devising effective alternative ways of communicating at work, which mean you don’t need to be on-screen all day is as much about self-care as it is about communicating.
• Develop your professional networks outside your own organisation. Internal contacts and colleagues are vital but don’t always bring a fresh perspective.  External contacts who perform a similar role to you but in a different sector or a different role in a similar sector can be a fantastic source of ideas, information, support and challenge.  So - spend time cultivating these relationships.  A conversation with an external contact can be as refreshing as a walk in the park and you don’t have to take a break from work to do it.

We promised 5 things but here’s a bonus 6^th self-care at work tip.  Work-based learning.  Take time to engage in it.  Identify a skill you could do with honing; some expertise you’d like to develop or experience you would benefit from gaining and set about getting that learning need met.  It may be as simple as talking to a colleague who has it or finding an interesting webinar to attend or a book to read.  Learning that happens at work is quicker to apply and easier to integrate into your current practices.  Learning makes us feel good and is a great way for you to add to your value as a team member and practitioner.

Self-care can still be something we engage in outside of working hours, but it doesn’t have to be limited to then.  Self-care at work in the ways we suggest makes the day more interesting and challenges us in a good way. So, when the day ends (quicker than expected with these newly applied strategies) you can curl up in the bath with the box set because it’s an enjoyable to do rather than as a response to burn-out.

"Several times lately, I have finished my work, closed the laptop and sat staring out of the window of my spare room office worrying that I don't have the answers. That my team are looking to me for guidance about the future…and I simply don't know."

A genuine, honest reflection from one of our clients. He is an impressive and successful leader. He has gravitas, is trusted and a great coach to his senior reports. He is also highly intuitive, with an innate ability to be a pioneering visionary who can then work with others to ground that vision into reality. And yet, he is stuck. He still has his instincts, yet with the world, in flux, he is finding it hard to convince his team to go with him because they need more tangible evidence to ground his ideas.

He is leading from his gut because he thinks that's the only way to respond to the unknown. If in doubt, follow your instincts.

It is an exciting area of leadership and one that, perhaps, has been overlooked in a world that can access evidence, stats and data at the swipe of a screen. Making decisions on gut instinct might be making a comeback, it could come back into fashion and for many leaders, it never went away.

Agile thinking is a crucial leadership skill. We work with teams to help them widen their abilities in this area to impact decisions, problem-solving and prioritising. If you unpack it there are five facets:

Systems thinking – investigating an issue from a broad perspective to understand the interdependencies

Possibility thinking – to be open-minded and generate a wide range of possibilities, the classic brainstorm

Logical analysis – to reach valid conclusions using clear, rational logic

Evidence-based thinking – identify core issues by analysing evidence from relevant resources

The fifth one is gut-feel judgement – relying on your gut instincts to provide valuable input for decisions.

Richard Branson says, "I rely far more on gut instinct than researching huge amounts of statistics", and he's not done too badly.

Most of us use all or a few of them combined. Yet in this world of unknowns, your instincts may need to be more finely tuned. It isn't easy to find evidence and interdependencies if we have never been in this situation before. Rational logic needs something tangible to test it against, the world feels pretty nebulous at the moment. Being open-minded looks like a good option yet can get stifled because the possibilities are almost endless.

Think about letting your instincts run free:

1. Trust yourself to follow a spontaneous urge to make a quick and subjective conclusion.
2. Your enthusiasm or emotional response to an instinct may not correlate to the validity of your conclusion so always open it up to your team to work with.
3. Embrace your gut feel about situations then test it against the other thinking styles.

You have a wide range of experience so even if you think gut feel is not reliable or scientific in there somewhere will be sound judgement.

As Anderson Cooper (US journalist and writer) observes, "You do what's in your gut – if you've been doing it long enough, what's in your gut will be appropriate".

Next time you find yourself staring out of your home office window, let your thoughts wander, don't evaluate them or crush any ideas that come to you, it might be that your gut is trying to tell you something.

 

It’s Monday.  Your day starts with a 9am one to one catch up, immediately followed by another meeting at 10am.  You meant to block out some time to work on a report at 11:30am but someone has dropped a meeting in to your Outlook and you feel under pressure to attend.  Before you know, it’s 14:30pm.  You shove some food down and just about manage to get on to your 14:45pm meeting by 3pm, apologising for being late.  That meeting overruns so the 16:30 team meeting you were supposed to lead is late starting. It looks like you won’t get through the agenda until after 6pm and meanwhile your inbox is full to bursting and your To Do list is into its 3^rd page.  It’s only Monday. 

