With the lockdown in India in place for more than two months, the media industry is still adjusting to the new norms, such as work-from-home. Sushil Kumar Tyagi, general manager of marketing at Eenadu, spoke to the delegates at the INMA Virtual World Congress on 22 May, about how to build teams in the WFH environment.
As media houses are adjusting their short- and long-term strategies to meet the growing demand for content from credible news sources, remote leadership, and strategic flexibility hold the key to the future. According to a recent blogpost by Brie Logsdon, project manager at INMA, Tyagi broke down the key components of remote leadership comprising communication, coordination, collaboration, and effective use of technology.
“Leaders must train and prepare teams so they can go above benchmarks. Knowing which tools to use is important to efficiency, and leaders should know when it is time for a video call or when to communicate via e-mail. As we all know, only a happy team can produce happy results,” Tyagi said, adding that clear agendas and connections into employee’s personal lives can make a big difference.
He called this strategic flexibility to drive remote leadership through four components – adaptiveness, responsiveness, elasticity, and agility.
Tyagi then shared the four building blocks of strategic flexibility. They are, anticipate, to build scenarios of the future; formulate, to create effective strategies for each of these futures; accumulate to determine the strategic options required; and, operate and manage the portfolio of options or components. Through these, Tyagi said, a remote leader can develop a team, identity, relationship, trust, and mutual understanding.
Eenadu is the largest circulated Telugu daily newspaper in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in South India. Various editions of Eenadu exist throughout the Telugu-speaking region of India, as well as in cities such as Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai, and New Delhi.
