Introduction

You can be anything you want. But if you are going to be something, be brilliant at it, and do it with gusto. Showing up gets you started. Stepping up gets you across the finish line.

-Capt. Ron Hackett, B.E.M. British & Australian Armed Forces, Military Police

The COVID-19 pandemic thrust the world into navigating the largest "work from home" experiment of modern times. Realistically, it is the largest work disruption of any time since Henry Ford designed his first production line. There is no denying that the COVID-19 virus is a large-scale human heartache, a health care crisis, and an economic tragedy. It raged across the globe, spreading sickness, death, and displacement. The double whammy impact on lives and livelihood hit many. The millions unemployed created a new reality overnight, and many of those jobs will not be coming back. Whole industries will have been destroyed, disrupted, or dislocated. Still others changed at speeds never seen before. Some have and will prosper. Perhaps not the masses.

While the threat of automation replacing jobs was the focus of much anxiety over the past decade or so, it proved to be a disease that did the most damage, most rapidly. We all saw how quickly the economy halted, the health care system faltered, people were furloughed or, worse, simply laid off as businesses shuttered closed. The world suffered a global crisis and responded with a country-by country, industry-by-industry, company-by-company, plan. The word remote punctuated management conversations, websites, podcasts, and blogs the world over. As the crisis unfolded, discussions ranged from "How do we cope?" and "How do we cut costs?" to "How do you lead?" and "How do you lead remotely?"

The Times, They Are a-Changin'

As the COVID-19 pandemic continued to unfold, a new reality set in and it became more difficult to predict an end. Financial modeling became increasingly difficult and cash preservation developed into the daily norm. The words no spend policy became commonplace for many firms.

Many discussions also addressed the issue of change. "We have changed more in a few weeks than in 10 years," said Tesco CEO Dave Lewis as supermarkets needed to step up into essential services. Others said they'd seen 6 years of change in 6 months. Larry Rosen, CEO of Harry Rosen Inc., the Canadian luxury men's clothier, flatly admitted, "We took a whole bunch of guys like me - I'm 64 - and they learned how to shop online during this crisis."

The rate of change accelerated by this virus had a fundamental impact on many workplaces and it provided a crisis playbook to better engage organizations, one we must learn from and carry over to postpandemic times.

Changing Your Advantage

As CEO of Proudfoot, a management consulting company founded in 1946, I too felt the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We had spent our history proud of our "boots on the ground" business model, our people shoulder to shoulder with clients, working through their improvement programs and major transformations to realize large-scale results, coaching new behaviors and implementing new processes and systems, not just advising from a distance. We told our clients, If you go underground we go underground, if your business has a night shift we work night shift. Well, that all stopped when the pandemic hit. Some assignments were paused as people zoomed their way home. We quickly switched to remote work. Where remote was not an option, our revenues paused. Suddenly, our competitive advantage nearly killed us. My goal was to save as many jobs as possible and maintain the business continuity where that was a possibility. We continued with projects that allowed it and were safe for our teams. We helped our clients navigate through with COVID-19 response planning, sometimes for free, because that was the right thing to do, and other times deferring their payments to the next year, to prevent them from deferring their improvement and transformation programs when they needed it most.

I was also conscious of the health and well-being of my people. Having been one of the early COVID-19 victims in February after three trips to New York as well as France and the UK, I knew what the virus could do. While I was lucky (its impact stopped at what I compared to a very bad flu bug turn into pneumonia), I recall getting out of bed three nights in a row wondering if I would be able to continue breathing. It was early in the pandemic. I didn't realize I could die. Later, the experience allowed me to understand its potential, and therefore I treated it with great respect. This disease was a killer for some, but it was not so bad for me. I was sick but lucky.

Great Things Happen at the Intersection of People and Technology

Both the firsthand business impact and the impact on my health allowed me to realize the empathy you needed during this time for your own people but also for your clients and customers. It also made me focus on the big picture - I needed my teams to feel as safe as they could, and we as a business needed them to remain engaged. This would not be something to navigate through alone. We doubled down on something we call HeadsUp and 1.5.30, a simple but meaningful global movement we kicked off with a rallying cry of "great things happen at the intersection of people and technology," to remind people to prioritize human connection as a way to better engage with their teams, their communities, and society. 1.5.30 is a quick, once-a-day check-in (1), a once-a-week progress chat (5), and a once-a-month development and coaching conversation (30). HeadsUp refers to people lifting their heads from their devices to actively engage and focus on people. At the time we launched HeadsUp, we had no idea a global pandemic would slam the world's doors shut and create a societal need for a HeadsUp movement. As a backstory, we picked the unusual launchpad of Singapore in 2019 to unveil HeadsUp. After all, Singapore is one of the most digitally fluent and innovative countries on the planet, but also, according to a recent Qualtrics study, was one of the laggards in employee engagement.1 When COVID-19 hit and much of the world went home, HeadsUp was more than relevant. We knew we needed to all remain HeadsUp. We needed to ensure that people lifted their noses out of their technology and connected with other people, albeit through technology when they went remote. But while it is labeled remote, feeling remote was the last thing people wanted during this time. After all, remember what you don't do when you work from home: you don't commute. You don't stop and grab coffee on the way to work. You don't stop and say hi to your colleagues at the office kitchen, in the locker room, or on the shop floor. You don't get the human contact you previously enjoyed. You may also be working on your kitchen table, balancing your laptop on one knee while bouncing your baby on the other knee. It's different. After the novelty wore off, we needed to be prepared for the new routine of the new reality. People saw that they needed to better engage. HeadsUp became a vehicle.

Fast forward past the height of the global pandemic, and HeadsUp becomes a mindset dedicated to encouraging better leadership at every level, irrespective of where people work. It's about developing leaders who prioritize connecting with people and human interaction in order to achieve their aspirations and build extraordinary businesses and communities. Great leaders know how to leverage technology to do that. This is a global need in the workplace, at home, and in society in general. HeadsUp is one of many tools that enable you to manage to engage.

Today, HeadsUp is both a business and a social movement. How effectively we do this now will determine how effectively our people, teams, and organizations not only come out of this period but how they show up in the future. Our wellness will depend on it. Our next-generation leaders will follow on from it. Our engagement will hinge on it.

Flat as a Pancake - Not Yet

While the past decade has flattened the organization structure and reduced the need for some managers, the need to create leaders at every level, particularly frontline leaders, has never been more necessary. Whether teams work from home or not. You need leaders not to command and control, but to create a sense of community, convene collaboration, engage people in their work, enable them to achieve their results, and energize them to coach and guide their teams, so that everybody can get up the next day and do it all again, and with gusto. So they will connect and engage.

We need to build engagement into the lifeblood of a leader's role, a performance requirement. The problem? Leaders have been ill-equipped to engage, not knowing the right tools to employ or the right approaches to take. After all, so much is coming at them. How can they stop and engage?

But What if They Could?

There is a way. Leaders often see engagement as the outcome rather than the launchpad to build stronger ecosystems and achieve results. Manage to Engage addresses this with simple concepts you will learn about like HeadsUp and the HeadsUp High Five (Presence, Vision, Tech Savvy, Coaching, and Influence), behavior models like active management, and the unique performance improvement tool that engages as much as it brings about improvement and change:...