COVID-19 blew up everything we thought we knew about work. Leaders now have an opportunity to reset and shape their cultures for the better.
IT’S TUESDAY MORNING and the project report you requested from your subordinate David is late. You needed it yesterday and you still don’t have it. As the leader, it’s your job to be in control, to set expectations and ensure everything runs smoothly. You call David into your office and explain that you will be setting up biweekly meetings to ensure that his projects stay on target. You are doing what you must as a leader: re-establishing control over the situation.
Question: Did you ask David why he didn’t submit the report on time? And even if you did, what did you do to help him meet his deadline?
Many of us treat leadership like a thermostat: We carefully monitor everything our subordinates do, and whenever there is a deviation from the expected ‘temperature,’ we take corrective action — turning the thermostat up or down to maintain equilibrium through punishment, discipline or increased monitoring. Equilibrium is restored.
No one is to blame for thinking about leadership in this way. This is how we were taught to be effective leaders, and this approach was modelled for us by many of our own bosses. If we don’t behave this way, things will quickly spiral out of control. Chaos will ensue, and we will have failed as leaders. But, this ‘thermostat approach’ to leadership creates an illusion of control — the idea that we can control our subordinates’ every action and behaviour while they’re at work. We can’t.
When you approach leadership with this mindset, you create the perfect environment for some of the most destructive workplace behaviours to emerge. I call them the Four Dirty Ds: Dis trust, Deviance, Dissatisfaction and Disengagement. And when they show up, value creation goes out the window.
Most leaders never stop to consider how their subordinates view their behaviour. But rather than seeing corrective actions as ‘my leader trying to stave off chaos,’ employees take it instead as a clear signal that you don’t trust them. Let’s be honest: When the world went remote in March of 2020, how many of us were concerned about people slacking off and productivity taking a nosedive? Were you one of the leaders who responded by monitoring people in one form or another? Did you engage in more frequent check-ins? Lots of leaders did; but unwittingly, they were sending a dangerous signal to their subordinates.
Every employee in your organization wants and needs to have some sense of control.
Once distrust creeps in, it opens the door for the other three Ds — particularly dissatisfaction and disengagement. If your subordinates don’t trust you — or worse, if they think you don’t trust them — it’s a recipe for increased dissatisfaction. Let’s face it, no one would be happy about being more closely monitored and controlled. Employees resent such actions, and their response is to disengage and start doing the bare minimum demanded of them. Nothing more and nothing less.
More bad news: If your illusion of controlled you to engage in increased monitoring through electronic surveillance or other means during the pandemic, your subordinates likely responded by finding ways to avoid the ‘gaze’ you put in place. Maybe they tried to trick the system or fudge the numbers. In short, they likely become deviant — directly, to evade your monitoring or indirectly, to enhance their outcomes.
The truth of the matter is that every employee in your organization — even those without managerial responsibilities — wants and needs to have some sense of control. And if they have to get it by engaging in deviance, they will.
Creating a Culture of Trust
One good thing that has emerged from the pandemic is that it has allowed all of us to take a step back from the daily grind of commuting, presenteeism and our frantic daily routines to re-assess what we actually want from our jobs. And make no mistake, the vast majority of employees don’t want to go back to the way things were.
This quest for meaning in one’s life and work isn’t new. It was always there, but few people had the luxury of free time or mind space to even consider what it meant for them; which is precisely why so many employees were disheartened, disenfranchised and downright dissatisfied by their work prior to the pandemic. Over the past 30 months, we have seen glimpses of what work could be, and many of us are now determined to get closer to what it can be for us. In many ways, employees have become the controllers of their own ‘thermostats’ and are making adjustments to find their own individual equilibrium in the new world of work. Following are three principles for leaders to embrace going forward:
RETHINK WHAT IT MEANS TO BE ‘PRESENT’ AT WORK. We all need to rethink whether physical presence will ever matter again. Should you care if your employees are sitting at their desks between the hours of nine and five? Or should we accept that people deserve the flexibility and autonomy to work how they want and when they want, as long as they deliver? The fact is, even when people are in the office where you can see them, that doesn’t mean they are being productive and efficient. Even if we all eventually go back to the office more frequently, rethinking ‘presenteeism’ will be beneficial.
WORKING FROM HOME WORKS. While we were all working from home, we learned something very important: productivity didn’t take a nosedive. In fact, many of us realized that we were actually more productive in this new environment. The time has come to examine and check our biases around our workplace beliefs and alter them to fit the new landscape of work.
DROPPING THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL WILL GO A LONG WAY TOWARDS CREATING A CULTURE OF TRUST. Instead of watching the clock or monitoring your subordinates electronically, your only concern should be whether projects are being delivered on time and at high quality. When you adapt this mindset, you are signalling to people something that is priceless: that you trust them. Academically speaking, this involves a process called ‘working self-concept activation,’ whereby a leader’s behaviour elicits the same behaviour in their followers. Put simply, if I trust you, you are more likely to trust me.
Research shows that with increased trust comes increased tenacity, perseverance and a sense of increased responsibility for one’s work. In addition, when people feel intrinsically motivated to do their jobs (versus being extrinsically motivated by rewards or punishment), the quality of the work improves dramatically. Furthermore, with trust comes truth: The majority of people will be honest and forthright if they feel trusted and ‘psychologically safe.’ If they feel they can come to you with their problems — professional or personal — they are not likely to engage in deviance to restore some control, because they won’t need to do so anymore.
Most importantly, with trust, people are much more likely to find meaning in their jobs. It’s no surprise that people have been leaving jobs in droves over the past two years and searching for new ones with more meaning. And no one will find meaning in a job where their leader tries to control their every move.
