How to manage in the Spring of 2020 (some shortcuts)
This is not comprehensive, but it does contain some tips and tricks for managing teams in this uniquely unusual time.
What follows are three tactics that I have used successfully to date.
Setting culture
You are responsible for your team’s culture (that is part of leadership.) Thus it’s important to over-communicate your cultural priorities at this time, granting other leaders in your org a fig leaf to execute against your collective “crisis cultural agenda.” (This is, in my estimation, a period of crisis.)
Below, an example of the cultural note I wrote to my team, which you can make your own (or write a new one from scratch):
“Some of the things that I think are important to consider are Product Marketing cultural priorities. They will continue to be, in this order: your health, your families, and then work.”
This allows managers on your team(s) to make space for their teams to prioritize health and family. More succinctly, it allows them the space to be human.
How to connect with your team
There are two ways to do this, one is social, the other you can file away under “empathetic leadership outreach.”
The social part | Set up social chats (virtual coffee) with your teams. You can do this with Google Hangout, Zoom, Webex or BlueJeans. This can be no more complicated than a line in your group chat/Slack that says: “I am going to take a 30m coffee break/have lunch/get a drink to wrap up the day, and anyone is free to join me at [link to virtual video chat room.]” Conversation starters are the usual things you would say in the office coffee room, in passing at lunch, or on a Friday afternoon over a drink.
The empathetic leadership outreach part| This should be a check-in to see how members of your team are doing. To stay on top of whom you have reached out to, my colleague, Jon, constructed a GDoc that allows you to track who you have spoken to. I would suggest a frequency of at least once a week for touching base, and the goal is to listen, primarily. Secondarily, you should show empathy during the listening.
How to conduct better video conferences
The movement to work from home (WFH) during this period has meant, at my employer, a growth from video conferencing nodes that numbered less than 10 to meetings with greater than 10 nodes.
The guidance below is for meetings with > 8–10 nodes that are less than one hour. Meetings below that node threshold or longer than an hour can use your company’s historical meeting structures.
Goal of the meeting | Inform or make a decision
Set-up | The meeting owner should create a group chat right before the meeting, with the primary document being reviewed as the first post, and these rules of the road:
1. Ping in the chat if you have a question
2. Your question will be queued for discussion here or answered in chat
3. Please let the meeting owner (or a designee of the meeting owner) moderate the chat, including who is speaking next
Discussion | per the guidelines above. Try to keep most of the discussion verbal, otherwise people will be distracted.
Follow up | The presenting party should (i) respond to comments as appropriate verbally and in chat; and (ii) collect action items/follow-up based on the comments and share at the top of the doc within 24 hours, with “hails” (also known as “@’s”) in your company’s shared document format (Google Docs, Sharepoint, Quip, what have you) requiring others to follow up, if needed.
These are three of the tactics that I am using, and I am happy to take feedback on these and add or amend if you have other approaches that work for you.
Kind regards, Ty
