We’re a few weeks into the Coronavirus outbreak in the UK and as things begin to settle slightly, I’ve begun thinking about how I’ve handled managing a team during the crisis, what I’ve learned and what I’d do differently.

Adrenaline

The world went crazy. Work turned upside down. People were stockpiling bog roll. A frenetic energy seemed to build within us. Where does it go? How do you channel it?

If you’re spending eight or so hours a day working, what do you do with that nervous energy? What if you’re not busy? Worse, what if you’re at home and not busy but in every meeting and message and email you constantly hear from people about how manically they are? How does that make you feel?

From my own personal experience, the first two weeks were absolutely manic. I mean long hours, short notice, fast turnaround busy. Then the pace slackened a little for about four days. Then it ramped up again. Quickly.  The frenetic energy, however, never went away.

These peaks and troughs of workload, along with the restlessness can lead to emotionally challenging days. Big things are happening and you’re part of it and you feel like you’re contributing. Perfect. But when you’re not called upon, those big things continue and you’re not contributing and you can feel shut out. It’s difficult on a personal level, and it’s even harder in terms of people management.

Personally, I was slow to cotton on to the issue until a conversation with a friend really unlocked it for me. Without that conversation, I’m not confident that I’d have picked up on it even now.

From a management perspective, I’ve found framing the issue as one of importance versus urgency has helped. That everyone’s role is important, but the urgency with which that work needs to be delivered moves around as the crisis unfolds. Different people and different teams are in the thick of it at different times, but at all times the work is important and valued. I’ve kept reiterating this message.

Prioritisation

One of the core skills of management is prioritisation. What’s urgent, what’s important, and what’s nice to have? These things should be pretty easy to identify. In a crisis situation, where things are changing quickly and there’s little reliable information, it can be harder. But I think the real issue is that urgent list can become long very quickly.

In recent weeks, I’ve discovered that real progress is only made if you’re able to clear the urgent list and knock some things off the important list. This is hard. It might mean long hours for a period. It also probably requires a lot of delegation. And, more productively, a hard look at what is genuinely urgent and genuinely important. This latter point will require a fair bit of upwards management.

There’s also an element of bravery involved. Many things will be urgent and, if you had the resource, you’d do them, but you don’t. So make the call that they’re not going to happen. This is important. It prevents burn out, both personal and team. It also protects quality of output; tired, stretched teams do not produce good work. Prioritising isn’t just about the order of things, it’s about saying, “No.”

It’s important to remember here that prioritising things isn’t productive or an outcome in itself. It’s a skill to aid productivity. So if you’re wondering whether or not you’re prioritising things well at the moment, ask yourself if you feel like you’re making progress.

Resilience

Are you coping? And I don’t mean, “Is the work getting done?”

Too often resilience is synonymous with toughness or persistence, but this is unnecessarily macho. If you’re resilient, you can take the knocks because you and your set up are able to recognise and adjust to the setbacks and the pressure.

That means recognising the signs of fatigue and stopping. It means switching off and not thinking about work. Resilience is about keeping yourself productive over the long run. It means knowing there’s a limit to the late-nighters and the challenges you can set as ‘growth opportunities’. It doesn’t mean shielding your team from a heavy workload by doing it yourself, or delegating so much work that your team breaks.

Personally, after the first three weeks, I recognised that I was running on empty and took three days off. I’ve encouraged my team to take time off, even at short notice. These are challenging times. People come first. Work comes second.

Breaking through the screen

It’s hard to sense the tension in the Zoom. It’s even harder to sense the tension outside the Zoom. How do you manage people if you don’t know how they feel? Well, part of that is down whether you were managing people well before the crisis. Regardless, it’s important to watch out for how your team are doing by keeping in touch more often than usual.

I’ve also taken to giving advice when it’s not been sought. This might be frustrating at times, and I try to not go overboard, but I think the messages of ‘look after yourself’ and ‘how are you feeling?’ and ‘make sure you’re switching off’ cannot be repeated too often at present.

I’d love to hear more views on this. How are you managing your team? What have you learned? What’s worked? What hasn’t? Equally, how have you been managed during the crisis? What’s grated? What’s helped. Give me a shout over on twitter @kchadda.

Optimistic corporate purposes are white-washing reality.

The last few years have seen the eulogising of purpose. And I applaud this. I’ve written before of how worthy an idea purpose is. I do, however, find it surprising how many companies have, after extensive soul searching, settled on a purpose that basically says they’re going to save the planet and help people.

These are noble sentiments and it would be churlish to question them. But I hope it’s not bad form to suggest that some companies are getting a little ahead of themselves. They keep talking about the destination but the journey isn’t really clear.

The silencing power of say-do gaps

Let’s take a recent example. Companies have rediscovered their love of an international day. These calendar dates, once the preserve of activists and the occasional internal comms memo, have become a core part of every company’s corporate narrative.

For International Women’s Day, there was a flood of posts from companies across all sectors talking about the brilliance of many women who work for them. It doesn’t take much effort for the slightly curious to look up the gender pay gap reporting of these firms and wonder why, if they value female employees so much, they don’t pay them the same as men?

The rhetoric is ahead of the reality. But few will speak up and call it out. Activists and the disgruntled might. However, those without a platform or an agenda won’t. Employees (current and future) won’t, because it would be career limiting. Suppliers won’t, because it could be commercially costly. There is a cacophony of silence around these crowing corporate announcements that is troubling.

Cheap talk costs reputations

Mental health is another case in point. Recently, a lot companies have picked up on mental wellbeing as a talking point. Yet a huge amount of survey evidence exists to say that workers are more stressed than ever.

