Japan has some set pieces around leadership.  The Middle Manager boss sits at the head of an array of desks arranged in rows, so that everyone in the team can be seen.  This is important because this is how the boss knows who is working well in the team and who isn’t.  They can be observed every day, all day long.  What time they arrive and what time they leave, who is late back from lunch – it is all there in front of the boss.  Meetings are easily arranged and follow up is a shout away – “Suzuki, what is happening with that report?”.  Now the team are at home, away from the constant surveillance of the boss.  The boss has little idea how they spend their days and our clients tell us many Middle Managers  are struggling to supervise the diaspora.   In many cases, the day would start with the chorei, the morning huddle, getting the team together to go through what is on for that day.  These meetups can continue even when everyone is at home. We have just moved it online. Everyone needs to be on camera at 9.00am, dressed for business, rather than in a T-shirt.  If you don’t come on camera that is a red flag.  There may be some depression issues bubbling away in the background, as the isolation starts to get to people. They begin to withdraw.    One of my team didn’t come on camera for three days in a row, saying there was an issue with the laptop webcam.  Was there an issue?  How would I know that was the case, sitting in my study, at my home?  I immediately started organising another laptop to be sent out. I need to see everyone’s face every day, to check how they are doing.  In the end, it was a technical issue around the privacy settings in Teams.  The point though is, I didn’t really know what was going on.  I have to be continuously keeping an eye out for the emergence of any stress or depression in my team.   At the chorei we go through good news reports, the vision, mission, values, the Dale Carnegie Principle for that day, who we are visiting virtually or otherwise and who is visiting us, each person’s top three priorities for the day and a motivational quote.  The whole thing takes about ten minutes.  I usually spend another ten minutes talking about things like taking care of your health, standing up regularly because we tend to sit for too long, issues around coordination which have arisen, the latest news in our business, the cash flow situation and recognising good work.  We also have Coffee Time With Dale at 3.00pm every day for anyone who wants to just shoOt the breeze and catch up with colleagues, they don’t physically meet anymore.   The meeting cadence with direct reports continues online but it is easy for this to fade or drift.  People’s new work from home schedules seem to make it harder to connect.  Back in February, when we started working from home it had a temporary feel about it.  On reflection, I didn’t immediately embed some processes I should have.  It is now many months since our migration to working from home and we will many more months like this. These direct report meetings are a discipline I found I have to really enforce, because many of my staff seem to possess ninja level skills at avoiding talking with boss. I want stuff from them, I want it yesterday and I am very demanding. Talking with me is probably a pain, so some are quite creative in escaping the supervision.    The biggest issue has been coordination across the whole business, as we all descend into our little pockets of responsibility and start losing sight of the big picture.  I have to spend a lot more time now making sure that key information is being shared and that I am also sharing key information, rather than hogging it to myself.  This is a time consuming activity, but we have dropped the ball a couple of times because it wasn’t done properly.  Before you know it, timelines start to drift, activities drop out of completion sequence and confusion is not far behind.   This is when you discover just how detail challenged some