Are You a Good Leader?
I suspect that deep down, unless you really do lack a sense of self-awareness (and many people do), you know whether your subordinates trust you and think you are a good leader. By ‘good,’ I mean someone who fosters a culture where people feel safe coming to you not only with problems, but with new ideas. I mean someone who helps people achieve their goals and find meaning in their work.
Many leaders don’t think about it much, but a key part of their responsibility is helping subordinates understand how their jobs contribute to the organization’s goals. When I was 17, I got a job at a Sears warehouse to make some money for university. This warehouse was gigantic, and my first task was to sweep it all. It took me three days. And on day four, I was so bored that I quit. If someone had only told me that my sweeping ‘contributed to the safety of everyone in the warehouse,’ I might have lasted a few more days, but probably not. That job was awful; not every job can be made meaningful; but most can.
To be a better leader, you just might have to change — or at least shift — your culture. And you have the perfect opportunity right now to try and shape it for the better. Creating a culture of trust that blends remote and in-person activities should be at the top of every leader’s agenda. How will you ensure that everyone has the same opportunities and finds meaning in their work, regardless of whether they’re working remotely or in the office?
Before I attempt to answer that, we need to understand what organizational culture is. In the 1980s, MIT Psychologist Edgar Schein came up with a definition of culture: A pattern of basic assumptions that are invented, discovered or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration.
Big sigh. That’s the long-winded academic definition, but what it basically means is that culture is ‘the way we do things around here.’ It’s the song sheet that everyone goes by, and it helps to reduce uncertainty and anxiety because it indicates how we’re supposed to behave and act — particularly in new or challenging situations.
Schein went on to develop a model for understanding organizational culture that divides it into three distinct levels:
LEVEL ONE: ARTIFACTS. These are the overt and obvious elements of your organization. These are things even an outsider can see, such as office layout, dress norms and inside jokes. Yes, foosball and free food are also artifacts. While artifacts can be easy to observe, they are sometimes difficult to understand, especially if your analysis of a culture never goes any deeper. The Palo Alto office of IDEO famously has an airplane wing jutting out from one wall — a surprising and puzzling artifact if one doesn’t understand the firm’s culture of playful experimentation and free expression. The question is, do artifacts still hold any meaning after the pandemic? Does anyone care about foosball or free food anymore?
LEVEL TWO: ESPOUSED VALUES. These are your organization’s declared set of values and norms. These are often reinforced in a publicly visible list of core values, but they also take the form of common phrases and norms that individuals repeat often. Herb Kelleher was famous for responding to a variety of proposals from his Southwest colleagues with the phrase ‘low-cost airline,’ reaffirming the espoused value of affordability.
LEVEL THREE: SHARED BASIC ASSUMPTIONS. These are the beliefs and behaviours that are so deeply embedded that they often go unnoticed. These are the essence of a culture and manifest themselves in a variety of ways. Sometimes they’re reflected in espoused values and artifacts, sometimes not. But when these basic organizational assumptions don’t align with an organization’s espoused values, trouble arises. Consider that Enron produced a 64-page manual outlining its mission and core values. Judging by its highly ‘creative’ accounting practices, it is questionable whether the people at the top had ever even read it.
This is forced evolution: we have no choice but to change.
On my campus at the University of Toronto Scarborough, the vision statement is ‘inspiring inclusive excellence,’ which sounds amazing — and most organizations have similarly great sounding vision statements. We espouse inclusive excellence as our basic assumption, but the next questions become, how is that expressed in our values and daily behaviours? What do our processes and approaches to problem-solving say about our espoused culture of inclusive excellence? These are things that need to be explored and understood.
After I completed my Master’s degree and before I started my PhD, I worked for two very different management consulting firms: One was located in a converted farmhouse north of Toronto, where everyone dressed casually and interacted informally with each other, and the espoused goal was to ‘help leaders succeed’; the other was located in downtown Toronto in a very formal office environment where everyone wore suits and engaged in very structured and standardized activity. The arti facts presented by these firms signalled very different outward manifestations of culture. But as I would find out, the cultures were not very different at all. These firms actually shared the same underlying values and assumptions that guided their behaviours. In a nutshell, for both, it was all about making money. Lots of money.
It isn’t always easy to decipher whether artifacts are an accurate reflection of a culture. Leaders must pay attention to this and spend time clarifying the values and assumptions they expect to see. Importantly, they must also model these things.
Your subordinates are always watching: You need to overcome your fear of chaos and making mistakes. People will respect you for trying to make things better, even if it doesn’t always work out; they won’t respect you for towing the company line and being the guardian at the gate. That’s the thermostat model of leadership.
In Closing
COVID-19 blew up everything we thought we knew about work. But I encourage readers to use it as a catalyst for changing how we do just about everything. This is a perfect example of forced evolution, where we have no choice but to change. As a leader, you must articulate your new direction and share a new set of assumptions. And wherever possible, you must address old myths and stories and create new rituals, symbols and artifacts to shape the new culture you want to create.
Once we accept that leadership is an illusion and embrace the idea that we can’t treat it like a thermostat, we can get to work on helping people find meaning in their work. We can look at how we can change our cultures for the better to give people more meaning, autonomy and freedom, while enabling them to accomplish their goals.
David Zweig is a Professor of Organizational Behaviour and HR Management and Interim Vice Dean of Recruitment, Enrolment and Student Success at the University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus. He holds a cross-appointment to the OB and HR Management area at the Rotman School of Management and served as chair of the Management Department at UTSC from 2011-2020.
This article was published for the Rotman Management Magazine.
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