September 16, 2021 - Another winter is coming, and we need to talk honestly about what’s next in leading hybrid global events and teams. Even if your team is work from home or work from anywhere, things are not going backwards.

I’m gonna break it down real simple today on what’s on my mind, and the thought du jour is a hybrid global meetings.

What do I mean by that? So we’ve all been in the the COVID world for a while. And you know, lockdowns have been a thing. And what we’re seeing emerge is that every country in the world is a little bit different in their current circumstances, and things are going in cycles and lulls.

Right. The the countries are hitting peaks, then they’re putting in more practices lockdowns, and the case counts start dipping. And but then, they go right back up. And it’s, I mean, there’s epic centers as things open up, and they navigate outward as people start feeling more comfortable with traveling, again, we’ve seen this process.

What twice, almost three times now. I think and we’re going back into another restricted phase. And so, why is that important? So, 2015 is when I started on my first journey of doing hybrid, that’s things that incorporate both the physical and the virtual for your team and distributed leadership.

This isn’t an old concept, we’ve done it before, but now it has a additional nuance doing it more. And in fact, replacing other other ways, we would do it. So that’s something that’s on the top of my mind right now, especially with some of our university partners that I work with and global nonprofits that focus on education events.

We are entering another winter case. Counts has started to rise, and that’s when we’ve had really good, really good weather before we started to have secondary infections other things that, you know, cause additional concern. And, you know, the variant, the delta variance specifically is on a rise. There’s probably over a dozen variants right now that are spreading in different places.

The US specifically. Is that like 50 I think 50% vaccination where now, there’s a lot of variance, emerging the breakthrough rate, even for vaccinated is happening. Luckily the severity is less in hospitalization rate is less, but even other countries who are a little further ahead in propagation because it propagates outward throughout different countries, that different times.

They’re seeing that the hospitalization rate is even impacting younger with Delta variant. So that calls to question a lot of long-term planning for face to face events that are in other countries because other countries have these variability and requirements that are different than our own. It adds an additional layer of complexity for people to travel and join especially especially if a restriction is put in place made a travel.

So that risk factor that concern is huge for a lot of individuals and organizations both for their workforce as well as for events that they would plan to host. So here’s the question. How do we do effective hybrid? International global virtual meetings. That’s what I want to focus in on because guess what?

I’ve done it before 2019, we had a budget crisis in the, the US government. And we had money pulled away for a specific reason to support something else. And you know, our organization was short. They they pulled 110 million from us and it’s like, okay, well we need to go and rereview everything to see where we’re going to cut that money.

And one of the things I did was like, okay for these these corporate communities we have the the leadership teams across all four shipyards. I was the lead for the electrical community which includes the combat systems the electrical distribution engineering, the nuclear power distribution engineering group and the combat systems engineering group, of course, along with our actual electrical and electronics and calibration workers.

So, like 3,300 people across the corporation, you know, 60 60, senior leaders about to represent those groups. You’re supposed to meet, we meet once a year set, the strategic agenda, major initiatives, alignment, knowledge, sharing innovation, new tools, new processes across the corporation and face to face like could valuable to build those relationships face to face.

Because once you’ve seen the face and heard the voice and built those commonalities, you know, whether it’s in the hallway and a chat or we would always do a lot of social functions. Not they were quote and quote not mandatory but literally was part of why you were there.

The host shipyard would always kind of put it on for everybody and huge. Huge, I took that practice and I’ve used it for new programs. I’ve stood up for developing different kind of functions with teams and that social elements really critical again when we transferred the Brussels European form 2020 into the virtual European form reconfigured.

Reset the social element was a critical part of that as well. How do you do the structured and structured? Social interactions help build a team that comradery besides the actual technical or purpose. The cause that you’re meeting for because we’re human, that’s, that’s the shared commonality between us all.

We’re all humans, and how do we build human connection? It’s important. Okay, so with those kind of thoughts, those kind of processes, like, yeah, we can go do things virtual, but the added complexity going into 2022 is okay. Maybe the international travel still going to be problematic, but I’ve had a lot of experience lately with hybrid meetings.

So setting up and running meetings where some people are in a room and some people are offsite. And I’ll tell you without changing things up and just trying to run it like any old meeting. It’s super fragmented. So one of my focus areas for research is technic, long technological fragmentation.

It’s a little bit of a on explored area but this is one of those areas for team virtuality and hybrid virtuality where you have physical and virtual digital elements to your team interactions. So the the thought process is okay, it’s really rough unless you do things different and deliberate with the virtual and physical team.

So what lessons learned can we then use to apply to global meetings? Global events. Now I’ll tell you there’s a lot of entrepreneurs who are looking at the virtual elements and they’re designing specific face to face components, as well as being deliberate and how to interact with the virtual elements.

There’s some things that are face-to-face. There’s some things that are virtual and I think one of the magic areas for focus is, how can you use the same tool for both? So for example, somebody’s joining a meeting from a computer you could literally have an interactive app on a phone and you know we we did that with the virtual European form.

We were specifically told people like hey for this experience you need a computer and also we highly suggest having a mobile phone with this this app for our virtual environment interact with. And I’ve seen some other virtual events because I’ve made a practice of going and studying and paying thousands and thousands of dollars out of my own pocket to go and look at different events to see.

How did they do this? What worked, what felt awkward? What was different? What was an explained? Well and kind of putting that catalog of lessons learned all together. So you got to look at that. Like how do you interact deliberately with people for questions for responses for special content for reminders, even on meeting times, agendas sharing sharing the files that you’re talking about.

And so that’s where my headspace is right now, because we have an international event in March, with multiple universities, one of the universities I work for, I’m a government employee DOD, employee subject to travel restrictions, that may come from DOD. And I’m trying to think of how can we make sure to provide a enriching immersion experience immersion?

That’s the part that gets you. Those social elements, you can do some virtual and we’ve done. It successfully doesn’t work for everybody, but for those who engage with it, it works pretty well that we’ve shown this through the, the retention rate in alumni involvement. So that’s that’s an important consideration.

I’m also thinking how do we do the physical where the technological tools provide integration rather than fragmentation and I’m curious. What have you done? What have you done? That works posted in the comments if you’re listening in your preferred podcast location you know posted on your social media channel and put hashtag leadership daily.

And I’m really curious to get feedback from folks who are working in this area and I love to get you on here. So post what you’re doing a little bit about it. And that way we can have a conversation. I’d like to follow up with you until then keep focused on the future.

Folks, the future of leadership is critical and I just want to say, I appreciate you all talk to you next time.