Hello folks, my name is Karim Panton and I'm a current PhD student in Hofstra's Applied Organizational Psychology program. I'm also the graduate assistant for leadership development and programming through the Office of Student Leadership and Engagement. So Dr. Vickery Dermann had reached out to me asking me if I could put together a presentation on virtual leadership for her students.
I believe this will be particularly helpful in light of current events with the global pandemic going on. A lot goes into transitioning from a conventional workplace or even academic setting to working from home. So I got my master's at Hofstra in industrial organizational psychology.
And as I said, I've moved into the PhD program. A lot of the work I do and a lot of my research surrounds leadership. So I think I'm pretty well poised to deliver this talk. So I hope you enjoy it and gain some insights from it. I was actually given the opportunity to speak in Dr. Vickery's BBA class last fall.
So I'm glad to be back with you. So here we go. Virtual leadership.
So this talk, I've separated into two imperatives and then three considerations. I've done it this way because the imperatives are more actionable. If you want to think about it that way, those are communication and work.
I'll be discussing how you can act upon those things. And, you know. what you can be implementing to ensure that you're working effectively, communicating effectively, that your work is structured effectively.
And then the considerations are less so actionable, but something to keep in mind. If you do want to be effective in your leadership ability and leadership proposals when working in a team. Also bear in mind that all of this is still relevant, whether you're the team leader or not, the de facto team leader or not.
Leadership is something that's very, very circumstantial for one. And then two, you know, leadership is something that can oftentimes be shared. And the leader in a certain situation will differ based on personal characteristics, what the situation needs and what the team needs. So the first imperative, we have communication, which I've broken down into frequency, mode, and the content. Now, when it comes to frequency, let me see if I can.
Move this out of the way. When it comes to frequency, you want to be asking yourself, how regularly are you communicating with your team, right? And then how much do you need to communicate? I'll give you a personal example.
So in the Office of Student Leadership and Engagement, we have our Monday staff meetings. That's 11 a.m. every Monday, the entire office meets and discusses the going-ons in each of our areas.
So I discuss the Blue Leadership Program, which is something I lead. as well as, you know, whatever touch points I have with clubs, which I also helped manage through Get Involved HU. Then as we transitioned to virtual work, this had to change, right?
So now we actually have daily check-ins. They're much shorter than a, you know, structured staff meeting, but it's going to be very relevant. It becomes more relevant as we're not seeing each other across the cubicle.
We're not communicating face-to-face as frequently. and we're actually communicating less frequently altogether. Just thinking about the workday, I can stand up and ask another GA or go to Denise, who's one of the associate directors in OSLE who I directly report to, and I'll pop in and out of her office three or four times a day in addition to my official correspondence that I would send to her over email updating her on anything that I'm working on. And that would go both ways, right? She would pop over to my cubicle, I suppose.
But in the virtual workplace, we really don't have those opportunities. So we have to make sure that we're trying to optimize our communication styles. And the first thing we play into that is frequency. So now we also have to consider what does the ideal situation look like?
And does each team member require the same amount of attention? In my previous leadership talk, I think I may have touched on the strategic core. Actually, I don't believe any of you would have seen that. previous talk because this would have been a different class.
But the strategic core in any sense lies at the heart of, let's say, the operations of an organization or a team. And it can generally be identified based on who is it or which parts of the organization or team are involved in the most touch points or even are involved in the most critical decision making. So when learning about the strategic core, one of the most common Metaphors used is a baseball team, right? One of the most common similarities is drawn with a baseball team where the pitcher and catcher are at the heart of the strategic core, given that they initiate each play, they have most contact with the ball, etc.
So based on that, we can see that the team itself can be broken down and subdivided into sub teams, dyads, any other relevant groups, and that will vary from team to team as it comes to realizing the team's ultimate goals. So while it might be ideal for me to be speaking to my boss virtually, maybe three times a day. and then we have our daily check-in and then weekly one-on-one.
For someone else such as her immediate supervisor, which would be the dean of students, she would have to be speaking more frequently than that, or at least the length of time would be for a longer period of time. So these are all considerations that we want to take into account, the frequency of communication as well as the quality of communication. Then we move to mode.
So how are you communicating? And is the mode of communication most suitable for the information being transmitted? Something else that we look into when we look at team communications in organizational psychology is open versus unique communication.
So open communication would be, let's say, less limited, right? So in open communication, you're talking not just about the work that you're getting done. but you're tying it into maybe anything you have going on in your personal life, or, you know, you kind of let it flow.
