New to managing a remote team? Three lessons from Radar, Space, and a Blind Professor to navigate these times.
When things change around us, we do get shocked and feel helpless. But if we are ready to adapt, then there are ways in which we can deal with it.
6 pm, May 25, 1917. Folkestone, Kent, England. It’s the height of World War I and British soldiers have been dying in the trenches of mainland Europe. Out of the blue, the screeching sound of German Gotha planes is heard overhead. The planes bomb this tiny town and its neighbourhood, killing almost a hundred people. It's a surprise attack that comes with an ominous warning: the war is leaving the battlefield and entering defenseless towns and cities.
Recognising this shift, the British government realises the country needs to counter this new threat with a strong air defense.
So here they are in the middle of a war, suddenly finding out that their existing tools are no longer enough.
The change has to come - it may not come in time for this war - but it is needed nevertheless.
Smart minds get together and start trying out very rudimentary, out-of-the-box things. Like giant horns pointing towards the coast to detect enemy planes early, monitored by the blind who are sharp listeners. Or giant balloons (called barrage balloons) that would raise steel cables around a city to prevent planes from reaching them. These concepts were primitive, but over time, Britain became really good at air defense.
By the time World War II came along, the Brits had devised and perfected radar. Despite a resurgent and ruthless German air force, the British could successfully fend off the blitzkrieg in the famous Battle of Britain. They could ‘see’ German bombers before they arrived. Prime Minister Winston Churchill said of the Royal Air Force: "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.". The same could be said of radar and its inventors.
The right mindset can help you overcome new threats
Just like the British who faced a completely new theater of attack, many of us feel lost and stunned in the remote-working and hybrid-working space. So what can we learn from this?
When things change around us, we do get shocked and feel helpless. But if we are ready to adapt, then there are ways in which we can deal with it. Here are some of the uncertainties and threats leaders and managers face in the remote / hybrid world:
I don't know whether my employees feel engaged.
I don't know if they're secretly interviewing with other people.
I don't know whether they are productive, or on the verge of burnout.
The fear makes us seek the safer shores of the times already gone: wishing things would go back to how they were earlier.
But imagine you are a military commander in WWI, seeing the end of cavalry and the rise of tanks and planes. Does it make sense to keep hoping that warfare would remain how it was 20 years ago, yearning for horses and bayonets? That's not how the world works. And we've got to learn to live with the new, and adapt.
It is like learning to use the radar, a technology completely alien to our intuitive senses. Radar essentially takes signals from radio detecting - sounds and other forms of similar kinds, and it turns it into a visual display that we have to learn to interpret. To be trained as a radar technician or to use it as an Air Traffic Controller is an extremely specialised job with very different tools that are nothing like anything else we use in life. Yet people learnt to use it effectively and now protect thousands of lives daily.
When new situations arise, we have to think beyond our default settings.
Now, imagine you run a team of astronauts out in space. They're not in front of you and you cannot be with them, no matter what. These are highly trained people who are far away. There's a big delay in your commands reaching them, and only then can they even act on it. So clearly, you can't micromanage them.
So astronauts are highly trained for the mission they have to accomplish. And contrary to most romantic notions of astronauts, most of their time is spent not floating around but in things like repairing parts of the space station or carrying out some research experiments with great diligence and patience.
Astronaut Scott Kelly became famous for spending a whole year in space and wrote extensively about his time there. When asked about what makes for good management practices for astronauts, he said agencies like NASA are good at picking people who have these mindsets:
They are trained to cope with adversity at close quarters.
They are good at avoiding or minimising conflict.
They are followers, and good teammates.
These behaviours are a mix of nature and nurture. Apart from choosing astronauts for their personalities, NASA also builds the right training and support system around them. They are taught how to deal with sources of conflict. They learn to build relationships with strangers (a critical component when the first time an American astronaut might rub shoulders with a Russian counterpart could be in the confines of the International Space Station!) Because they are isolated and away from family support, NASA helps the astronauts take care of their mental health. There are calls with psychiatrists and psychologists every couple of weeks. An entire set of activities is designed to help the astronauts hone the skills they would need.
