Lawyer Monthly Magazine - September 2021 Edition

Chris, I believe that you and Josie have just been involved in a project on this topic in collaboration with London Business School. How did that come about? Chris: Josie and I both run independent executive coaching practices and have worked very well together on coaching briefs like this in the past. I was invited as an alumnus of LBS and now I’m part of their Alumni Career Coaching team to co-create a pilot leadership webinar aimed at senior executive alumni. It felt natural to bring Josie into the mix on this topic because she is a great communication coach and complements my background in finance. So, what did you learn from this exercise? Josie: So many golden nuggets came out of it! I don’t think that any business would have signed up to mass hybrid working as an experiment unilaterally, however, we were all thrust into the pandemic regardless. Collaborating with other leaders in this webinar produced some great insights into the challenges of adapting business models to suit current circumstances. With so many factors and permutations to consider, it provided the leadership cohort that participated a real opportunity to a) air & debate the challenges and b) share best practices in finding possible solutions from their collective experiences. Chris: It was indeed a fascinating session. Hybrid working is not exactly a new concept for leaders to handle, but since the pandemic employees have experienced, en masse, the flexibility that hybrid working offers and quite reasonably want it to continue in some form. Subsequently, how can leaders - globally - maintain business effectiveness and cohesion while at the same time allowing employees greater flexibility in how they work? It’s a huge question. However, there are two factors at play here, employees working a) away from the office and also b) asynchronously. The latter may be the greater challenge. Hybrid working isn’t going away, so the difference between winning and losing in this new world order will be measured by the speed at which leaders are able to adapt their business models effectively. The upside of course is that, for agile leaders who can embrace this coming of (the digital) age, there’s a huge opportunity to listen, learn, adapt, and grow in spite of the pandemic. In this new hybrid culture of work, if you had to put the main challenges companies are facing into distinct categories, what would those be? Josie: Chris and I spent a long time researching and soliciting feedback on this question in preparation for the webinar. Thankfully, as you might imagine, there is also some great empirical research that has been done on the pandemic’s impact as it unfolds. From our perspective in the context of team leadership, the primary challenges boil down to three Cs: Culture, Communication & Connection. • How clearly is the Culture being defined & understood in your business? • How much is Connection embracedandencouragedwithin your business? • How much does the leadership facilitate open, two-way Communication at all levels and acrosstheorganisationandreally listen to the feedback? Chris: Yes, absolutely. It’s the combination of firm Culture also cast as vision & purpose; Connection, specifically in terms of active engagement; and effective Communication across the whole organisation from the top down which actively embraces the best of what technology can offer. The obvious challenge for leaders in a "Hybrid working is not exactly a new concept for leaders to handle, but since the pandemic employees have experienced, en masse, the flexibility that hybrid working offers and quite reasonably want it to continue in some form." 32 WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM | SEP 2021 LEADERSHIP IN A HYBRID WORKING WORLD