Unique communication is more formal. It gets more to the point. And it is, let's say, distilled.
So you can think about it as open communication is something you're more likely to engage in if you're talking face-to-face. And then unique communication is more likely something to engage in when you're sending an email, where you have the information you want to relay, and that is at the heart of your message. So when we talk about is the mode of communication most suitable for the information being transmitted, if any of you have had internships before or, you know, you've all been on teams, different teams for sports or different projects, and you may have been in a situation where you're wondering, well, hey, this meeting could have been an email, you know. So in the virtual workplace or in virtual leadership, virtual teams, this is something that is very critical, right?
Because you don't have the same freedoms as you would face-to-face. So what you try to do is minimize the drawbacks from lacking those freedoms and maximize on some of the utility that comes with being virtual, right? So now when you're talking about the mode of communication, sure, you know, you can have virtual happy hours. You can have your daily check-ins over Zoom, over Google Hangouts, anything like that. That's face-to-face where that kind of open communication is relevant.
And... promoted. But then when it comes to delivering critical, unique information, then you're starting to think about, okay, let's go to an email or let's go to the chat feature on Microsoft Teams.
I don't know if any of you have ever used Microsoft Teams or Slack or any of those, let's say, instant messaging platforms, which you're familiar with through social media. But when it comes to a team management program like Microsoft Teams or like Slack, then it gets utilized a little differently. Then we consider, can you optimize things to get more value out of your communication channels? So it just comes back down to reorganizing how it is you're relaying your messages, what messages are being sent when, and are you using the suitable platform?
If the message you're sending is something you'd want to look back on, then you know for sure it's something you should be sending, let's say, in an email or in a chat window, something you can go back and look at. Maybe having a conversation over the phone or through FaceTime or through Zoom is less ideal, given that this is something you're going to want to relay back to. So anything that you want to look back at at a later point in time, definitely put it in writing.
Then we move to content. What information must be transmitted most strongly? How much information must be transmitted in total, right?
So given that you're no longer face-to-face, that doesn't mean the amount of, or the volume of communication you need to have with your team members will decrease. The type of communication will just change, right? With that being the case, you might have a lot more communication coming in through emails and through text. So it can become increasingly difficult.
to kind of wade through everything and prioritize what should happen first, what's most imperative, least imperative, and even just timelines for those things, which we'll get into when we talk about work. So it's very important to recognize that you're not or to try not to overload the other members on your team or have yourself get overloaded? Then how do you format content so as not to overload the team? As I just discussed, if you're thinking about even emails that you're getting from Hofstra University, the university generally tries to stray away from sending anything that is too long.
You know, I mean, there are times, for example, now in this pandemic during the quarantine, where a lot of... critical information needs to be transmitted immediately. But generally speaking, when regular procedures are going on, we're going to campus, some of you may be living on campus, the emails you get from the administration will be a page or two, if that, right?
You're not going to get a 14 page book. And that's just talking about volume. We can also get into complexity, but that as well is almost self-explanatory. If it's something that is increasingly complex, then it's probably better to, one, send it in writing, as I said before, but then set up a meeting where you're going to walk through each of the steps or each of the points that you have written down.
Does that make sense? And you can think about that structure when you think about your online classes or classes that have kind of adopted this virtual format for the time being. You would have your PowerPoints maybe or a PDF or any notes.
that your professors would have sent to you from your various classes, but then you're still meeting in class to go through everything so you understand the content. Next, we transition to work, which I've broken down into structure, timing, and timeline. Those last two are very closely related, but when we get there, you'll see why I've made the distinction between both. So structure, how is work divided?
Who is doing what? Who is most suited to doing what? This is imperative.
given that, let's say you have a subject matter expert, that's what we call it, a SME, someone who knows everything about this particular project or this particular process that you need to employ, right? If you've transitioned to a virtual workplace, then that person, while they have the expertise, might be limited by the media that they're working with. That being the case, a project or a task that would be... Generally allotted to that one person may need a dyad or a sub team, right? A group of two people or a smaller section of the greater team to work with it.
If I have the information and let's say Dr. Vickery has the expertise with Zoom, so she understands how to set up breakout rooms to help me facilitate a meeting where I'm transmitting that information, then we'll be working on formatting. my meeting content and all of that together, right? And that's something that we really wouldn't have to consider if we're working face-to-face.
But as I said, times change and we have to change with it. So once again, who is most suited to doing what? That's factoring in one who has the information and who has the expertise to communicate that information. And then are sub-teams functioning to ensure work is being handled effectively?