I’m being careful not to name names here (see my previous point about dissension being career-limiting). But I am concerned that this constant, incessant positivity seems to fly in the face of reality.

Is all really for the best in these the best of all corporations?

No, of course it isn’t. Companies are full of people with good intentions doing good things but inevitably bad things happen. There are side-effects and unintended consequences. We might not like them but we cannot wish them out of existence.

And even if people don’t call you out on it, they are thinking it. It is costing companies in trust and reputation. People don’t always tell you that they think less of you.

I suspect one of the reasons these positive messages roll forward so readily is the low cost of owned channels, particularly corporate websites, where firms can say what they want. So they do. And it turns out what they want to say is anodyne, self-serving drivel.

It’s a lazy shorthand for saying, “people I’m better than.”

Godwin’s law states that the longer an online conversation goes on the probability of some comparing someone to the Nazis approaches 1. For Twitter, you can be fairly sure that the for any illiberal tweet that trends, a pejorative Daily Mail comment will feature in the first five replies.

This denigration of Daily Mail readers stems from what we might politely call the paper’s strong views. It also feeds off the idea that we are a divided nation. But this latter view is wrong.

As 2019’s Ofcom News Consumption Survey shows, very few people consume just one type of media. At a platform level, there’s huge crossover.

Indeed, as the below chart shows, the average person consumes 6.7 different sources of news from across different platforms. Minority Ethnic respondents used the highest number of sources at 8.2.

Interestingly, ABC1s (the more educated and skilled socioeconomic group) used 7.5 sources of news. The latest figures I could find, said that around two-thirds (65%) of the Mail’s readership was ABC1s. So the majority of Mail readers get their news from multiple sources. They’re not Mail readers, they are more interesting than that.

When we look at what the Mail’s readers think of it; a third (34%) don’t believe it’s accurate, 3 in 10 (29%) don’t believe it’s high quality, and half (48%) don’t believe it’s impartial.

And that’s for the print edition, when you go to the online edition (which has a much larger readership) three in five (61%) do not believe it’s accurate. Two in five (39%) online Mail readers say it helps them make up their mind.

So, in summary, Mail readers do not single source their news, they don’t believe what it says en masse, and they don’t necessarily adopt its opinions.

None of this should be taken as an argument that the Mail isn’t negative or that it doesn’t exert an influence over Britain’s national conversation. Of course, at times, it is and it does. However, its readers are not a uniform group. People should stop belittling them.

My 2020 audiobook round up proved popular, so I thought I’d provide a monthly update of what I’m listening to. If you’ve got suggestions for books I should look up, give me a shout over on Twitter.

Month in numbers

How Brands Grow: What Marketers don’t Know, Byron Sharp

Sharp’s language is certainly, err, sharp. He gets straight to his point: that a lot of marketing truths are merely received wisdom. He then goes on to expound his immutable laws of marketing. I’m a natural sceptic (I try not to be but it always comes out in the end) and yet, at the end of this book, I find myself in agreement with much of Sharp’s analysis. I draw a line at accepting there are laws of marketing beyond trading standards.

I do, however, accept that much of the current received wisdom is wrong, that for inexplicable reasons it persists, and that clever marketers will reassess these things and really look at the data.

Sharp’s not a believer in tight segments but he is big on using data and evidence to prove his point. This is all good stuff. In particular, his analysis of efficiency and loyalty are worth engaging with. The take down of loyalty programmes is particularly good and convincing.

Now, some books don’t suit audio, this is particularly so for those that constantly refer to charts. This book seems to reference something you’re supposed to look up in the accompanying PDF every 10 minutes or so. Guess what, I’m zooming by Basingstoke at 70mph, I can’t really look away. It wouldn’t be sensible.

Additionally, the narration is in a monotone, hard-to-place, American accent. It sucked the nuance and rhythm out of the writing. Nonetheless, I persevered. To really get to grips with the ideas, I think I might buy a hard copy.

White King: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr, Leanda de Lisle

I follow Leanda de Lisle on Twitter and once read a tweet about Charles I being seen as a martyr in parts of Ireland. I’d done the Tudors and Stuarts at school (like everyone else) and I’m a regular visitor to Hampton Court, but I’d never heard this. So I bought the book and am very glad I did.

It puts the whole English civil war period into context. It shows Charles I in a light I’d never seen him in. He wasn’t all personal vanity and heavy spending. A man of some character, principle and sharpness of mind. At the same time, he is in parts hugely naive, overly trusting and seems to lurch by overcompensating for mistake by making another at the opposite extreme.

The splits within the parliamentarians were also quite interesting. With the King’s safety seemingly assured until very late in the day.

The use of propaganda, particularly through songs, is a reminder of how much our current issues around truth are nothing new.

There is probably a Brexit analogy to be wrested from this tale of a country split, but it would be cheap and superficial so I won’t waste my time.

Overall, thoroughly enjoyable and educational to boot.

The Spy and the Traitor, Ben MacIntyre

I’m not really one for spy thrillers. Love them as movies, not so much as books. This was recommended by someone who reads widely and voraciously. It is very good.

The true story of a KGB officer who defects to MI6. He’s affected by, and plays a critical role in some truly historic moments. He’s discovered, captured, interrogated and ultimately… Well, I won’t ruin it for you.

The narration is a little self-satisfied. The tone very much makes British spies sound like the heirs of Blackadder’s Lord Flasheart. But that doesn’t really take away from what is a truly gripping tale.

Definitely worth a listen.