Working from home is here to stay, and I sense that the role of the leader has become harder. Despite the tools for collaboration and productivity, it is now more difficult to fully appreciate how much value individual team members are contributing.
We no longer have the same dynamic interactions to build up the picture of the individual’s value. Instead, we have a lot of the more transactional video calls. The things visible to a leader are reduced to responsiveness on emails, timeliness & quality of deliverables and what/how you speak during a call or presentation. But much of engineering & project work is really teamwork. There’s a lot that happens in between emails and calls. Some would call that “real work”!
It pays for leaders to be close to their teams, but our measures for performance or out-performance needs to include the input of stakeholders & the individual’s impact on their tribe/community.