When leading based on gut feelings no longer works

Sabrina is a good manager. Over the years, she has developed an excellent intuition for her employees and leads with "brain and heart". She is no stranger to clear goal setting and empathy. Then came the pandemic, and with it home office, hybrid work and video calls. Lots of video calls. And all of a sudden, intuition got the better of her. The "grip" on her employees' situation is lost. Leadership becomes cumbersome for the first time. So what can be done? How can data-driven leadership help facilitate leading in remote and hybrid settings?

Step 1: What actually enables "classic" leadership?

It's indisputable that leaders in office settings have a huge amount of informal information at their disposal. In team meetings, I can see the facial expressions, body language and intonation of all employees. In conversations, I can flexibly ask questions and intervene without interrupting the natural flow of the conversation.

From this I learn a lot about the general mood, but also about progress, capacities and blockers. In 1:1 meetings with my employees, I receive direct information about the professional and private environment, can give space for upward feedback and also ask questions. I also get a feeling for capacities and challenges and can react accordingly.

Good managers absorb all this informal information consciously and subconsciously. They form the basis for intuition and decisions.

Step 2: Why does this no longer work so well in the home office?

In home office or hybrid structures, direct contact typically takes place either in video calls or in writing via e-mail, Slack or MS Teams. Everyone who has ever tried to solve a disagreement via Messenger knows how much contextual information is lost in written communication. But information is also lost in video calls (especially: group calls). Cameras stay off, conversation starters are harder to find, and facial expressions and body language are only visible to a very limited extent.

Combined, all of these factors often lead to an information gap and a lack of closeness to the team. The first impulse of many managers to close this gap is therefore: more video calls? The result: zoom fatigue and further declining productivity.

Step 3: Data-based, asynchronous leadership

The conceptual solution here is to asynchronize data collection and make informal information explicit. We would like to illustrate what we mean by this using the example of three elements of effective leadership.

Monitoring:

No matter what target system we use: in a traditional management environment, I always have the option for short check-ins - either with the entire team, or by briefly going to Anna's desk and asking where she stands.

In a hybrid environment, such an unannounced "short" video call would be extremely disruptive. It is better to place meetings at the beginning and end of a project or sprint ("kickoff" & "retrospective" in agile jargon) and rely on digital solutions in between to make collaboration and goal progress visible.

The OKR method has proven itself for this type of collaboration. This way, each team member always has an overview of who is where at any given time and whether follow-up is required.

Team collaboration:

It sounds banal, but: in home office there is no room for team lunch or a quick coffee break to brainstorm. But these are precisely the occasions when you often get a maximum of informal information. Jane has to take care of sick relatives right now? Max is making slow progress because his computer can't access the VPN network? Creating a forum for this exchange via "informal" video call is very, very difficult.

The solution? Don't trust that the information will come up in the synchronous exchange (=conversation), but ask for it asynchronously and explicitly. This is where short Team Barometer pulse checks have proven their worth - short surveys of 3-5 minutes maximum that capture the most important collaboration parameters and make them available for team calls. This allows you to focus on the most important aspects (where are blockers? How is the work-life balance?) without everyone in the team having to tell you once a week in a video call how they are currently doing.

Individual leadership:

It's a very similar story with individual collaboration. If I, as a manager, can no longer discuss important things with my employees over a quick coffee and get a feeling for their current mood, then I need to turn that feeling into explicit data. A short track measurement - our name for operational upward feedback - can work wonders here.

Having employees briefly answer three specific questions about collaboration, satisfaction and prioritization once a week is enough. Impulses that I can then clarify in a direct conversation. Again, ideally asynchronous, so that employees can integrate the answers into their daily work wherever it suits them best.

Step 4: The right tools

As a provider of a SaaS solution for automated, agile feedback from and for employees, as well as OKR management, we map the use cases mentioned above with a focus on intuitive usability - so we are naturally biased.

But even abstracted from this, the aforementioned asynchronization of the collection of informal information can actually only be efficiently mapped through the use of digital tools. Because: in order to keep the manual effort as low as possible and to integrate the collection of asynchronous data as little disruptive as possible into the daily work routine, automation and agility are required.

Automation to relieve as much of the recurring work as possible, but above all to be able to map trends and changes through consistent and continuous data collection.

Agility in this context means, above all, deployment at the level of the actors who are most affected. Specifically, managers and teams should be able to control themselves what, how often, and in what visibility they collect information asynchronously - central control by HR would be costly, counterproductive, and not build trust here. And that is a good thing, because it allows HR to take on the role of impulse generator and partner.

Of course, implementation and integration into daily routines need a minute. Any tool is only as good as how it is used.

We believe that with our LoopNow solution we have excellently mastered this balance - broad applicability for data-based leadership in teams and ease of use. Why not book a no-obligation 30-minute demo and find out how you can already lead (more) data-based tomorrow!