And we have individual versus sub-team work. Oftentimes in the workplace, if this is a team that's existed for a while, or even if it's a new team, but the individual members understand the strength of each other, it's a lot easier to delegate tasks. That being said, in the virtual workplace, once again, optimization becomes more critical because, you know, as human beings, we're naturally social. So we gravitate towards... speaking face to face and working with each other in unison, at least at key points in time.
So recognizing that we need to optimize the little time that we do get, whether that's going to be through a Zoom meeting or through, you know, just having scheduled emails that we'll be sending. So I know I'll be sending information on this at 4 p.m. and then something else at 10 a.m.
the next day. We need to recognize. that how we structure our work and the groups that are, will be doing the work is imperative. Next, we move to timing.
And as I said, we're about to touch on timeline. So this is now versus later. So one thing to consider, and you know, your BBA students, a lot of you may be naturally entrepreneurial or want to get into entrepreneurial pursuit. There's a book I've listened to, I think, yeah, I had the ebook called The Lean Startup.
And there they spoke about the just in time principle. So generally when we're working face-to-face, it's a lot easier to see down the road that okay This is something that I know we're going to need a month from now or this is an event that will occur a month and a Half from now that being the case Things change rapidly, especially in a virtual workplace, and there can be a lot more unforeseen circumstances. So with that being the case, where workers are less likely to engage with work that is not immediately pressing.
Does that make sense? So it's easier to say, for example, I'm currently teaching the Blue Leadership Program. We have two more meetings left in the semester.
But then I also know that I am planning programs. for the fall. If I were in the workplace, I would have already been more on top of those programs, given that I'd be able to contact or be in more regular communications with our other campus partners that I'd need to work on it with. But given the current circumstances, that is now on the back burner. So I'm working on things that are more immediately pressing and putting things off that can be done later.
This is very different from procrastination. And I mean, Trust me, we all do that too, myself included. I'm not an exception.
But this is more strategic than anything else. For the sake of the effectiveness of our team now, I'm focusing on what needs to be done now while keeping in mind when I will do what needs to be done later. And that involves front-loading the most imperative tasks and then recognizing the rationale for doing work now versus later.
In that instance that I just gave you, it was timeline. So... The program wraps up sooner, so I'm working on the closing ceremony currently versus working on rolling out my other program for the fall.
Another rationale could be even financial constraints. There are other things that I would generally be working on in the office at this point in time where I have a closer eye on the budget that the office is working with. But with the entire switch to virtual and then Hofstra also.
you know, doing reimbursements for residential students and all of that, we're a lot more careful about where our money is going, since the university as a whole will have less money when looking back at the 2019-2020 academic year. And then timeline. Is the team clear on the order of events or deliverables?
It is very easy to lose engagement when you're at home. That being said, everyone needs to understand when things are due. why they're due when they are and what are the next steps.
Does the timeline reflect the most critical operations and undertakings of the team? That ties back to timing, which we just touched on, and then how many timelines are running concurrently. When we get to the final consideration, we'll understand some of the distractions that can come into play when working from home, studying from home, anything like that. And with that in mind, it can happen that having too much going on at once or having it really wouldn't be too much if we're if you're in the office or if you're regularly on campus but given the change in setting and you're working from home your normal workload might be too much in certain circumstances or the format of your normal workload might seem too much so how many timelines are running concurrently that can be how many projects you're working with when are they due how many individual tasks have been assigned to you or how many have been assigned to the rest of the team and recognizing that balance is something that is imperative.
Now we switch to our first consideration. We're done with the imperatives now and that's accountability. The first one, each of these only has one slide and I'll just be talking over them and I'm sure you'll be able to understand what I'm saying.
you know, relate to it in some sense. So the first one is visibility. When you are in an office, or when you're in class, when you're going to group meetings, when you're just on campus, your student, your classmates, your professors, they can see you in person.
That is not the case when you're working from home, unless you have scheduled a meeting, or you have your scheduled class time. That being said... it is a lot harder for you to seem visible. And I stress this to all of you because maybe you have a class that you really enjoy right now or a professor that you think you had a good relationship with. And bearing in mind that the current change in setting is bound to affect that relationship, visibility is something you should be very cognizant of.
If you're thinking about graduate school, if you're thinking about internship opportunities for the summer or next summer, oftentimes, and this is just speaking as a student myself, oftentimes your recommendations will hold a lot of weight. maintaining that level of visibility, even given the circumstances, is something that could be imperative to your future successes, your future access to graduate programs, or your future access to internships. So if you're just, let's say you were a student that was very active asking questions in class when we were on campus, don't let that change.
