The 5 pillars: the model behind good hybrid leadership

Pillar 1 of 5

Direction

You can’t lead a hybrid team through presence. You have to lead it through purpose and goals. Everyone needs to know what matters most right now, without having to be in the room to pick it up. Direction is what makes independent work possible without everyone pulling in different directions.

Typical symptoms when it’s missing

• People prioritise differently, depending on what they happened to overhear.
• Those working at a distance find out about changes of course later than those in the office.
• The leader becomes a bottleneck, because everyone has to ask before they can act.

Practical steps

• Put goals and priorities in writing where everyone can find them, instead of only saying them in meetings.
• Start the week with a short, shared list of priorities everyone can read in their own time. And make it a standing item at team meetings.
• Test it regularly: can each person say what matters most right now without asking you?

Pillar 2 of 5

Relationships

Trust and good working relationships no longer just happen at the coffee machine. In a hybrid workplace, relationship-building has to be planned, or it quietly wears away until people no longer feel they belong and the resignation letter is on the desk. Gallup’s analysis of 2.5 million teams and 27 million employees shows why relationships are a leadership job: around 70% of the difference in team engagement comes down to the immediate manager (Gallup, State of the American Manager, 2015).

Typical symptoms when it’s missing

• Conversations are only about tasks. The informal contact has gone.
• New colleagues are still “guests” in the team months after they started.
• Poor wellbeing is only noticed once it has turned into sick leave or a resignation.

Practical steps

• Regular one-to-ones with questions about energy and workload, not just status.
• Plan quality time for when you’re together: workshops and time together as a team rather than status meetings that could have been an email.
• Make keeping in touch a shared job for the whole team: small, deliberate, informal moments online with the people you rarely see in person.

Pillar 3 of 5

Ways of working

Unwritten expectations are the most common source of hybrid friction. Ways of working means clear, shared agreements about where and when people work, which channels are used for what, and what’s expected in meetings, written down so nobody has to guess.

Typical symptoms when it’s missing

• The debate about office days keeps coming back and never gets settled.
• Important information is scattered across email, chat and meeting notes. Nobody knows where.
• People commute in for a day of video calls and wonder what they came in for.

Practical steps

• Write a one-page team agreement together with the team: where, when, which channels.
• Agree what the office days are for: what do we give extra attention to when we’re together?
• Review your agreements every six months. Hybrid work is something you learn as you go, not a one-off decision.

Pillar 4 of 5

Rhythms

A predictable meeting rhythm and protected focus time. When work became flexible, a meeting became the default answer to everything, and focus time disappeared. A good hybrid meeting pattern has fewer, better meetings and fixed rhythms, so nobody has to guess when things happen.

Typical symptoms when it’s missing

• The calendar is wall-to-wall meetings. Focused work has moved to the evenings.
• Meetings with no agenda, which could just as well have been a message.
• Hybrid meetings work badly for the people on screen, so they “multitask” their way through.

Practical steps

• Make 25 and 50 minutes the standard meeting lengths, and bring in shared meeting-free blocks.
• No agenda, no meeting. The purpose is the price of entry.
• Train people to run hybrid meetings, and consider rotating who chairs them, so the people on screen take part rather than just log on.

Pillar 5 of 5

Resilience

The ability to cope with pressure and change: a team that can work well together even when storms, world events or a reorganisation get in the way. Resilience isn’t a crisis manual in a drawer. It’s collaboration habits strong enough to hold when normal routines falter. Resilience is built before the crisis, not during it.

Typical symptoms when it’s missing

• Collaboration only works when all the key people are present and available.
• One person off sick or one system outage brings the team to a halt.
• Wellbeing is “fine” until suddenly it isn’t. Nobody picks up the early signals.

Practical steps

• Document what’s critical: decisions, agreements and knowledge mustn’t live with just a few key people.
• Make it a priority to strengthen your hybrid skills before you really need them.
• Build recovery into the rhythm of work, not as a perk. Burnt-out teams are fragile teams.

From model to everyday work

How to use the 5 pillars

The model is the backbone of everything we do. In the talk Hybrid Leadership 2.0, the whole organisation gets a shared language for the five disciplines. In the leadership programme, leaders train them in depth, one module at a time, with exercises in their own working week. And if you want to get started yourselves, have the leadership team score itself from 1 to 5 on each pillar. The disagreement about the scores is usually the best conversation you’ve had about hybrid work in a long time.