Mike Russell

Recently, Tom Meloche and I hosted several Remote Leadership Think Tanks.

We had heard rumblings about companies still having issues with remote/virtual work a year into the pandemic. So we decided to get data and find out what was really going on.

The results?

Yes, issues remain.

What are the issues?

The issues are mostly leadership issues, and less remote issues.

Only about 1 in 5 of the identified issues had to do with the “remote” part, and 4 out of 5 had to do with leadership, remote or not.

Ineffective leadership that existed before the pandemic apparently rarely improved and more often  got worse.

How is your company’s leadership doing?

We offer a free, quick assessment to help you identify major issue areas. Contact us to receive access to the questionnaire and the accompanying 30-minute briefing on results.

Below are questions that directly assess your effectiveness as a manager. Do you as a manager:

1. Want to manage people?
2. Use more than 2 of the 5 management approaches/styles for handling situations?
3. Prefer or tend to focus either on tasks/controlling OR on people/relating in situations?
4. Consistently excel in both productivity and satisfaction – your own, your co-workers, your reports, your customers, your owners/shareholders, and any other significant stakeholders?

How did you do?

Here is some perspective on each question:

[Read more…] about Quick 4 question self-check for your effectiveness as a manager

… internal organizational issues tend to remain the same.

Consider this list of work challenges from 20 years ago that I found when cleaning out some files:

• Slowness in responding to market and world changes + internal change resistance
• Slow execution
• Lack of focus and traction on strategic issues, including confusing strategic plans with strategy
• Poor (or no) performance management, leadership development, and succession planning
• Team (lack of) performance
• Process inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, especially for product and software development
• Inability to attract and keep talent
• Conflicting priorities or worse, no real priorities
• Multitasking to distraction and lack of results
• Need for innovation
• Too many meetings
• Burnout and overload

There were more, but you get the idea.

How many of these look familiar? For example, how many times have you heard “how can we go faster”? Or had your calendar loaded with so many ineffective meetings that you couldn’t get any work done?

Don’t treat symptoms … look for root causes and make real, sustainable changes this year – don’t wait another year!