Contactless leadership in the Post-Covid 19 era
By: Pierre Forthomme
Tags: Remote Working, Leadership Development

Contactless leadership in the Post-Covid 19 era

Remote work tools are currently massively present in our professional ecosystem. And they are here to stay. Interactions within organisations, as well as with external partners, are today formulated, by default, as digital exchanges, including remote meetings, on Teams, Zoom etc. which have become the archetype.

Does this trend necessarily lead to a dehumanised professional environment?

Our experience of working with Management Teams — traditionally face-to-face but more recently from a distance — really forces us to have a more nuanced look at this question: if remote work tools disrupt our traditional reference points in establishing a relationship with another person, they represent for managers a unique opportunity to reinvent their leadership and set a new ecology of their collectives.

Diving in at the deep end, this year, into the world of remote work tools, seems to have acted as a fearsome reducer of sensations. It has, in doing so, the great merit of making us aware of this “relational field”, endlessly forged by the meeting of mind, body and feelings which represents the impassable horizon of any human activity. Each one of us regularly experiences this when it manifests itself in a negative way: deep and uncomfortable silence during a meeting, boring speeches, staggered one after another without structure… In contrast, a fluid and buoyant relational field can materialize itself in shared and infectious laughter, which transcends all seriousness, or the severity of the subjects being discussed.

If an organic and fruitful creative exchange spontaneously emerges (the so called “informal” which is cruelly lacking in remote meetings), it would be safe to say that it relies on the properties of a tacit relational field (mutual respect, security, openness etc.) which facilitates its advent, and to which the actors, by means of their interventions, contribute by nourishing and reinforcing it. In contrast, if it’s difficult for views to be exchanged freely beyond formal and scheduled contributions, it’s because the relational field conveys other concerns (fear of judgement, distrust, insecurity). Of course, because of their particular position, it’s the manager who sets the tone, but, speaking from experience, we have noticed that, in reality, it is a joint creation[1].

The notion of relational field refers, by extension, to the one we know in physics used to describe phenomena like gravitational force, electromagnetic force or fluid pressure: the field is the data for each point in space, the value of a physical scale (temperature, speed, pressure, charge, masse, density, potential etc.). The notion of field therefore refers to movement and relationships: between objects in the physical field and between individuals, in the human field.

What about the “remote relational field”?

Our client feedback is quite convergent on this point. While remote meetings have turned out to be quite successful — sometimes even more so than in-person ones — they came out, however, with a recurring feeling of latent incompleteness, a shared fatigue which manifested itself with physical discomfort and a general feeling of dissatisfaction, relating to the difficulty and frustration of not being able to identify the correct non-verbal signals from their contacts. Remotely, the relational field is developed, in the same way as in-person meetings, according to group dynamics. The problem is that it is a lot less clear because we don’t have access to kinesthesia. The capacity to feel movements in the body, which is necessary to build a global perception of our contact, is nearly inoperative from a distance. Consequently, the body’s non-verbal resonance and the way it communicates, weighs each other up and occupies the shared space[2], which is essential to any mammals’ territorial dynamic as well as establishing their power relationship, disappears. In the best-case scenario, when the videos are on, we only perceive thumbnails on our screen, with a face and torso. Indeed, the facial expressions that we can read inform us, partly, about our contacts’ emotional state, but we remain impaired in this regard when we compare this to face-to-face interactions: we do not have the person in front of us, only their representation in the digital sphere.

Within this space with no territorial frame, deprived of feelings and attachment in our body, in other words, lacking “emotions”, which is, etymologically speaking “setting something in motion”, the challenge for managers is to develop leadership modes that allow to attract and emit the sensitive information needed to engage their collective, and interact with them with the desired level of impact.

Our conviction is that, in this context, one’s voice will become their best ally. Our voice is imbedded in our cells, where it originates and takes shape; it is the meeting point between speech and body language. It’s a physical process which relies on our physiological properties (feature of our vocal cords, the size of our chest cavity, the flexibility of our diaphragm), yet it is also what our breathing as well as, more generally, the quality of our inner self, allows it to become: stress, tension, fatigue, worry, or rather enthusiasm, optimism, trust. All this is carried by our voice and can be perfectly heard through computer microphones or in conference rooms.

For the manager, remotely, the voice is the best resource to generate the relational field that rightly supports his leadership efforts : How to listen to and decode someone? How to adjust my phrasing and tone to convey that, beyond the firmness of my message, my intention is to build a relationship and not to start conflict?

All of this can be learnt. But let’s be clear, it is not a mechanical procedure. Acquiring this knowledge implies, beforehand, better self-awareness, as no matter what I do, my voice will express what my words are trying to quiet: am I aware of what I’m feeling, boredom or fatigue, trust or indecision… and how is it communicated? Contactless leadership is above all a more conscious type of leadership. Whether we want it or not, we are already in a new era. Remote interactions will henceforth take the lion’s share in our professional exchanges and it is unrealistic to think that the leadership of tomorrow will consist of paving the digital desert with rare, in-person oases (seminars and team meetings, etc.), specifically dedicated to developing relationships within the community.