Trust is tied to the future
Contents
Trust is tied to the future
To unleash these powers, leaders must be able to transfer responsibility for finding solutions to their staff. This works when they learn to take a step back themselves and use the opportunity to become aware of the loneliness that is always accompanied to a leading position. Those who can listen in the TelCo and let others speak out, those who are credibly interested in how the other person is doing, how he or she is coping, those will create a sense of connection. Then emotional closeness and sympathy are not primarily a question of the spatial dimension.
Then leadership at a distance is also successful: when employees are not only addressed in their functionality, but are also perceived as persons and their dignity is respected by seeing them as an end, not just as a means. Through the now enforced social distancing we can understand the organisational fundamental error and actively unlearn it: And that means not getting too close to the employees, not trying to bind and hold them in paternalistic structures or ›hyper‐including‹ them in the organisation through feel‐good programmes. Instead, it is about building relationships at eye level and with respect for each other:
Strong commitment comes from certainty, from common identification and form the knowledge of being seen as an individual in the organisation – especially with the conditions and challenges that currently occupy or burden the individual in the corona crisis. The task of good leadership right now is that the individual can find himself with his contribution to the overall performance of the company. In this way, a very fundamental and fruitful experience of meaning can be experienced by the individual in his or her own activity. This carries well, especially through difficult times.
There is no doubt that many of us experience the restrictions on our freedom of movement as oppressive and anxiety‐provoking. Above all, the temporal unpredictability of this distress corresponds to an existential experience. Trust, cohesion, identity and consent are not primarily spatially bound, but profoundly phenomena of continuity, of the connectedness of people over time. There’s a promise in the knowledge that no one will be left behind – and an »I can count on that too«. Much more important now than the physical presence of leadership and the staff, therefore, is trust in their reliability.
