Editor’s Note: Each week Maynard Webb, former CEO of LiveOps and the former COO of eBay, will offer candid, practical, and sometimes surprising advice to entrepreneurs and founders. To submit a question, write to Webb at dearfound…
Being in the right place at the right time can result in some serendipitous career moments. If you bump into your boss at the coffee machine, it could prompt them to put you on an important new project. Or, if your manager notices you’re always the first one in the office, it could play out well when they’re working on promotion recommendations.
When you’re working from home, however, these passive moments are gone. To make sure your work is noticed, you need to be proactive.
“Today, you need to think about the need to be visible,” says Kevin Eikenberry, a cofounder of Remote Leadership Institute, which is a company of virtual workplace consultants, and a coauthor of The Long-Distance Teammate: Stay Engaged and Connected While Working. “In the past, you were literally visible. Now you need to be much more intentional, but you want to do it in an ethical way.”
Change Your Mindset
If you think about your situation as “working from home,” you’re focusing on being insular and individual, says Eikenberry.
“What you really are is a remote teammate,” he says. “Ethical visibility is still being part of something bigger than ourselves. What we’re after is making sure your work is recognized in context of it being part of the team’s work and results. You want to share or contribute in a way that’s consistent with team culture.”
For example, we all know that person who is always speaking up during Zoom meetings, only talking about themselves.
“Don’t be that person,” says Eikenberry. “You may think you need to call attention to yourself and your accomplishments to be visible. But when you take up too much airtime in meetings, others will judge your behavior and not your intent. Make sure your behavior is in alignment with being part of the team.”
Have a Visibility Strategy
You don’t want to take the opposite approach, though. It can be easy for employees to slip into a pattern of limited communication and slowly fade into the background of a company while working remotely, says Kevin Harrington, CEO of Joblist, a job-matching platform.
“A visibility strategy is a way for employees to stay prominent within their teams and ensure that their efforts and contributions receive the proper recognition at work,” he says.
Joblist surveyed remote workers and managers and found that while only 36% of workers have a visibility strategy, the benefits of having one are notable.
“Employees who feel visible in their remote workplace are more likely to be satisfied with their productivity, levels of engagement, and job security,” says Harrington. “Long-term, an effective visibility strategy can also be critical to career advancement, as companies are more likely to give raises and promotions to employees who make an effort to remain visible while working from home.”
Eikenberry recommends that employees make sure they’re delivering what their boss needs most from them now. “Ask, ‘How can I best serve the team right now?’” he says. “It’s managing up. Know the goals of the leaders, and make sure you’re giving them the help they need. It doesn’t have to be brown-nosey. It’s understanding where priorities are and making sure you’re making an incremental effort in areas of priority and not just your own.”
According to the Joblist survey, the most effective ways for employees to remain visible are offering new ideas, helping colleagues with work, and volunteering for a task or opportunity. Forty-one percent of workers made sure their projects kept moving, 37.4% helped their colleagues by taking on additional work, and 36.5% made an effort to focus on small details.
“These actions are particularly effective because they send a strong message through an employee’s actions that they are engaged, motivated, and care about the success of their colleagues and the company as a whole,” says Harrington.
Being visible is really about being supportive of others, says Eikenberry. “Generally speaking, when you’re doing the right thing to support your team, you will be noticed and recognized,” he says.
WHAT are the critical challenges that can make or break a leader?
In The CEO Test by the always insightful Adam Bryant and by the former Amgen president and CEO Kevin Sharer, they present seven tests that really all leaders face in one form or another…
U.S. taxpayers have been subsidizing corporations and their inequitable pay practices for decades.
When workers don’t receive fair and equitable wages, their ability to provide for themselves and their households diminishes. And when people cann…
Repeatable, successful innovation requires a dedicated ‘growth engine’ that can build promising ventures into growing businesses.
Biden signalling aggressive approach to combating corporate consolidation and monopoly power
Sponsor content from Siemens Healthineers.