Now NASA didn’t think of all these ideas overnight - they evolved over time. With every passing space programme there is a debrief, and a performance review. There are lessons to be learned and dealt with, making things better for the times to come later.
If astronauts and their managers can work together across large distances, so can you.
So if you're a manager of a team that has suddenly gone distributed, or you are working with people you never met in flesh and blood, what are the lessons that you can take from the likes of NASA and their astronauts?
How to manage teams without conflict, such that people are productive?
When people are working too far away for you to control at short notice, how can you influence them in an asynchronous, time-lagged situation, while also empowering them?
What can we learn from the experiences of your workforce to provide them with the right skills in the future, giving them the guidance that is necessary?
How can you help them prepare for an emergency, allowing them to deal with it because you are not going to be around to manage them?
This prof went blind in his 40s. Here is the thing that helped him adapt late in life.
John M Hull was a professor and a theologian. He went blind in his 40s. In his book Touching The Rock he speaks about the incredible shift he had to make so late in life. What did John Hull do?
Hull began focusing on sounds and learned about the richness of the aural world. While waiting at the underground train station, he noticed the differences in the sound of the wind around an approaching train versus a train leaving the station. Sighted people get new information when they turn their head in a new direction. For the visually impaired, sound information is usually the same. These kinds of insights led to Hull changing his approach to dealing with people. He realised it was best to be more specific in communicating with people, rather than rely on implicit cues. So Hull would demand a specific object be given to him rather than let people around him figure out what he wanted. There was much to learn and unlearn.
In a world where you can't see your fellow friends, coworkers or managers, what can we learn from the experiences of someone like John Hull? Perhaps that you have to ask for information very directly (albeit in a respectful manner), and with a lot of specificity than interpreting social cues or contextual cues. So the norms of how we communicate and of how we pay attention to the kinds of data around us, is going to be different.
These examples from the RAF, from NASA and its astronauts, and from experiences of people like John Hull lead me to give you three actionable takeaways for the fuzzy times of hybrid work.
1. Accept and adapt.
Be prepared to unlearn and relearn. Then you can quickly make peace with any situation and even flourish in the next 10-20 years. Remember that it took the British two decades to get things right. But because they started in the 1920s, by the time WWII came about, they were able to successfully defend their independence. So quickly accept that you will now always have some people - if not all - in your team working remotely, and it's time to make the changes you need. Like radars and air traffic controllers, start looking at different sources of information and find new ways to connect the dots.
2. Activate new sensors.
If the age of face-to-face won't hold true for everyone, you will have to take in information via other sensors. For instance, looking at things like: what is the tone of the person on your Slack channel; has it changed in any fashion? What is the pattern of work of a person? What are the new tools you and the others can adopt? The challenge for you, the human manager, is to effectively learn to use these tools and eagerly try them out.
3. Replace anxiety with curiosity.
Imagine you are someone in that British town who doesn’t know when the next air raid is going to happen or who's going to protect you. It is a non-life-threatening but equally uncertain scenario that leaders and managers face in the new world of hybrid / remote work. They don't know what's going to happen, whether they're going to keep their flock together. This can be paralysing. The step ahead? Replace your anxiety with curiosity and lean into the situation. Know that your old methods need to change and turn on that sense of curiosity. Go and read new things, learn, talk to people, find out what experiments others are trying.
Instead of feeling helpless, you can be like the makers of the early air defense systems, or like the astronauts, or like those who lost one sense, but compensated with new skills to overcome their life-altering hurdles. Adapt, activate and lean in with curiosity, and I'm sure like the users of radar, or the John Hulls, or the astronauts knocking on the door of Mars, you too will be successful in leading teams into the future.
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