Great Leadership In An Age Of Remote Working
I recently published a series of short videos about how to provide great leadership through remote working. The videos offered my thoughts and tips about how to tackle some of the challenges facing leaders of teams in these most unprecedented times, and here I’ve transformed it for reading.
By now, it will have dawned upon all of us just how exceptional the times we’re currently living through are. There is no template for weeks of isolated working; away from teams, colleagues and friends. No New York Times bestseller with renowned frameworks and processes that we can drop in our Amazon basket. Instead, the best (and more likely worst) practices of remote working are being invented on a daily basis.
As a leader of remote teams, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to provide great leadership, and ensure that the team was motivated, engaged, and performing at a high level.
I looked at all the actions I took over time and have broken it down into 3 key areas:
Communication
The Manager/Coach Balance
The “I’ll Do That Another Day” list
1. Communication
There’s no doubt that remote working brings difficult challenges. The good news is that by showing great leadership, and with a bit of ingenuity, the majority of them can be overcome.
Whether remote or face-to-face, the way you communicate with your team is always of the highest importance. The thing with remote working, however, is that it brings the deficiencies in any of your communication styles into starker focus.
Just because you’re not in the same room as your team, don’t forget: Your team needs to hear from you! It’s about changing the delivery method, not the quality or the quantity of the communication.
Of course, I get it: you can’t offer to grab a coffee or go for lunch with a member of your team when you’re remote working, and sadly I can’t help you solve that one. Instead, what you need to do as a manager is think creatively about how you can solve what I call those face-to-face “micro moments” that you have throughout each day or week with your team.”
Here are my tips for strengthening communication through remote working:
Hold regular “Ask Me Anything” sessions, and give all of your team or department the opportunity to get any questions they have out in the open. The result of these sessions is like opening a pressure valve at times of uncertainty, and allows people to get the things that are bothering them off their chest.
Take responsibility for the tech setup before each meeting. This might sound a little frivolous in the grand scheme of things, but when you’re working remotely — and particularly when you have team members working in different countries — this can be a real issue, and can lead to people feeling left out or that you don’t care. The key here is to aim for what I call a “same for all”, approach, and not a “best for some”. If that means going all the way back to an audio conference call on a fixed or mobile line, then so be it. Personally, my experience with this point is that you should never underestimate its importance!
Structure your regular team meetings online as you would offline. Keep things consistent; this will build confidence with your team that despite the uncertainty of working from home for a long period, the key fundamentals of the team they’re part of remain the same. So, for example:
Review the company/team OKRs/KPIs
Get each person’s business area update, or however you might normally do it when you’re in the same room.
Tell them about something that you’re working on, or any pertinent information that’s come out from a meeting you’ve had with your manager. Again, this helps to contribute to the “business as usual” sense, and that work higher up hasn’t stopped. However, it’s important to note here that if there are really are some issues then do be honest about them. Despite what you might think, the more perceptive of your team will probably have figured them out anyway!
4. Schedule an additional meeting, separate to your 1:1 catch ups or even at the beginning or end of your catch ups, where you make time for an informal chat. Obviously when you’re working remotely it’s impossible to have those same interactions you might have during the course of a day in an office, for example grabbing a coffee, or going out for lunch. This situation is about adapting to the circumstances you find yourself in. By specifically calling it out as a meeting not related to their work, you’re giving them permission to feel a little more relaxed, you can see how they’re feeling and if there any issues that you should be aware of. If it’s with someone whom you would normally go for a coffee with in the office, then replicate that scenario. It’s not perfect, but your team will genuinely appreciate the efforts you’re going to.
And finally: encourage those in your team who have direct reports themselves to do the same with their team, so that there’s consistency across the department.
2. The Manager/Coach Balance
Remote working requires you to make some subtle adjustments to the balance between being a manager and being a coach. What I’ve experienced over time leading a team remotely is that you need to spend a little more time on coaching your team, rather than managing them.
Promoting each individual’s development, while something that’s always important, becomes even more so when working remotely.
The reason its importance grows is because it will give your team something else to focus on other than the situation directly related to the company/product. It also ties into the broader vision you have for your team members about setting them up for success in the longer term and not just sweating over the business targets they’re responsible for. It’s also a great time to focus on personal development because when your team is working from home, they don’t have the usual time out of their day commuting to work, which means they can focus on some of the things that might normally fall off the priority list.
So how might you adjust the Manager/Coach balance? Here are my tips.
When I’m working with coaching clients and in particular in relation to leadership, I use something I created called the Dual Layer Leadership Framework.
As you can see, it consists of two areas: the base layer and the over layer.
The base layer consists of the actions that as a leader you want to ensure covers the whole team. Here you can see I’ve included examples such as the team values, culture, the metrics your company uses for team performance, for example OKRs or KPIs, and what I call “team happiness”, which refers to things such as team events, perhaps rewarding good work with gifts or prizes, away days, and so on.
The over layer is about the actions that relate to each individual in the team, for example:
Personal empathy — The way you treat each member of your team, adjusting to their style and personality
Constructive feedback — Your feedback model, whichever one you use
Tailored career development — the plan you have in place for each member of your team about their career goals
And what I call “What makes them tick”: how you get to know each one of them and understand a little more about their background, their lives, and so on. Understanding more about what makes them tick then feeds into each of the other parts of the Over Layer.
So, here are my tips on how to adjust the Manager/Coach Balance:
See it as a big opportunity to focus more on the Over Layer part of the framework. Think about the areas you can invest more time with each member of your team, for example:
If you haven’t done so already, setup a personal development plan for them, for example using a popular framework such as the GROW model
Hopefully your company’s tech will allow you to do this, but arrange with the HR team to set up a 360 degree feedback review.
If possible, get sign off for additional learning for them. There’s never been more choice for investing in high-quality, online learning materials across a range of platforms such as Coursera, Udemy, Masterclass, etc.
3. The “I’ll do that another day” list
Well, you probably know what I’m talking about! It’s that list of things that you’ve been meaning to do, except that you never find the time
In a time of prolonged remote working, it’s the moment to assess those things that are Urgent and those that are Important. It’s a classic dilemma, and it’s usually the Urgent that ends up winning the argument for your time. Instead, it’s time to let the Important take the upper hand.
When things are uncertain, keeping busy will contribute to the team’s sense of purpose and their overall wellbeing.
So, here are my tips for attacking the “I’ll do that another day” list:
If your diary starts to thin out from some of the regular meetings you have being cancelled, use your calendar to block out time for working on specific tasks. If there’s empty space in your diary, you’ll feel empty and it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Co-create a list with your team entitled “Things we’d love to get done if we ever had the chance”. And now could be that chance! Use the output to drive actions for each team member. This is the moment to work on that marketing plan, a competitive analysis, a piece of research, that you had meant to do a couple of years ago…
Break the tasks down. Aside from the procrastination, there were probably some good reasons why you didn’t get them done in the first place, so trying to throw yourself into them now won’t work either.
Give yourself daily or weekly goals to make steady, consistent progress and work with the other members of your team to get it done. Try to ensure that you’re giving people the parts of the task that best play to their strengths.
None of us have got a sense of when “normality” might return, or what the new normal will look like. The business landscape may undergo some extraordinary changes. Use this dramatic and unforeseen moment in time to refresh the relationship you have with your teams, and give them the great leadership they deserve.