After a year like 2020, it’s no wonder people prize resilience. The trait has helped many organizations weather the triple punches of health, economic, and cultural crises. But how does an organization develop and encourage resilience—not just among its workforce but throughout all of its processes?
Speaking at a workshop during Fast Company‘s Most Innovative Companies Summit today, Siemens president and CEO Barbara Humpton, who leads a workforce of 40,000 and is at the helm of a concentrated effort to create safer indoor spaces, was joined by Carbon’s president and CEO, Ellen Kullman. Carbon rapidly pivoted last year to develop the Resolution Medical Lattice Swab for COVID-19 testing.
The leaders offered their observations on the concept of “antifragility,” a term that was introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Antifragile. It’s defined as “a property of systems in which they increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures.” Both Kullman and Humpton used that as a starting point to detail their own best practices for weathering any storm.
Take a look at where you’ve been
Kullman and Humpton began by culling from their previous work experience various times that tested their mettle. Both were quick to mention that having children played a huge part in their ability to roll with disruption. But from a professional perspective, Kullman, an engineer and a veteran of DuPont, recalled the devastating impact that Hurricane Katrina had on one of its plants in Mississippi and how everyone immediately pulled together to help first responders help other citizens in peril in the aftermath.
Humpton remembered being brought in to lead a struggling team working on GPS at IBM and taking them through to finally delivering on the project. “[You become] better creating more success because of what you experience and learn,” said Kullman.
Understand what’s in your control
For both, these recollections served as valuable lessons in being able to understand what a person and team are capable of when they are under significant stress. “I created a mantra,” said Kullman—”‘Focus on what you can control and create a new trajectory.’” The former, she said, goes a long way to combat the feeling of helplessness during events such as natural disasters that are beyond anyone’s control.
Humpton agreed about the importance of identifying what you can control. She also pointed out that in addition to IQ and EQ, she likes to lean into DQ. The “disruption quotient” is just as necessary for creating resilience as both intellectual and emotional intelligence. DQ captures “people who are gluttons for change,” she said, who will be able to surf the waves of crisis. “People who said ‘Call me when it is over’ aren’t performing in leadership,” Humpton maintained.
Take a beat
One of the things that people tend to do in challenging times is to react by holding their breath, said Humpton with a sharp and audible inhale. This is when it helps to remember to pause and ask yourself, “Is this something I control or not? If not,” she said, “it’s just news.” Then it’s easier to make a choice about how to react.
Kullman noted that breathing and thinking about how to react is very much a learned trait. She uses it as an opportunity to stay collected. “If you have calmness,” she said, then you can use collaboration skills to enable others to act with thoughtful determination.
For her part, Humpton says being able to stay focused and not reactive allows her to help others get the resources they need to get their jobs done. She likened it to being “in the zone” because “you are applying your best self.”
Internalize lessons
Kullman is a proponent of postmortems, as long as they happen “in calm of day, after the darkness passed.” After a challenging time, she likes to bring teams together to go over what they learned and, more importantly, to ask themselves what they would have done differently if they knew then what they know now. It’s crucial to make it safe to say anything, she underscored, and she noted that leaders needed to show vulnerability to be part of the team, create camaraderie, and change what needs to change going forward.
Humpton didn’t completely agree with holding debriefs. “It doesn’t help too much to look backward,” she said, particularly when working with engineers. She said they instead looked forward during COVID-19 by creating a document called Agenda 2030, which would serve as a guide for them to start developing what would be needed to address future markets.
Coming through the first and second waves of the pandemic, Humpton said it helped “just to get people thinking creatively about where you go. It’s lessons learned but with a forward-looking spirit to them.” This keeps teams inspired to move on, she said. And it keeps them resilient and flexible. Bottom line, said Humpton, “In a moment of disruption, people want to be helpful, and to know they’re needed and essential.”
