The post-pandemic era is requiring us to embrace new definitions of leadership—and apply new approaches to teaching and learning.
In G11 Team workshops with teams across all industries, we ask a series of anonymous, interactive questions. Feedback and data gathered from these questions during 2021 have confirmed that most leaders will need new skills and competencies to succeed in the new working environment. These skills and competencies relate specifically to two broad themes of care and trust.
Care
G11 poses the open question to team members ‘there is a feeling of care at ….’ The following table shows the data obtained pre and post-pandemic.
| Response | Pre-pandemic (2018,19,20) | Post-pandemic (2021) |
| Yes | 61% | 51% |
| No | 27% | 39% |
| Unsure | 12% | 10% |
There has been an obvious decline in how team members perceive the environment of care at work. Perhaps this is due to the new hybrid working arrangements, or the fact that people have had an opportunity to recalibrate what is important to them and how their job is contributing to this. Either way, the significance for leaders is great.
Team members want to know that their leader cares for them – before they will give that discretional effort that is needed for greatness at work. High care comes before high performance. Leadership skills such as openness, empathy, resilience, and the ability to communicate are of greater importance now than ever.
Trust
A second question G11 Team asks in workshops is ‘at work I trust …’. The data obtained is shown below.
| Response | Pre-pandemic (2018,19,20) | Post-pandemic (2021) |
| All | 34% | 30% |
| Most | 45% | 43% |
| Select few | 17% | 22% |
| No-one | 4% | 5% |
Whilst there appears to be only a small difference in overall trust results, the subtle downwards trend in overall trust levels between teammates is intriguing. Is it because there are less casual ‘collisions’ between team members due to remote working arrangements? These collisions provide the opportunity to learn about each other, therefore facilitating an understanding and acceptance of individual differences. Is it because team members are working with a more siloed approach, with less collaboration and transparency of progress?
Regardless of the rationale, now more than ever, leaders need to be conscious of developing the required skills and systems to build care and trust in teams. Leadership coaching, enabling greater awareness of leadership behaviours, combined with individual self-reflection and peer feedback, will help a leader to develop in the post-pandemic era.
Sally Carbon
Founder, Director and Principal Consultant
Sally Carbon is the founder of G11 Teams – setting up the business late in 2011 in response to serving a distribution company based in Melbourne which designed high fashion clothes in Paris – it was a fun way to kick start her own business. Her diverse client list grew, covering all sectors, and various organisational sizes and scales. Sally is a business strategist, helping companies to grow, finding their competitive advantage, and driving high organisational performance through leading-practice strategy. Sally has consulted for 15 years, specialises in strategic growth, across all sectors from financial services, not for profit, resources, agriculture, education, and private sector. She was formerly the Director of Docklands Authority in Melbourne, a large scale urban renewal the size of Melbourne’s CBD. Sally is also a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and was first placed on a government board when she was 22 years of age. She is an Olympic and World Cup gold medallist, and has released nine books. Sally loves to work with like-minded high performance thinkers who enjoy feeling ‘uncomfortable’