Are you and your team still working part-time? Here’s a quick refresher on our management culture and key skills to support your employees during these strange times!

CARE–TRUST–LIBERATE: Remember our management values

CARE: More than ever, we need to take care of each other!

Pay attention to others, make time to speak to everyone individually so they can talk about how they feel or any difficulties to find the best way to deal with them.

TRUST: When we’re apart, trust must be the basis of our relations. It is a three-part process:

• Believe in others: Trust that we will all use our strengths to handle this situation
• Trust others: Trust that others want and are able to adapt and will do their best
• Be confident: Trust in the future and our ability to come back together

LIBERATE: Given this new and uncertain situation, freeing up energy for innovation is a key to success.

Creating the right conditions to support individual and collective initiatives to adapt well is essential. 

To implement these management principles, the following four interpersonal and situational skills are extremely useful.

Authentic and enthusiastic:

Be honest – Be aligned in mind, body and spirit – Be energising

It’s not always easy to be honest with your teams and to energise them when you are destabilised by an experience yourself. What can you do?

• Step 1: Take the time to connect to your impressions and feelings by asking yourself a few questions: How is this period affecting me? Is it stimulating for me, or worrying? A little of both? What does my energy feel like?
• Step 2: Identify your resources, both internal and external, to re-centre yourself and create positive energy: give yourself time to recharge, confide in someone you trust about your feelings, etc.

Agile:

If there is one skill that we really need to work on in these uncertain times, it is our agility as it applies to ÏDKIDS, i.e. the ability to:

Be welcoming and demonstrate openness – Everyone is entitled to make a mistake – Connect and synchronise

• Step 1: Welcome this unavoidable situation and identify what you can control and what you cannot control.
• Step 2: Ask yourself how this situation can be an opportunity for you, your team and the company and what role you and your team can play.
• Step 3: Create the right conditions to support collective intelligence within your team to adapt and innovate.

=> Set your sights on clear group and individual objectives.

=> Create new remote rhythms and habits for the group to maintain ties and communication.

=> Encourage a sense of initiative and support new ideas

 Available and instructive:

Be there, here and now, with others – Manage through active listening, asking questions and rewording (think like a coach) – Give meaning

Paradoxically, during this confinement period, it can be difficult to remain available for your teams, especially if you’re at home with family having to juggle your kids’ schooling and everyday responsibilities. This is why it is so important to create new individual rhythms and habits with each member of your team. Work together to choose a time that works best so you can be fully present during these times.

And always remember to give yourself time to reconnect to yourself before talking to others.

These individual discussions should not be exclusively about work. Let your employees talk about how they are, how they’re managing at home, or any difficulties they’re facing to get their work done.

This is the time to work on all your manager-coach techniques: listening, asking questions, rewording. Remember the iceberg technique: don’t start working on solutions until after you’ve fully understood the depth of the issue at hand. And if your employee comes up with solutions, all the better!

Assertive:

Dare to say – Understand and express your emotions – Respect others when you speak 

Despite all your best efforts to stay connected to your teams and enhance collaboration, there may be times when you have mixed feelings about one of your employees after a issue arises, such as missed deadlines, a lack of availability for individual check-ins, lack of transparency, etc.

It’s important that you express how you feel to prevent the issue snowballing over time and to ensure your objectives are met.

One especially helpful technique is: OFNA

• Observe: talk about facts – and only facts – without judgment: “I’ve observed…”
• Feel: talk about how you feel about a situation: “In this situation, I feel that or I feel…”
• Need: express what you need to not feel that way: “Because I need…
• Ask: get your employee to agree to improve the situation and work together to identify the reasons behind the issue to find appropriate solutions.

In the end, these unusual times are proving that our management culture is relevant to address the challenges we’re facing today.

Take care ! 🙂