Tech Life Be healthy

A Few Small Things You Can Do as a Leader

  • As much as possible, make sure to hold existing staff and 1:1 meetings as usual. Structure in these times of flux is critical.
  • Lots of folks have more family at home and will need to shift their schedule. Full support. Make it a non-issue for being off the grid for folks to focus on the most important thing – their family. Maybe a shared calendar so folks can flag themselves as off the grid without the stress?
  • A daily stand-up for your staff in your preferred conferencing solution. 15 minutes. No formal agenda, just checking in and saying hello.
  • If folks want to talk about world events during check-ins, that’s fine, but I’m deliberately avoiding that and focusing on the work because there’s already plenty of places to worry out there. If folks want to chat about it, that’s so very understandable.
  • For myself, I’m going full Benjamin Franklin and building mega-structure for myself from 9am to 6pm. This is both a coping control mechanism, but also a means to keep myself focused. My home office is full of interesting distractions.
  • Listen. What your team needs this week is different than what they need next week. The daily stand-up is your time to make sure that as folks adapt to this very unusual work set-up that they have time to raise their hands and ask for help.

Finally, and most importantly, as a leader, I’m aware that the expression on my face in a meeting tells everyone a lot about how it’s going. It’s not going well, but I’m choosing productive joy as my expression not because that how it’s going, but that is how I’d like it to be.

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