Are you a team leader who is finding you are having to adapt your leadership and management for a ‘new normal’? Last month I addressed some tips for team members in adapting to the ‘new normal’. What’s it been like for team leaders?
I’m in a privileged position as a leadership coach to have a window on what it is like for leaders leading a team during a transitioning normality. As a team leader you are in the position of needing to be aware of how the gradual working context changes are affecting you personally as well as supporting your team members through their own processing of these changes.
Perhaps the biggest theme arising from my coaching of leaders in recent weeks in relation to their team members is needing to spend more time on ‘pastoral’ elements of people management.
What does this mean, and how can it help you with your team leadership?
I have to confess that I’d not heard the expression ‘pastoral’ in relation to management and leadership before. Having taken a deeper look, it is clear that often this term relates to teaching and the pastoral care that is required to enable a child in school to flourish. Here’s an explanation that I like from Schoolsmith: ‘ Pastoral care is the provision the school makes to ensure the physical and emotional welfare of your child. You’ll know when it works. A successful pastoral care programme means that your child is safe, happy, involved and able to perform to their potential.’ So yes, I can see how this might translate to how a manager helps a team member to be engaged, have a sense of belonging and involvement and to perform.
I’ve found that managers and leaders are sometimes surprised that team members are needing more support at the moment. It might be that they need a listening ear or that they seem to have lost some confidence in making decisions. If you find yourself thinking ‘These people are adults. I wasn’t expecting this behaviour’ it might help to understand what could be driving it.
David Rock’s SCARF model is a helpful framework to explore what could be happening. It links employee engagement with brain science. Rock identified five social triggers that can instigate both ‘minimise danger’ and ‘maximise reward’ brain responses at work. SCARF stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness.
I’m focusing on Certainty, Autonomy and Relatedness as the most obvious factors to connect to the current situation but you may find that Status and Fairness could also be playing a part for your team members depending on the situation. Below you’ll find an exploration of each in turn with a tip or two to support you as a manager:
Certainty
Your organisation is likely experiencing some business pressures through the impact of Covid-19 whether reduced sales, distribution issues, rising costs or something else, The knock on effects, whether real (e.g. a leader focused on crisis management over team, or a team member unsure about how to get something done in a changing landscape ) or imagined (e.g. threat of restructures and redundancies) can create uncertainty for team members.
TIP: As a team manager, you may not have complete certainty yourself. What you do have is the ability to alleviate concerns for others through regular and timely communication. When working virtually, your team members may not connect with you as readily as if you were in the same office so creating opportunities for them to speak with you either as a whole team, or one to one, are more important than ever. And.. .as the old communication tip goes … even if you don’t have anything new to communicate, it can be helpful to reiterate that point so that imagination doesn’t feel the gap with unhelpful assumptions.
Autonomy
Autonomy at work is feeling that you are able to make your own choices and have a degree of self-governance at work. You may feel as a leader that your team members have more autonomy than ever if they are working at home with flexibility around their working patterns; if your team member is not used to this, having to work out how to work effectively and feeling like there are constraints to their ability to work (increased childcare needs for example) this can unsettle and upset emotional balance.
TIP: In regular one to ones, don’t just focus on task, performance and progress. Check in on how your team member is adapting to a new way of working. Where do they feel things are working well? Where are they struggling and why? Taking time to listen is useful in itself and then providing coaching can help your team member regain a sense of agency.
Relatedness
Relatedness is closely linked to trust and, at work, requires a sense of safety with others. It can be lost when someone you know excludes you from a meeting or chooses not to confide in you over an important matter. It can be more difficult in virtual teams to create the bonding opportunities that come through understanding our shared common ground that help to enable relatedness.
TIP: If your team members are newly adapting to virtual working, it can be helpful to include activities in team meetings to help retain relatedness. Ways to do this include each team members sharing 10 slides of pictures, talking only for 10 seconds about each as described here (Pecha Kucha); enabling your team to support each other through having a team conversation where team members share where they may need some help or advice as well as offer help or advice to each other.
Finally, as a team leader, don’t forget to consider your own needs as well as that of your team. You also have the same social trigger reactions – it might be a useful exercise to consider the SCARF elements in relation to your own work in recent weeks and see what you can do to support yourself moving forwards.
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