After a year like 2020, it’s no wonder people prize resilience. The trait has helped many organizations weather the triple punches of health, economic, and cultural crises. But how does an organization develop and encourage resilience—not just among its workforce but throughout all of its processes?
Speaking at a workshop during Fast Company‘s Most Innovative Companies Summit today, Siemens president and CEO Barbara Humpton, who leads a workforce of 40,000 and is at the helm of a concentrated effort to create safer indoor spaces, was joined by Carbon’s president and CEO, Ellen Kullman. Carbon rapidly pivoted last year to develop the Resolution Medical Lattice Swab for COVID-19 testing.
The leaders offered their observations on the concept of “antifragility,” a term that was introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Antifragile. It’s defined as “a property of systems in which they increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures.” Both Kullman and Humpton used that as a starting point to detail their own best practices for weathering any storm.
Take a look at where you’ve been
Kullman and Humpton began by culling from their previous work experience various times that tested their mettle. Both were quick to mention that having children played a huge part in their ability to roll with disruption. But from a professional perspective, Kullman, an engineer and a veteran of DuPont, recalled the devastating impact that Hurricane Katrina had on one of its plants in Mississippi and how everyone immediately pulled together to help first responders help other citizens in peril in the aftermath.
Humpton remembered being brought in to lead a struggling team working on GPS at IBM and taking them through to finally delivering on the project. “[You become] better creating more success because of what you experience and learn,” said Kullman.
Understand what’s in your control
For both, these recollections served as valuable lessons in being able to understand what a person and team are capable of when they are under significant stress. “I created a mantra,” said Kullman—”‘Focus on what you can control and create a new trajectory.’” The former, she said, goes a long way to combat the feeling of helplessness during events such as natural disasters that are beyond anyone’s control.
Humpton agreed about the importance of identifying what you can control. She also pointed out that in addition to IQ and EQ, she likes to lean into DQ. The “disruption quotient” is just as necessary for creating resilience as both intellectual and emotional intelligence. DQ captures “people who are gluttons for change,” she said, who will be able to surf the waves of crisis. “People who said ‘Call me when it is over’ aren’t performing in leadership,” Humpton maintained.
Take a beat
One of the things that people tend to do in challenging times is to react by holding their breath, said Humpton with a sharp and audible inhale. This is when it helps to remember to pause and ask yourself, “Is this something I control or not? If not,” she said, “it’s just news.” Then it’s easier to make a choice about how to react.
Kullman noted that breathing and thinking about how to react is very much a learned trait. She uses it as an opportunity to stay collected. “If you have calmness,” she said, then you can use collaboration skills to enable others to act with thoughtful determination.
For her part, Humpton says being able to stay focused and not reactive allows her to help others get the resources they need to get their jobs done. She likened it to being “in the zone” because “you are applying your best self.”
Internalize lessons
Kullman is a proponent of postmortems, as long as they happen “in calm of day, after the darkness passed.” After a challenging time, she likes to bring teams together to go over what they learned and, more importantly, to ask themselves what they would have done differently if they knew then what they know now. It’s crucial to make it safe to say anything, she underscored, and she noted that leaders needed to show vulnerability to be part of the team, create camaraderie, and change what needs to change going forward.
Humpton didn’t completely agree with holding debriefs. “It doesn’t help too much to look backward,” she said, particularly when working with engineers. She said they instead looked forward during COVID-19 by creating a document called Agenda 2030, which would serve as a guide for them to start developing what would be needed to address future markets.
Coming through the first and second waves of the pandemic, Humpton said it helped “just to get people thinking creatively about where you go. It’s lessons learned but with a forward-looking spirit to them.” This keeps teams inspired to move on, she said. And it keeps them resilient and flexible. Bottom line, said Humpton, “In a moment of disruption, people want to be helpful, and to know they’re needed and essential.”
The company, Canada’s Carbon Engineering, counts Bill Gates and oilsands investor Murray Edwards among its backers