Does this sound like your every day at the moment?  To us it sounds utterly depressing.  Our clients are telling us this is becoming the norm of the working week, so let’s consider why this might be.

Ever since the majority of us have been working away from our colleagues and clients, our meeting load has become meeting overload.  In the office, what could be done as a chat across the desk or enroute to the kitchen, is now a 15-minute exchange on Slack or Teams.  What would have been a get together and a useful conversation over coffee is now a full-blown Zoom meeting. What would have been a monthly team meeting now happens fortnightly because you’re worried about people feeling isolated. In the office, it was also perfectly fine to pop to the loo, grab a coffee or check your email before your next meeting – and let people know that’s what you were doing.  It is much harder to convey this remotely, without appearing rude or tardy.  Yet we still need those little breaks. 

Our days have become so full of meetings, none of us is getting any work done.  It’s fine if meetings are your work, but for most, meetings result in actions and there is no time to implement them.  Add to that the now accepted practice of scheduling meetings without a gap between one ending and the next starting - and it’s a recipe for fatigue and frustration.

Let’s nip this one in the bud before it tucks itself snugly in to our work culture.  Here are three ways to get off the meeting conveyor belt and restore communal gatherings virtual or otherwise, to events you look forward to.

1. Ask “Why?” more often.  Why is this meeting taking place?  Why should attendees care that they are there? And why does whatever you’re having the meeting for need to be done at a meeting?  If you have sound answers to all these questions, give the meeting the green light.  If you don’t, consider whether the purpose can be achieved in another way.
2. Scan the Attendee List – do you have the right people at the meeting?  They’re the right people if they can add something to the conversation and are responsible for at least some of the actions that result.  There are exceptions to this but in the main, meetings don’t need observers or extras.  Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has a novel way of keeping the numbers down.  He says:  "We try to create teams that are no larger than can be fed by two pizzas. We call that the two-pizza team rule."  This avoids too many people at meetings.  Elon Musk’s approach is even more radical.  He encourages people to leave a meeting if they are not adding any value.  That certainly focusses the mind of the participant, but it also makes you question if you’re the right person to be occupying the square on the screen.
3. And this is the big one.  Instigate the 15-minute rule to meeting scheduling.  That is, you don’t allow meetings to be scheduled back to back.  There must be a 15-minute gap.  And if that sounds all too reasonable, why not go for 30 minutes which is even better, but we accept may not be realistic sometimes.  It needs to be agreed across teams and adhered to.  When you think about it, it makes total sense.  You want to arrive at a meeting with the right mind-set – focussed on the impending agenda, not the recently departed one.  People need breathing space (not to mention coffee and comfort!) to give their best, so give them a break. 

And while we’re talking about scheduling, if you do have a report to work on at 11.30, that is a meeting of sorts.  A meeting with yourself and the report – so give it an appointment in your diary which prevents others slotting in yet another meeting.

Those are our top 3 tips for tackling meeting overload, and we have more tips too.  If you’d like to speak to us about how you build a meeting culture which inspires energy and commitment without the song and dance, we’d love to hear from you.  We could even book a meeting to talk about it.  But not until at least 15 minutes after your previous meeting.

Redundancy. It's such a horrible term. It describes something that is no longer needed. We were made redundant 23 years ago and we survived and thrived. We set up a business together and we have never looked back. We know you would like to wipe the imagined smug look off our faces and we can’t blame you. That stuff doesn’t seem useful to you now, yet it is proof that you will pull through.

If you were asked how you are doing, what would you say? You might say you saw it coming and had already started planning for it. Or you might say with tears in your eyes that you feel hurt, rejected, and wonder why they picked you. Maybe you would pace the room angrily, telling of all the people that should have got the chop before you because they are all useless. These are strong, understandable reactions.

How did you find out? If it was a shock the old primeval stuff kicks in, and we fight, we flee we standstill. If it was evolutionary, a gradual realisation that your role may not exist in the new order, you might have had time to adjust to it, which softens the impact. Was it a result of a strategic restructure? You might have had full sight of the train coming down the line, or was it shrouded in mist? When that mist cleared, maybe you saw it as a new opportunity. Not all change is threatening, so what can you do to find your silver lining?

