Leadership skills and tasks before and during COVID
In order to establish the ground base of our project and as a first test of our hypotheses, we asked our fellow colleagues from the Full-Time MBA programme (all are experienced entrepreneurs or managers) in a small non-representative survey (n=20) about their own experiences regarding leadership tasks and skills (before and during COVID). The answers supported our hypothesis to focus on motivation as an important leadership task, to look into Emotional Intelligence as a leadership skill and to further elaborate on the relationship of the remote work situation and leadership styles.
70% of the participants mentioned “Motivating” as the most important task for a successful leader, followed by “Developing team members”, “Building a culture” and “Innovating”. When asked which of the leadership tasks were most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, 55% answered “Motivating” and “Developing team members”, respectively.
Here, it is interesting that “Tracking performance” was only mentioned by 20% of the participants as important in general, but 50% said that it was a task mostly affected by the pandemic. On the contrary, “Innovating”, which was seen as one of the most important tasks in general, was not viewed as to be affected much by the pandemic.
Emotional Intelligence / Empathy was considered by 70% of the participants as an important skill that leaders should have before COVID. When taking the remote work situation in COVID times into account, this remained important in addition to listening skills.
When asked about the best channel of communication in work from home, 65% voted for group meetings (e.g. via Zoom), well ahead of other digital channels. Interestingly, email was not considered once as the best communication channel.
Finally, the most important leadership roles in COVID times were “Mentor” and “Coordinator” with a joint answer rate of 80%. While 20% said that “Friend/Colleague” was the most important role, none answered “Delegator”. This was an interesting indication in order to further explore leadership styles during our interviews.
The results of this introductory survey were the starting point of what we explored further in eleven in-depth interviews with managers and employees, the output of which you will find in the following blog posts. From here, we want to dive deeper in how this new reality has affected the way leaders behave and act within their organisations and beyond, how the relationship with their employees has changed, and what lessons learned can be adopted.
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