How the stressors of today are shaping a new kind of manager

This post was written by Ben Battaglia and originally appeared on Medium. Ben is a 2019-2020 MDLF Fellow and Director of Marketing at Lessonly.

I was recently chatting with a small group of fellow managers about the biggest challenge on our minds right now—how should we lead our teams while working remote during a pandemic?

Over the last few weeks, we’d noticed the undercurrent of stress on our teams. Whether juggling childcare or coping with a sick relative, to managing lost income or personal anxiety, there were (and still are) plenty of good reasons why anyone and everyone might be showing up at work with less pep in their step than usual.

So we asked ourselves, how should leaders respond?

How can we empathetically care for our teammates? How can we keep moving the business forward? How do know when to give grace and when to challenge our teams? How can we create connection in a remote world? How can we help our team, and ourselves, stay healthy?

My fellow managers each contributed some helpful ideas and thoughts, but one nugget stuck out to me above all the rest. In fact, every single manager I talked to something to the effect of:

“I want to lead like this when I go back to the office, too.”

We wanted to be more empathetic. We wanted to communicate clearly and provide clarity to our teammates. We wanted to spend more time asking about our teammates’ personal lives. We wanted to prioritize mental health and time off. We wanted to create opportunities for connection and camaraderie.

This stress on our teams and teammates was prompting us to level-up our thoughtfulness about our leadership. And each of us wanted to bring this level of intentionality about managing and leading back with us to the office in a post-COVID world.

TL;DR? Working remote during a global crisis was highlighting the ways we wished had been leading all along.

On the days leading up to Lincoln’s first inaugural, seven states had seceded from the union and the country was on the brink of civil war. Lincoln’s speech was a plea for unity, and he concluded by saying:

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Lincoln was hoping that our “better angels”, the best parts of us, would show up in the threat of crisis. And from where I sit, the stressors of COVID are doing just that — prompting the better angels of our nature as leaders and managers during a challenging time.

To be sure, that isn’t true of all organizations. There are certainly examples of less empathetic, less trusting, less kind managers out there. But I’m convinced that the greatest leaders of tomorrow, the ones that people will really want to follow, are the ones showing up today to meet the challenges of COVID with grace and charity.

It’s not hard to see that the byproduct of this pandemic is physical, emotional, and financial pain for so many. But much like Lincoln was working toward the never-fully-achievable goal of a “more perfect union,” here’s hoping that this time produces a cohort of “more perfect leaders” — people who bring greater empathy and thoughtfulness to management not just during crisis, but for rest of their careers.

And here’s hoping you’ll be one of them.

You can read more great articles from Ben over on his Medium.