A practical guide to dealing with a social media crisis

In March 2020, many of our old assumptions about how we lead and manage people were thrown out of the window. Previously, when our teams met, we came together in a room, slung our jackets over the backs of our chairs, opened our laptops on the table in front of us and got down to business. Or we bumped into each other in the queue for the coffee machine or standing around the water cooler and had sudden, impulse conversations that set creative hares running. We solved problems and came up with new ideas by talking to each other.

Now, all that has changed. Impulse communication and spontaneous conversations no longer take place; meetings are formal and scheduled, booked days or weeks in advance through Teams or Zoom. The meetings themselves are more stilted, people waiting for their turn to talk; and sometimes, by the time the chair gets around to you, the conversation has moved on and your great idea is no longer relevant. There is a constant sense that things are falling through the cracks.

My experience of teaching on senior leadership programmes through the lockdown and transition to working from home is that this is one of the biggest worries faced by leaders and their teams. How will team cohesion hold up? How can we achieve synergy when we are working in isolation, beset by constant worries about whether the broadband connection will hold up, constantly interrupted by the demands of home life?

In the early days of lockdown, these worries seemed groundless. Faced with a crisis, people pulled together. Teams met more frequently, and the conversations were more intense as everyone worked to manage the transition. Because the challenge was so sudden and so unimaginable, we lived and worked for the moment, and in most teams morale remained surprisingly high. Partly, too, we were buoyed up by the notion that this was temporary; the virus would fade, a vaccine would be found and we would go back to normal. It would all be over by Christmas.

But as the months pass and the virus shows no signs of abating, that early optimism is starting to fade. Morale is beginning to flag. Faced with the prospect of varying degrees of lockdown and many teams continuing to work from home until next spring – at least – there is a sense that the real uphill push begins now. A large portion of UK office workers – over half, according to some surveys – have expressed a desire to continue to work from home. But whether over the long term this is good for them, or for the firms that employ them, is a moot point.

The next normal

Teams are only as good as the relationships that bind their members together. High-performing teams have strong working relationships based on trust and respect. They communicate constantly, bouncing ideas off each other and creating solutions together. And there is where the fault line lies between past and present. The way we communicate has changed dramatically.

When I ask the senior leaders I work with what they miss most about the old office routines, the answer is almost always the same: they miss those ‘water-cooler conversations’ mentioned above, the spontaneous encounters that lead to some new idea or solve a nagging problem. There are software platforms that allow us to try to replicate those conversations, but it is not the same.

We need to re-think communication, and in order to do that, we need to go back to that point about trust and respect. These are the bottom line; these are the things that need to be established and preserved. McKinsey Quarterly has recently published an interesting series of articles on leading post-pandemic, and one article in particular, ‘Psychological safety, emotional intelligence and leadership in a time of flux’, makes the strong point that we need to think about what makes people tick and what they are experiencing in the crisis. The need for psychological safety is paramount, say the authors. People have to feel safe; or, at the very least, able to share their fears with others.

The senior leaders I work with, and my own experience, supports this. People tell me of spending as much time providing pastoral care and support for their team members as they do on managing processes and outputs. That may change as the initial sense of crisis begins to fade and we move towards what McKinsey Quarterly calls ‘the next normal’ (implying that normality itself is in a state of flux and will continue to change and evolve), but going back to the old ways would be a retrograde step.

That move towards a more pastoral mode of management has also been accompanied by a renewed emphasis on communication and the building of trust within the team. As Richard Boyatzis, one of the contributors to the McKinsey Quarterly article, points out, one of the disadvantages of online meeting software is that it does not adequately convey body language (especially when team members who are short on bandwidth have to turn off their webcams). This means members find it harder to tell what their colleagues are thinking, which in turn raises uncertainty levels and this undermines trust. ‘We not only have this greater uncertainty that arouses more stress, we’re exposed to fewer opportunities to tune into the emotions of others’, said Professor Boyatzis. ‘Ultimately, we are minimising emotions from what we are used to … Nobody feels good. Even the top performers worry.’

