If the Delta variant is throwing a wrench into your reopening plans, then the true lesson of the pandemic is being missed.

Getting people back into the office only feels like the solution to all of the problems. If we could just get going again, then we could solve:

– The problem of accountability.

– The problem of production.

– The problem of recruitment.

– The problem of engagement.

– The problem of retention.

– The problem of quality assurance and control.

– The problem of mentoring and skill development.

– The problem of business development.

We have taken all of the real problems and made them a function of something that is not a problem, namely physical location. Our logic says that solving the location problem is how we solve all of the other problems.

In reality, the pandemic surfaced a weakness many firms had and have: Team distribution degrades performance.

But why? We have MS Teams, we have mobile phones, we have the Cloud, we have the Internet! For white-collar professionals, what else do we need? Answer: Updated leadership practices. In lieu of doing that work, we glommed our existing leadership playbook onto a wildly different working reality.

For instance, The Wall Street Journal cited one survey where 69% of respondents noted their overall number of meetings have increased since the pandemic. We tried to take the casual meeting practices of the office and formalize them into virtual meetings. Didn’t work. Now, it’s a monster. But if we dig a bit, the real problem isn’t the number of meetings. The real problem is that we haven’t yet adapted our communication expectations to the new working reality.

The true lesson of the pandemic is that our leadership practices require evolution. This will mean repeatedly identifying and facing the unknown and uncomfortable, making mistakes, tweaking, and trying again.

What does leadership in a post-Covid workplace actually look like?

And, what if Covid-19 is only the opening salvo for other big problems to the horizon? Climate change. Social unrest. Inequality. New pandemics. More.

We can’t keep searching Dad’s tattered leadership playbook for answers. We have to do the hard thinking ourselves and come up with something that’s designed to work.