“Corona-Home-Office-Leadership” for Project Managers

Due to the Home-Office regulations in Germany, I have personally not seen my project team face-to-face for over 10 Months now. From one day to another, all workshops and face-to-face meetings were suspended and we were all facing the challenges of working remotely. Luckily, my project team was already distributed over several sites and we were not completely unfamiliar with working virtually. Nonetheless, the current situation definitely came with new challenges. Let’s start by stating the obvious: activities, work packages and goals of the project did not change. We were still facing the same challenges and objectives, as when we could meet in person, namely to move the project forward and complete it on time and within budget. The only difference that had occurred, was that out tools and methods had changed. However, aside from Corona, a project manager today will most likely have to deal with virtual project teams in their career at some point. Due to globalization, outsourcing and location independent recruiting, virtual project teams are on the rise.

Many psychological aspects of team-work change in virtual teams. Group norms become more difficult to control, the importance of first impressions and superficial relationships increases, but the potential for conflict usually decreases in line with the fact that the aspect of personal contact is greatly reduced. Additionally, many aspects of the group roles (such as the Belbin Team Roles) no longer function as usual. Especially communication-oriented roles such as team workers cannot develop and act without human contact. The fundamental problems of working in virtual teams, namely the amount of social impressions, the ambiguity of team roles, the risk of misunderstandings, and the lack of information and communication, mean that the project manager has to trust his team members much more than in traditional teams. The traditional hierarchical possibilities to control the work of the project team members are vastly diminished. Hence the authoritarian and directive leadership styles, such as “produce-or-perish” leadership styles, are bound to reduce productivity in virtual project teams.

In our experience, leadership over the past couple of years has developed in the direction of promoting and putting the needs of the employees first. The idea here is to promote an intrinsic motivation of the employees through self-actualization, achievements, interesting tasks und responsibility. In the end, this leads to higher productivity and lower employee turn-over. Leadership theories that utilize such ideas are for example servant leadership or transformational leadership. A servant leader shares power with the employees, puts the needs of the employees before his own and supports the employees and the organisation in their quest for excellence. This means that the roles traditionally associated with leadership are submerged. Employees do not serve the leader, but the leader serves the employees. The basis of servant leadership is that employees are given every opportunity to fully develop and enhance their skills and abilities will use them to drive the business forward. This means that personal growth is linked to economic and entrepreneurial growth.

In order to become a successful servant leader, the leader needs some characteristics that are predominantly employee oriented. These characteristics include appreciating different attitudes and opinions. Servant leadership is not possible to combine with micromanagement. Instead, in order to support the employees in their endeavours, a servant leader must appreciate different approaches and differences of opinion. An employee can easily verify that he or she is in a company where servant leadership is practiced by asking whether or not they feel compelled to adopt the view of their supervisor. If one answers this question in the affirmative, they do not have a servant leader as their supervisor. Furthermore, a servant leader must build trust in the organisation among employees. Servant leadership only works if the employees work together as a team. This is not achieved if employees talk badly about each other and have no confidence in the performance or contribution of their colleagues. A servant leader also does not lead alone. He likes to delegate and share his power with others, who can then take over leadership tasks. A servant leader also takes care of his employees. In order for employees to perform well at work, they must be doing generally well in all areas. Therefore, the servant leader may also need to support employees in their private lives so that they can concentrate fully on their work. Of course, a servant leader must also be able to motivate his employees. He likes to do this by selling them ideas rather than giving them assignments. A servant leader also thinks long-term. In order to give employees the opportunity to develop and to see this lead to better results for the company, one cannot have expectations of a short period of time. This development can be achieved, for example, through training of employees.

Working in virtual teams presents the project manager with special challenges in the case that they and the team members do not share the same social signals and impressions. In addition, the opportunities for communication, especially spontaneous and informal ones, are limited. To bridge these gaps, the project manager must lead the team more actively than would be necessary with a traditional team. This includes proper delegation of tasks and, this should go without saying: Micromanagers will quickly get into trouble when leading virtual project teams.

One of the main tasks of a project manager is “strategic” considerations and decisions within the boundaries of the project. However, when the calendar fills up with meetings in order to check on the progress of the project team members, there is often no time for strategic thinking. By delegating, the project manager can gain time for those tasks that cannot be delegated, such as longer-term strategic decisions. Furthermore, delegating forces the project manager to think about how to prioritise the tasks at hand, including which can be delegated and which must be carried out personally. When you delegate a task, communication is very important. If you cannot clearly communicate the task and the expected result, you cannot expect the result to meet the quality requirements you desire. Therefore, it is very important that the leader can communicate a mental picture of the task and its results to the employees. It is important that the desired outcome is described in a concrete and measurable way. Additionally, identifying the deadline, i.e. by when the result must be available, is an important part of the communication.

Project managers who have to or want to interfere in all details of the project team member’s work are often described as micromanagers. A micromanager is never satisfied with the performance of the employees as, in their opinion, there will always be details which do not meet their own personal standard. In the end, a micromanager is much more concerned with checking all the details of the result than with the process and the path that was necessary to create the result. It is self-explanatory that someone who spends so much time checking the details of all activities in the project will hardly have time for important management activities, such as “strategic” considerations. Moreover, micromanagement often has negative effects on the entire project team, such as a lack of trust among employees, low (intrinsic) motivation, less commitment and more stress. It is therefore important to emphasise that micromanagement has very little to do with leadership, as it is not about showing the employees or the company the direction, but about controlling it.

Even though time is always tight in projects, it is very important when working in virtual project teams to approach the necessary tasks and activities slowly, in order to build trust. Since communication and monitoring of the work is difficult, the project manager must have a certain amount of patience so that they can take their time to assess the situation, the result and the project team in order to gain confidence in the project team. What our brain subconsciously processes in milliseconds in terms of information and impressions about the performance of the team members in face-to-face meetings, takes considerably more time in virtual project teams, as this information has to be processed consciously, actively and rationally. The project manager must allow time for this process, e.g. waiting a few moments until one can be sure that everyone has correctly assessed the situation.