You've ridden the change curve of denial and resistance and now….nothing. You feel stuck in the waiting room which can be a tough place to be. You will be looking for the exploration and commitment bit of the curve, but you can't quite see it.  One door has closed, but a new one hasn't opened yet because there is so much uncertainty in the world, making it difficult to see your next step.

The waiting room can be a stressful place. It is a place of continuous disruption and instability. You feel insecure, a sense of loss, and you must break old habits. You may have tried to make your world as small as possible so that you feel in control in an alien environment. Are you dreaming of the status quo of your old job? Do you find yourself blowing out the candle that lights up the waiting room, so you don't have to explore it or are you madly searching the walls trying to find the mythical new door?

This is a difficult phase, yet it can also be one of exploration, learning and resetting. You can light up the waiting room. The best learning comes when we are out of our comfort zone. Ask for help and support from your close friends, family, and your network of connections. The world is a friendly, supportive place. Look at those LinkedIn posts from people you have worked with who are now offering support. All connections are useful because you learn from them and create goodwill, which you can reciprocate at some point.

What are you missing to make progress? Intentional learning is an excellent way to keep you occupied in the waiting room. Research online learning, podcasts, groups you could join to fill gaps in your experience or knowledge.  Learning from others is useful too. Is there somebody in the same position as you that you could talk to? Is your friend in an organisation or a job you are interested in? Can a member of your family help you draft an up to date CV and give you tips on interview technique?

Then one day, the door will open because you have made it happen. When it does, you will be the best version of yourself. In interviews, you will be able to dazzle the panel with the new skills, ideas, and perspectives you have harvested. You will be discerning about the roles you go for because you haven't panicked, you have control over your destiny.

Who did you learn from in the early stages of your career? Whether you were aware at the time or not, you were surrounded by good and bad examples of how to do things in your chosen field. This must have informed your choices as you progressed.

One such example from one of our clients came from a boss’s boss in their first job - a regional sales manager - who was overlooked for (well deserved) recognition over several years before finally getting promoted.  When our client asked her how she kept her spirits up through all that waiting time she replied: “Oh I always behaved like a regional manager – I wasn’t going hang around and wait for the title.  That was just the rubber stamp.”  Big bit of career-shaping learning right there.

Learning from others has particular relevance at the moment with the temporary physical separation from our colleagues and bosses.  Many of us have been working remotely for over 4 months now and whilst return is on the horizon, it’s a slow return and for some, the office as we knew it, is likely to be an occasional base rather than a permanent one.

In the early days of lockdown, the emphasis was on communication.  We all got Zoom/Teams/WebEx/whatever You Use-savvy and developed creative ways of staying in touch and staying connected.  Midway through lockdown, motivation waned as we realised this was going to be our main mode of communication for the foreseeable.  We lamented the loss of the warm body experience, of meetings, away days, retreats, and events.  It is exciting to see a cautious return to these on the horizon, to fill a gap that just can’t be filled remotely.

But actually, there’s another gap caused by Covid-19 that needs filling.  When we ask our clients what they are missing about the office, group events are on the list but not top of it.  Top of the list is those little nuggets of learning that happen simply because we are near others.  It’s sitting next to your boss when they informally debrief with you on a tough negotiation.  It’s hearing someone opposite you handle a call really well.  It’s sitting in a meeting and seeing it chaired professionally.  Sometimes it is the counter-example – a conversation handled badly, a conflict that escalates, an ill thought decision where we learn the “how not to” lesson. 

At the moment with work as it is, we’re missing these opportunities to learn and to teach.  This is a particular problem for our younger colleagues, who rely on these opportunities to develop and grow.  So, what can we do until they can once again happen naturally?

If you’re experienced and, in a position, to teach – find opportunities to do so.  Include slots for learning in your regular team meetings.  Talk to the team about some of the challenges in your week and how you’ve sought to overcome them.  Share your knowledge whenever you can because at the moment, they can’t pick it up from being near you.

If you’re in a position to learn – ask more questions. Show interest.  Volunteer for tasks and projects that will stretch you and ask for a proper briefing and regular debriefing. This will help you to know how you are progressing in tasks and projects.

It isn’t complicated, you just have to make time for it and see it as a valuable part of work.  That way this will be a year where we all learnt, not purely through adversity, but also just because we were at work and that’s where the learning happens. This can be the case even if the current workplace is the spare room, the kitchen table, or the end of your bed, until we meet again.