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When COVID hit, as a leader working remotely at Cisco, I immediately started thinking about my team. How would we handle working together through quarantine? How do successful managers operate during times of crisis? How would we maintain our team culture when we weren’t sure when we’d see each other again? Like many managers, I scrambled to find ways to support my direct reports at first — I loosened deadlines and I sent each team member a LEGO kit, and they appreciated both — but like everyone else, in the early days, I thought my responses would be temporary. As the pandemic wore on, I adapted my management style with the assumption that this might just be our new normal at work.
Now, more than a year later, I’ve found that many of the changes I thought of as “crisis responses” have grown into successful practices that I want to leverage permanently. In 2020, I made the choice to respond to the pandemic by doubling down on empathy — and since then, I’ve discovered that the more time I invest in my team’s well-being, the more productive and engaged they are. As we’ve slowly adapted to our new normal, we’ve discovered better ways of relating, cooperating, and getting work done. Now, I want to make sure that sticks.
These are the three biggest lessons I’ve discovered so far through the pandemic, and how I’ve put them into practice with my team.
The gang’s all here: My team of developers, designers, and strategists
Fostering Team Culture Takes Hard, Intentional Work
Creating and maintaining a culture across a team is, obviously, easier said than done. When we first went into quarantine, I knew I wanted to step up my culture efforts, but didn’t know where to start. I saw other leaders struggling to keep their own teams’ morale together. On my own team, I was keenly aware that not everyone was the same — some of my direct reports are introverts who thrive with solitude, while others do better when they’re frequently connecting with people.
So I started with empathy. Each of us was handling things in a different way, and I wanted to create space for that. In team meetings, and with individual one-on-ones, I adopted a few new practices.
- I made it a standard practice to openly talk about our mental and emotional capacity. My one-on-one
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