You know, if you have a question about the material that you're learning. or you came across an interesting article that you would love to take up your professor on, then shoot them an email, right? Stay visible.
And that's actually ties into the final point. Then you have engagement. That can be engagement with the work and engagement with team members. If you're not visible, then people are less likely to think you're engaging with work as much, especially if you're also not engaging with them. As I said, In a lot of teams, a lot of the focus is placed on the strategic core.
So especially if you're not in the strategic core, it can seem like you're kind of off to the wayside and coasting. If you're not regularly providing updates or deliverables, and that may not be your fault. It may not be in your role to provide those kinds of things at regular or frequent enough intervals for people to see that you're regularly engaged. But for that, you need to take the first step and take command of your own engagement.
And not so much sell yourself, but make sure you're staying in clear sight and at the forefront of your team's processes. Make sure everyone knows the work that you're doing and the timelines that you're working with. And if you think about it, even if we were still on campus, that's something that we would generally be doing anyways, at least for the most successful among us, right?
That way, your team members can help you see hurdles down the road faster. You can help, you can preempt any issues that are upcoming as well, just because you have more eyes on your work and you're more engaged with all the team members you're working with. And those two things come together to talk about, once again, politics. When people think of politics, generally speaking, they think about like national politics, like you turn on the news, and then you see what's on the TV.
But there is such a thing as workplace politics. And I'm sure many of you have heard about that. So if you're a worker or a team member, that is not very visible is not being seen to engage with their work.
Not a lot of team members are talking to you on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, then you will seem disengaged and people start to lose faith and question your one commitment to the team and to your productivity. No one likes a social loaf. I'm sure we've all been in groups where a member or two have loafed or engaged in social loafing, and that's never fun.
So even if you are doing your best and you are getting your work done, while that might be enough when you're working on campus, you're meeting more regularly, you're going to office hours with your professors every week, that is not as easily visible. virtually. And that is what you need to keep in mind.
That's one change that you have complete control over your visibility at this point in time. You can at least make the effort to make sure that you're remaining visible, remaining engaged, and controlling those workplace or team politics. The next consideration is EQ and OH, that's emotional intelligence and occupational health. So emotional intelligence.
This is generally, you know, a term that gets thrown around a lot, but in, let's say layman's terms, it's generally an individual's ability to one, understand their own emotionals and emotional states, as well as recognize and understand those in others. So if you're going to class, you're meeting with your team regularly, you're going to your office hours, you can very clearly have you at least have a much better purview of the lives of the people that you're coming in touch with. Because virtuality or virtual work comes naturally with less visibility, you really don't have that. So you might be in a position where we're just talking about visibility. You might be in a position where you're not seeing a team member contribute as much as you would expect them to or want them to.
And because of that, we can naturally start to feel like once again, they're disengaged. recognize that we don't know what's going on at home. And because of that, we do need to employ a certain level of empathy and, you know, giving the benefits of the doubt to that team member, at least at the beginning.
And then give them an opportunity to explain themselves or express themselves. So if met with that situation, really do try to approach it with a sense of empathy, as I said, and understanding. Because once again, we don't know what could be going on on the other end of the computer screen.
And that's one of the drawbacks that comes with virtual communications. This is a good time to talk about virtuality as a concept. Now, when we think about something that's highly virtual, we might think of virtual reality where you put on a helmet and then it looks like you're on a roller coaster. But in IO, industrial organizational psychology, where we study virtual teams, for example, virtuality actually speaks to the.
type or level of communication as mediated by technology. So if the technology is geared to make communication more realistic, so let's say Zoom, where you're talking face-to-face through a camera, that's more similar to face-to-face communication. And because of that, that's actually considered low virtuality. So it's kind of the opposite.
It's something that we intuitively you might think of it the wrong way. So high virtuality is something that we wouldn't be able to do without the technology. So I can send an email back home to Jamaica because I have access to Microsoft Outlook. And email as a platform, as a medium, is highly virtual. That's not something I can do without email, sending that message, unless I'm writing a letter.
And we know that's much more difficult. So low virtuality describes those situations as it becomes more and more similar to a face-to-face interaction. So tying that back to emotional intelligence and being considerate, recognize that we're not seeing our team members or our team leaders, if we're not the team leader, or professors or TAs as frequently as we would if we were on campus.
Because we're in this highly virtual environment, we don't know what's going on on their end. And that's something that we should take into account as we're approaching working with each other, as well as managing those relationships. So don't take it for granted.
