Leadership skills and strengths are more important today than ever before. Increased complexity and volatility in today's world demand that leaders navigate constant changes and intense challenges, leaving some leaders feeling unsure of how to effectively proceed. On today's episode of The Forward Thinking Podcast, FCCS VP of Marketing and Communications Stephanie Barton interviews Lisa Cavanaugh, VP of Leadership Development Experiences at FCCS. They discuss what leadership needs to look like in these unprecedented times, including common leadership mistakes to avoid and key rituals that will increase your team's productivity and connectivity.

Today's Insights Include:

Critical leadership skills in today's world

• Learning agility is essential in facing today's volatile and uncertain world.
• Leaders have to remain curious in order to recognize that they don't know everything and then pull in multiple key points and a variety of perspectives to solve challenges.
• Leaders need to ensure that their teams are comfortable sharing different viewpoints in order to solicit the best ideas for solutions.
• Crafting a compelling narrative starts with building a story that includes every team member and inspires them to work toward the team vision.

Effectively leading dispersed teams

• The principles of good leadership are constant, whether you're in the same room or on a different continent.
• Effective leaders exhibit technical competence, good communication and an ability to set clear expectations.
• The best leaders know their strengths and weaknesses and act accordingly.
• Maintaining team cohesion is especially important in dispersed teams, and can be accomplished by setting clear team goals, celebrating wins and crafting new team norms.
• Communicate, communicate, and then communicate some more and be thoughtful about how your team wants to communicate.

Handling productivity during a pandemic

• Identify which jobs are best suited for dispersed work, and expect productivity accordingly.
• Top performers and bottom performers both tend to take their efforts to the extreme, and neither is ideal.
• Leaders should expect work to be done in ways that are balanced and sustainable.
• Good leaders don't count hours, they count outcomes.
• Ask team members how they are doing to better understand productivity and team relationships.
• Various kinds of distance work including remote, dispersed, and hybrid setups each come with different positives and negatives.

This podcast is powered by FCCS.

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