What can you learn from leading a team?
I am speaking as someone who came from a conventional environment, where we all worked in an office together. These days offices are mainly virtual. The communication used to be more relaxed and spontaneous, therefore the brainstorming sessions and ideas exchange was running more smoothly. Today this is done by starting a thread, which can make the time to initiate a basic form of communication a bit longer.
The situation becomes more complex when you consider that the team works remotely from UK, Switzerland, Germany, Serbia and soon Austria. It is a challenge to achieve the perfect synergy of the team when you consider that we all relate to English in a different way. Another challenge is to keep up with everybody’s rhythm, and know when things are more relaxed and more intense.
You need to achieve a level of communication so that you work in a healthy working environment in which transparency is never put in question. However, that is a challenge I’m constantly facing. It is important to emphasize that I am not alone in this, that is why I am so grateful to my team and Group IT colleagues as well.
I try to make decisions along with my team as often as I can, depending on how complex the challenge is ahead of us. Also, I try to avoid situations where I have to put my foot down or boss people around, it would be a failure on my part and a sign of poor leadership. It would just mean I didn’t prepare the team for the project or certain activity properly. The complexity of activity, duration, stakeholders influence, priorities, daily tasks and obtaining new work - It all a part of our mutual effort.
I realized that the pandemic has brought us nothing new when it comes to the remote work of the team. We managed to maintain our regular pace. This was easier to achieve when compared with the companies that have a conventional office system.