The response from successful team leaders has been to give yet more time and attention to relationships, to understanding what team members are thinking and feeling, and this includes what is going on in their private lives as well as the work space. Many tell me that they spend much less time managing the performance of their people than they do on helping them and providing assistance to get their jobs done in often very difficult circumstances. This in turn is leading them to question the value of performance management itself. The once-heretical idea that most performance management is a waste of time is beginning to gain traction.

Trust and safety

‘Why is trust so hard to achieve in management?’ asks James Hesketh in an article in Harvard Business Review. He advances a long list of reasons, but among the most prominent is the quality of communication between managers and team members. He is not the only one to make this point; the quality management expert W. Edwards Deming argued strongly for trust in his book Out of the Crisis. If people trust their leaders, they will be more committed to working harder and getting the job done, whereas if they do not, their levels of uncertainty increase and they become demotivated and productivity falls away. If you build trust, Deming said, you will improve motivation and you won’t need performance management.

That is why going back to the old normal would be a backwards step. This new, more pastoral, more caring style of leadership and management offers us a golden opportunity to improve performance. Is it possible that the army of workers who prefer working from home and believe they are more productive than when in an office environment, believe this because since the pandemic they feel they have been more valued and better looked after?

Have we been doing leadership and management right? Before the pandemic, were we too focused on performance and productivity, rather than on people? How often did we check up on our team members, ask them what was going on in their lives and whether anything was bothering them? I asked my senior leadership students how often they did a health check on the motivation of their team members, asking them what they wanted from the job and whether their needs were being met. Many admitted to never having done this. Most also said they had never questioned their own motivation, or what they wanted from the job.

Honest, frank conversations in an environment of psychological safety and trust are one of the most powerful forces that binds teams together. We saw this during lockdown, when people put their own fears and concerns aside and worked hard to solve problems and come through the crisis. How can we capture that spirit and make certain it endures? We can do so, but we need to move quickly before it slips away and ennui and inertia take over.

The first thing that is needed is more frequent communications, and these do not always need to be work-related. Leaders need to make regular health checks or sanity checks, dropping in on their team members virtually and seeing how they are doing, checking that their motivation levels are not dropping. Social calls can be useful team bonding too, virtual tea breaks or pub crawls can help people communicate in a more relaxed way. These social calls help contribute to greater psychological safety.

Second, communications need to be democratised. In most virtual teams, it is the leader who sets the schedule and determines when people meet, meaning people who are struggling with problems have to wait until the next meeting to discuss it. Giving everyone a chance to call a meeting when they need help and support will encourage more psychological safety, and also help problems get solved more quickly.

A Royal Air Force team once told me how they handled this problem in a physical setting. An industrial kitchen toaster and tea urn were installed in one corner of the hangar where they worked. Whenever any member of the team, no matter what their rank, encountered a problem they could not solve, they simply shouted ‘Toast!’ Everyone converged on the toaster and tea urn to talk, and by the time they had finished their toast the problem was usually solved. There is no reason why we cannot have ‘virtual toasters’, or some equivalent.

At the same time, though, more meetings does not equate to more productivity. One global bank is currently embarking on a plan to reduce the number of virtual meetings staff make, in order to give them more time for reflection and rest. Studies from neuroscience are beginning to confirm what we all knew, that spending too long online can affect cognitive function and impair decision making. Frequent breaks allow the eyes and brain to recover.

And finally, we need to remember the role played by leaders during the crisis, and to capture some of that essence and distil it too. The relationship between the leader and the team needs to be recalibrated. There is a lot to be learned from Robert Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership in this context. During the crisis leaders acted as protectors and guides, shielding their organisation from the worst of what was going on around them, acting as umbrellas to keep out the chaos falling on all our heads. As leaders, we need to remember how powerful that was, and how our teams responded.

About the author

Morgen Witzel is a Fellow of the Exeter Centre for Leadership at the University of Exeter Business School. His book The Ethical Leader was published.

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