How to Be the Leader Your Team Needs Right Now

Something many people may not know about me?

I’m introverted. Even though I run an organization that’s all about helping women connect to one another, I need my space and my time.

Yet recently, someone made a comment to me that really shook me. They said:

It’s really easy to hide online.

For many, this “hiding” is entirely unintentional. It’s so easy to fade into the background in this virtual landscape, where you’re not in the office, popping by desks and having meetings with coworkers. These interactions aren’t just for extroverts - they’re important for everyone aiming to maintain their visibility at work.

As leaders, we must examine how that lack of in-person interactions in these past two years has affected our employees’ relationships with us — whether we’re their direct managers or senior leadership. Because in those same two years, we’ve seen women disappearing from the workplace and losing out on that relationship-building that’s so crucial for career growth.

One thing I’m really hopeful about is that we’ve seen so many of our workplace norms shattered. We didn’t just learn to work from home — we learned how to work from home. That learning process came with its bumps and bruises, but many workplaces have come out of it better for it.

Being an introvert, I often worry I’m not doing a good enough job reaching out to my team and staying up-to-date with them. That’s something I have to be really intentional about. I know many other managers in my shoes — both extroverts and introverts — who are running into the same problems in this virtual landscape.

If you’re in a leadership role, whether it’s managing one person or a cast of thousands, do you have processes in place to ensure you’re checking in with your employees? It’s your responsibility to ensure they don’t fade into the background by the very nature of remote work.

In order to not flood your calendar with coffee dates, some other ways to stay connected are:

• Attend team meetings. Joining a smaller team meeting gives you the chance to connect in a more intimate environment, to see how everyone is working and contributing, and to hear their ideas firsthand.
• Connecting doesn’t have to be another Zoom. Send a Slack/Teams message just to check in. Let your employees know you are thinking about them.
• Make it fun. If you have All Hands meetings or larger team meetings, carve out space for smaller breakouts focused on fun activities aimed at getting to know each other as humans.
• Don’t be afraid to share about your own life outside of work. It helps to humanize your relationship and gives freedom for others to do the same.

As we shift into a professional landscape very different from the one we lived in before COVID — in which many organizations are embracing remote and hybrid work as the future of work that they are — what are you doing to show up for your team? Having an answer to that question might just make or break your leadership in the years to come.