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Something to think about for your organization as a leadership team that will help you build more cohesive, stronger culture:

How to lead and manage remote and hybrid working teams in this return to work, post-COVID, new-normal era.

It was important before all this COVID and remote teams and figuring stuff out, but it's even more important now, and that is this: visibility.

This is about your top-level leadership being visible to the rest of your team & organization.

The executive leadership team inside an organization should be incredibly visible to the rest of your organization. Before COVID, you could get face time and interact with the VP, HR director, etc through casual hallway chats or run-ins.

Now, from the perspective of an employee, if you want to interact with anyone senior to you, you have to schedule an appointment with them, just to have an “informal Zoom call.”

There's no opportunity to network with higher-level leaders inside the organization unless you're intentionally setting that up.

Because that's awkward and executives could be like, "Why are you wasting my time?" it's really important for senior-level leaders to create visibility.

Companies already doing this well

I've heard about companies already doing this really well, creating a panel or a town hall where once a month or every other week, they set up an opportunity, a meet and greet, a Q & A, where senior-level leaders make themselves available, senior leaders are making themselves available to connect with, ask questions, just network and spend time.

Do I know how you should do this inside your organization? Absolutely not.

But here's an exercise for your leadership team to brainstorm ways.
Ask yourselves:

Are you being visible?
Do people have access to you?
What can you put in place to provide more access or visibility?

Get creative! What can you do, what can you put in place to create this kind of virtual environment?

It isn’t just about a Q&A, it's about the feeling of belonging to a team.

If the senior executive leadership team is the driving heart of the organization, if they're making decisions and doing things, you want to hear from them, you want to know who they are. And now that things are so remote, there's more of an opportunity to be seen, to be known, to get on a video call, to have personality and get people to kind of know who you are.

So it's about visibility and access to people, but it's also about telling the story.

That's a really powerful way in organizations that people can feel like they belong to something when they have access to senior leaders, and they feel like they know this person. It makes a huge impact when people feel like they've interacted with this person, they know about them and understand their personality.

Right now I'm hearing a lot of good stories about organizations who are really being intentional about that. They're making sure that senior-level leaders are visible, are accessible, they're creating opportunities where people can interact with different level leaders, if they’re interested.

Just start with a conversation with your leadership team and ask them, “Are we doing this? What creative ways can we come up with to create this kind of environment?"

It doesn't cost you anything except the time, but it's an easy way to build more cohesiveness, build more belonging.

That's it. Go be awesome.

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This article was created by Galen Emanuele for the #culturedrop. Free leadership and team culture content in less than 5 minutes a week. Check out the rest of this month's content and subscribe to the Culture Drop at https://bit.ly/culturedrop 

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