New Buzzword Alert: Leadership Redevelopment.

Two things: First, I care deeply about workplace well-being. Second, reskilling, upskilling, developing, training, whatever you like to call it, getting leaders the knowledge they require is the most crucial organizational hurdle to success in the remote and hybrid workplace. This might seem obvious to some, but here is my case.

Trust, community and communication are the most foundational components of healthy, productive workplace cultures. In a nutshell, organizations exist to accomplish shared goals. A community is a label we give to a group with something in common. A workforce is a community. It needs enough people of exemplary character with the right skill sets; let's imagine that is in place. That community forms a network of individuals and subgroups of individuals. Trust is what binds and connects that community. The network loosens if trust bonds are low and critical connections weaken or break. When trust is high, the network is strengthened and orderly, more capable of acting efficiently.

When working towards a common goal, individuals require Information. Communication is how we move Information across our network. It needs to be accurate and timely, amongst other things. When trust bonds are high, Information flows efficiently across our community. We receive Information; if we trust the source, we immediately activate the Information and pass it along intact. When trust bonds are weak, communication slows down and breaks apart. We receive Information; if we don't trust the source, we question it, consider it, choose not to pass it along, or clutter it with our opinion if/when we pass it along. Information is constantly degraded in low-trust environments, causing us to waste energy we can't afford. We are only efficient if we have enough or the correct information. When we are less efficient, we either get less done or have to add more energy, more people, or more time to accomplish our goals. It is challenging for people to remain healthy when they work in inefficient workplaces. Trust is a social lubricant for success and supports workplace well-being.

We need trust to be healthy in the workplace.

In their 2017 HBR article on the Neuroscience of Trust, Author Paul Zak lays out the best case I've seen. I highly recommend you read it. They drew blood from a workforce to gauge trust levels by measuring neurotransmitter levels (don't try this at home). It's a rock-solid proxy, far better than employee self-report. Below is the evidence they present for the impact of high-trust workforces.

Leadership Development

For the past 75 years, we've been studying, honing and improving our understanding of leadership and management skills. Everything we learned was derived from in-person experience. We knew the importance of building healthy and productive communities. In-person. We recruited talent and trained skills. In-person. We began to understand the importance of solid relationships, and as we did, we began to understand the importance of trust. We built it all in person.

Communication has been improving at the actual speed of light. This means the quantity of communications we send and receive has grown equally. If we receive 10X as much Information, what happens if trust is low in our workplace community? We get 10X of the problem that we used to have. Communication will always be critical to leadership success.

In the age of Hybrid and remote work, It is no leader's fault that they are unsure how to build and maintain a healthy community, develop trusted relationships and communicate to optimize success. The change to remote and hybrid has been thrust upon us faster than any in our career. But unfortunately, only some skills and tactics we developed in person translate directly into hybrid and remote working environments.

Leaders need to learn these new and modified skills for our hybrid and remote organizations. Leaders need to be redeveloped. And so we need to teach them. We should assume we won't get it right all at once, so we need to measure how we are doing and communicate what we're learning to maintain the trust of our communities as we go.

Leadership Redevelopment is the biggest hurdle to organizational success in the post covid era. I care deeply about workplace well-being; we need to retrain 100% of leaders to expect to have healthy people to lead.