Ask your team members, ask your classmates, your professors, your TAs, how things are going on their end, especially given the current circumstances. Now, occupational health, this is its own... essentially its own brand of psychology, honestly, but it generally falls under the umbrella of IO, which is industrial organizational psychology.
So we have occupational health psychology. And here, these are terms I'm sure you've all been familiar with, work-life conflict. That is where your work is conflicting with your life outside of work. But then what a lot of people aren't as familiar with is life-work conflict.
And this is something that's studied particularly when we're talking about... employees or team members who work from home. Okay.
If you have a pet at home, you have a niece, a nephew, a child, a baby at home. These are things that will pull you away from your work just naturally. If there, these are distractions or distractions for the sake of our work, we're going to consider them distractions.
Not, I'm not, I'm not evil. I promise. But these are things that can distract you from your work.
These are elements that don't exist in your normal workspaces, which would be in your classes, in the library, at your desk, in your dorm room, if you live on campus. So that would be life-work conflict. So managing these things and setting borders for yourself, boundaries for yourself, setting routines, is something that is imperative, as well as managing those stress levels and feelings of loneliness that come with a change such as the one that we've gone through, like switching.
to virtual classrooms right at spring break in the middle of the semester, right? So these are things that we really do have to keep in mind when moving forward. If we want to be successful in our teams, if we want to be successful in our projects and undertakings.
And then the last thing, that would be circumstances. So leadership in general is largely situational. And it deals with a lot of circumstances come into play.
There are things that we generally don't consider that it is. not only to our benefit, but also to the benefit of our team members, if we are to be successful. The first thing is housing security. And you can see it at the university level, right?
When we were moving off of campus, we were moving to virtual classes, the university was sending out questionnaires or sending out emails talking about these things, and trying to gauge what level of comfort the students had with each of these concepts. So housing security. If you don't live on campus, how confident are you in your ability to get housing somewhere else? Do you live in the area?
Do you have friends who live in the area? For me, for example, I was considering staying on campus. I'm an international student. That being said, I did have friends who have a house off campus and that's where I'm working out of now. That's where I'm living and I'll be here for the entire summer.
But I'm very fortunate to be able to say that there are other international students or other students that, you know, maybe their situation at home just isn't good. Maybe they don't have... a good relationship with their parents or guardians. And once again, because we're working in such a highly virtual environment, we may fail to consider these things.
And we have physical and mental ability, right? There are so many considerations as it comes to ability that we really don't take into account when it comes to the 20 or 30-minute group meetings we have and we schedule on campus after class. Or even... for the, let's say, hour and 10 minutes or however long we are in our classrooms with our professors. Maybe some people are, you know, better working in the evening, the afternoon, the mornings, etc.
And it's something we wouldn't have considered because we only see them at those particular points in time during our regular routine school semester. So bearing that in mind as well, this is something that can... taken, that can, that must be taken into account when we're considering the workplace in 2020, when we're considering our teams in 2020 and moving forward as well. You know, persons might be limited by the amount of time they can look at a screen.
So recognizing that they may not be in the same position if you're having a group meeting at 7 p.m. on campus after a day of classes versus 7 p.m. at home after a day of classes, where they would have been looking first.
at a screen for however many hours. Then we have internet access and other technological restraints. That one is the most self-explanatory.
Yes, we do have a lot of wi-fi access in 2020, but let's say I did go home to Jamaica, that's something I know is significantly less reliable when I am at home, right? So to understand that your team members might not be in the same position as you are is something that's very critical. Also, you might be the team member that's not in that same position. And I recognize that it can be difficult to be forthcoming with that kind of information. So we do need to recognize how best to handle that and how to communicate early and effectively to kind of preempt the hurdles that will come when working virtually, when leading virtually and operating virtually as a whole.
Okay, folks, so that is the final slide that I have for you. I tried to touch on quite a few things. I was shooting for 30 minutes.
We're going a little past going on 34 right now. So sorry, I went over a bit there. If you do have any questions or you have, you know, anything you would like to suggest, or even if you're interested in leadership development on campus.
Once again, that's the work I do. And I will still be involved with it in the fall. So you can shoot me an email at kareem.a.panton at Hofstra.edu. And that's also a good place to get a hold of me if you have questions about the presentation itself or, you know, you're curious about anything else that I've discussed. OK, so thank you for your time and please stay safe.
Stay home as much as possible. And I hope I can see you all on campus in the fall. Take care.