We’ve all been thrust into a Zoom world in which leaders had to help their teams get work done in different ways while supporting everyone through all of the challenges of a global ordeal that seemed to rise up overnight.
Many leaders have stepped up and delivered in ways that are caring, decisive and focused. But now there is a new kind of mountain to scale. Mental health. We are coming to understand that the fourth wave of COVID-19 will affect our spirits.
The subjects of burnout and fatigue have been trending across the dashboards of our social media. We could have seen it coming. Tested and retested endlessly, our resilience feels like it has been ground down.
We need to think, reflect, connect, and still get our work done.
Here’s an additional challenge… in a virtual world, we, actually have less capacity than we used to. Zoom meetings are cognitively more taxing. So is the responsibility and expectation of dealing with high levels of uncertainty, volatility, complexity, and ambiguity. So, what do we do now?
Leaders have long grappled with how to make more money with fewer resources. The results determined her survival within the company.
Now the commodity in question is the health and capacity of the leader herself.
It doesn’t mean we all stop Zoom meetings and all go back to the office. Most expect the future of work will involve a hybrid model of remote and onsite.
But if we really want leaders to create great workplaces, we need to talk about how they are set up for success in doing so. Are they actually able to focus their attention on:
- Coaching their direct reports
- Collaborating with peers
- Resourcing the critical few projects on which their teams’ success depends
- Creating future strategies and plans
If we keep piling on demands, on ourselves and on others, we lose an opportunity to continue the creation of a new world of work, one in which relationships matter and people know leaders care, teams focus on, and finish fewer but more meaningful and high impact projects and objectives and development are prioritized.
Wildly different circumstances will require equally radical solutions.
Will we take advantage of the opportunity in front of us now or will we keep doing what we’ve always done and then wonder why, in this time of phenomenal change, we didn’t get something different?
