Digital leadership under lockdown

Robin Knowles, Founder and chief exec­u­tive of Dig­i­tal Lead­ers

Mov­ing your organ­i­sa­tion to home work­ing has for many been an epic under­tak­ing. We have seen a peri­od of accel­er­at­ed dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and lead­ers need to be think­ing dig­i­tal first when moti­vat­ing the indi­vid­u­als they lead. Dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is all about your peo­ple, your cul­ture and not
the tech­nol­o­gy.

So it’s par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant to be think­ing about the impact of lock­down on the four tra­di­tion­al areas of an indi­vid­ual team member’s moti­va­tion: pur­pose, learn­ing, auton­o­my and social con­nec­tion.

Indi­vid­u­als still need a sense of pur­pose in a role. This can be con­tribut­ing to a mean­ing­ful out­come big­ger than them­selves and often one larg­er than the organ­i­sa­tion they work for.

Leaders must rethink organisation’s purpose

Dur­ing lock­down our organ­i­sa­tion­al and even whole sector’s sense of pur­pose has been under attack. We have focused on sur­vival ahead of pur­pose in the short term and as we unlock, it’s vital for lead­ers to acknowl­edge this and take the time to rethink their organisation’s place in our sec­tor and soci­ety.

You can be sure that your teams will also be ask­ing them­selves, “Is my organ­i­sa­tion still in a place where what we are good at is what peo­ple need?”. Time think­ing about this col­lec­tive­ly with your team as a leader post-lock­down is crit­i­cal.

With auton­o­my lev­els high, we need to lever­age dig­i­tal tools built to encour­age col­lab­o­ra­tion and sup­press any urge to reduce this strong moti­va­tor of indi­vid­ual per­for­mance

The impor­tance of learn­ing and devel­op­ing skills in a role is an area where lock­down may have cre­at­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty. Before the pan­dem­ic a lot of skills were acquired from col­leagues longer in the job and also from those more senior. Six months of lock­down has trans­formed this rela­tion­ship and remote teams now know they need dig­i­tal skills unavail­able in their cur­rent organ­i­sa­tion.

This is a nation­al chal­lenge and has com­bined with an explo­sion of free train­ing events online. As a leader, encour­age and sup­port this oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­nect indi­vid­u­als to the knowl­edge avail­able and need­ed by them and our organ­i­sa­tions online.

How lockdown led to greater trust

Auton­o­my, that sense of con­trol over work, is an impor­tant part of indi­vid­ual moti­va­tion and has been an unin­tend­ed, but nec­es­sary, part of lock­down. The lev­el of trust in our peo­ple has cer­tain­ly risen and a pletho­ra of dig­i­tal tools now means we can co-ordi­nate dis­parate teams with less direct con­trol. With auton­o­my lev­els in our organ­i­sa­tions high as we come out of lock­down, we need to lever­age dig­i­tal tools built to encour­age col­lab­o­ra­tion and sup­press any urge to reduce this strong moti­va­tor of indi­vid­ual per­for­mance.

Last­ly, and per­haps the main vic­tim of lock­down, has been social con­nec­tion with­in our organ­i­sa­tions. Indi­vid­u­als need a net­work, sup­port group, men­tors and sense of social belong­ing. Whether “water­cool­er moments”, gos­sip or social events, a great deal of this has been lost.

Our team mem­bers’ net­works are now far more geo­graph­i­cal­ly local to them rather than with work col­leagues. This might be good for the indi­vid­ual, but is not for the organ­i­sa­tion. We need to lever­age tech­nol­o­gy to build new vir­tu­al cul­tures that can sur­vive and build sup­port net­works of val­ue to indi­vid­u­als, with a lot less face-to-face inter­ac­tion, to rein­force them.

