Leaders lead. Find your way to be available to anyone. Be visible and be accountable.
With change comes new thinking and uncertainty. So, what feels like opportunity to you, might feel disquieting for your team. Great leaders find lots of ways to be available and accessible to everyone in their business. Here’s a tactic you might like to add to the mix.
Set aside one hour a week for anyone to speak to you in private. Put it in your calendar and make sure people know why it is there. Be consistent – don’t chop and change the day or time.
Give people time to share their thoughts. Often people just want a little information or some reassurance. If there’s a bigger issue, schedule time to discuss it more thoroughly and perhaps with the right people in the room.
With more people working outside the office, this becomes more important and easier to arrange than ever. Video chats also have the advantage of being very discrete (it’s not like following the CEO into a meeting room and closing the door).
There are lots of ways to coordinate this. In the past I just asked people to email me and I’d arrange a time. I’d keep it out of the company calendars just for privacy reasons. With video chats, you can flag yourself as busy and let people join a virtual queue.
There’s a very interesting and short article about leadership here, from HBR