The Virtuality of Things:

The Virtuality of Things (VoT) affects everyone everywhere. The means to virtualize or transform is disruption. This disruption isn’t negative. Instead, it transforms how things have been done to a better, new way of doing things. And this change and transformation is happening at a rapid pace.

The VoT doesn’t only cause disruption with the tools, tech, and geography of a worker, but it also creates the need for a different kind of leadership. Current leadership styles are becoming antiquated and will not align with the future workforce expectations. Embracing leadership as a partnership helps align present and future workplace expectations. With so much of the workforce being remote, a standard “in office” leadership model doesn’t always work well.

It can be harder to build a virtual rapport with employees. Leaders in these instances must understand how a person self-motivates and self-reflects. Understanding these qualities about each employee, allows a leader to understand how a team will work as a whole.

The Virtuality of Things is also shifting the qualities that are important when deciding if a prospective employee is the right fit for the position, the team, and the company’s culture as a whole.  Understanding employees’ emotional states (isolation, fear, peace, flexibility) also becomes as foundation for virtual leaders. Being able to access, flush out, and repurpose these emotional states in order to re-direct employees toward something new is a challenge. Also, clearly communicating with employees has become more important than ever. With a lot of uncertainty in the world, employees are tending to feel more unstable in their jobs especially when not in a typical office setting. Transparency, authenticity, rapport, and bringing certainty to uncertainty are very much at the core of good leadership.

The Virtuality of Things will continue to be ever-changing. The best things leaders can do during this time is pivot and transform their leadership to accommodate a mixed model (virtual and in-office) approach, lean on their team, listen to their team’s expectations, and take all of this and evolve into something newer and better.

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