Building virtual communities

Louise Stokes, Direc­tor, Dig­i­tal Lead­ers

We are social beings and the inter­ac­tion, net­works and social con­nec­tions we cre­ate at work are impor­tant giv­en we spend so much of our lives “in the office”. How­ev­er, dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, work­ing from home has meant those water­cool­er moments and face-to-face con­ver­sa­tions com­plete­ly halt­ed.

Remote work­ing was not entire­ly new, of course, but even work­ing-from-home vet­er­ans would be the first to admit that aspects of a remote envi­ron­ment still had some dis­tance to go when com­pared with phys­i­cal inter­ac­tion.

Tech­nol­o­gy has done it’s best and we all had our dig­i­tal net­works accel­er­at­ed by the “Zoom boom”, tak­ing part in online quizzes and the like. Vir­tu­al drinks cer­tain­ly helped, but I am much more excit­ed now about the pletho­ra of new dig­i­tal plat­forms step­ping up to recre­ate social togeth­er­ness for teams and organ­i­sa­tions.

The tru­ly vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty is com­ing of age in 2020 and for me will become the way to net­work, build con­nec­tions and bump into serendip­i­ty for pro­fes­sion­al com­mu­ni­ties

In the last few years, we have seen the tech for group work­ing and one-to-one inter­ac­tion plat­forms trans­form unimag­in­ably, at first through the likes of Slack, Zoom and Microsoft Teams. But for me, the miss­ing link always remained the net­work­ing and inter­ac­tion you get in larg­er groups, that you can only get through phys­i­cal­ly attend­ing an event, meet-up, con­fer­ence or sum­mit.

Lockdown has created new ways to network

Pre-lock­down, the Dig­i­tal Lead­ers team already ran a large online pro­gramme for our com­mu­ni­ty along­side phys­i­cal events because our mem­bers are based through­out the UK and beyond. The plat­forms we used were typ­i­cal one-to-many for­mats like webi­na­rs, where con­tent is pre­sent­ed and ques­tions asked. How­ev­er, it was always miss­ing that gold­en moment of audi­ence inter­ac­tion when the serendip­i­ty of bump­ing into a new and use­ful con­nec­tion hap­pens.

This moment is what peo­ple val­ue most when attend­ing phys­i­cal events and in lock­down this has been lost. But lock­down has now cre­at­ed new plat­forms that do offer this net­work­ing and audi­ence peer-to-peer inter­ac­tion, And wow, what a change. Del­e­gates on these new plat­forms can sit togeth­er in groups of five, use social media tools to con­nect, move around the space and see every­one else there. This now includes our own mem­bers’ space we have chris­tened the #Dig­iLounge.

Creating new, inclusive communities

Most excit­ing­ly, com­mu­ni­ties of design­ers and users have sprung up around the new plat­forms and these groups are mak­ing week­ly improve­ments, updates, new fea­tures offer­ing extra­or­di­nary lev­els of cre­ativ­i­ty. I rec­om­mend you try them. Com­mu­ni­ties will rely far less on face-to-face meet­ings attempt­ing the serendip­i­ty we lost when we locked down.

Also, these new com­mu­ni­ties are inclu­sive, offer­ing access for those work­ing remote­ly, or for peo­ple in rur­al com­mu­ni­ties who don’t have the time or the funds to trav­el, and there is the reduced envi­ron­men­tal impact to con­sid­er. Being live and inter­ac­tive, del­e­gates can net­work in a nat­ur­al-feel­ing way. They can meet new peo­ple, lis­ten to great speak­ers and even take part in the Q&A, all from the com­fort of their home office.

The tru­ly vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty is com­ing of age in 2020 and for me will become the way to net­work, build con­nec­tions and bump into serendip­i­ty for pro­fes­sion­al com­mu­ni­ties.

Dig­i­tal Lead­ers Week, the UK’s largest online gath­er­ing of those lead­ing dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, takes place from Octo­ber 12 to 16

Leaders must rethink organisation’s purpose

How lockdown led to greater trust

Building virtual communities

Lockdown has created new ways to network