As workers have been forced to work from their home offices during COVID-19, fresh challenges have been placed on managers to oversee teams that are working in fundamentally new ways.  It marks the latest step in a transformation of managerial roles that also include the rise in external workers, the mass introduction of millennials into the workplace, and the need to change and evolve at extreme speed.

In his latest book, Shapers, entrepreneur Jonas Altman outlines five modes the modern leader needs to master if they are to be effective at creating an engaged and empowered workforce:

• Teacher, with the leader aiming to provide clear direction as well as the requisite tools and support to help their team to thrive, before crucially getting out of the way and leaving them to it.
• Learner, with the leader embracing change, encouraging experimentation, building courage, and learning from new ways of working to help their team improve every day.
• Mobilizer, with the leader anticipating and responding to organizational needs and facilitating vital and timely change.
• Giver, with the leader tasked with playing the long game and striving to put the needs of their team first above their own.
• Coach, with the leader providing space and support to grow leadership qualities in their team, with the aim of growing people capable of thinking independently and solving their own problems, while also helping others to do likewise.

“Modern management of an empowered workforce requires an upgrade from an industrial mindset to one that is compatible with today’s emergent era,” Altman says.  “We need different modes of leadership that are premised first and foremost on trust-more of an art than a ‘science'”.

2020 has undoubtedly placed a lot of new pressures on managers to adapt to what has largely been unprecedented levels of change.  Altman provides some interesting thoughts in a pretty crowded field around what managers should be aspiring towards.