If you need things to change, the first place you have to look is inside.
Leaders are prone to action. Whenever a challenge or an opportunity comes along they start moving and finding ways to overcome them.
The problem is most people have a hard time understanding that their blind spots might get in the way of the result they want to achieve.
Companies can adopt new practices, systems, and tools for remote working, but if they don’t invest in leadership it will all go to waste. You can have the latest version of a digital collaborative tool, but if the leader is unable to engage the team in collaboration, it will be used just for confirming the leader’s ideas in a beautiful mind map.
All leadership best practices are still valid. As a matter of fact, they are more necessary now than ever before. Those leaders that counted on their charisma or organic way of engaging through their communication may feel lost and not knowing how to behave when you can’t put your energy in the room every day.
So, remote working made it urgent to look at the kind of leader you are now and the one you need to be to thrive in a virtual environment.
Let’s take a look into three blind spots that might get in the way of effective remote leadership: Trust, Performance Perception, and Team Engagement.
The main challenge for remote leaders is to trust the team.
One CEO I coached was constantly trying to get more time for strategic work and had recurrent discussions with team leaders about the need for them to be more goal-oriented and autonomous in their roles. After some introspection and self-assessment, he realized that he was getting in the way of the leadership team to step up because he was not willing to accept decisions that were different from the ones he would have made.
In remote work, trust becomes an even more important ingredient for effective leadership.
And there lies most of the problem.
Having everyone at the office creates an illusion that you are observing and controlling everything that happens, so the first thing leaders feel when having remote workers is anxiety. Fear that things will not go well if they are not supervising everything closely.
So, micromanaging begins. Constant calls and virtual meetings to understand what everyone is doing just undermine the relationship between the team and the leader.
What can you do to make the mindset shift and start trusting the team?
For leaders that are really interested in embracing remote work and want to have a happy and productive team, the first thing to do is to see yourself in a new role.
You are not the one who has all the answers. You are not the one who has more knowledge than everyone else. You are not the commander who everyone must obey.
The new leadership role, the one that will thrive in the digital revolution, is the orchestrator or coach-style leader.
When you start looking at yourself as responsible for getting the best of everyone, for raising collective intelligence, you lose some of the statuses that previous generations have always given to “the boss”. Accepting this new role is understanding that your mission is to guide other people, and take pride in the team’s achievements, instead of your own.
Once you understand that your purpose is to get the best out of everyone, your focus must be on people instead of tasks. A good way to start is by mapping their strengths and weaknesses and finding ways to leverage people’s performance respecting their personality styles. This will make you more confident about the level of maturity people on your team have and how you can better delegate responsibilities.
Question your beliefs about performance and results
Another important psychological challenge in leading a remote team is breaking the old belief that working longer hours means commitment and brings results. This is a task-oriented approach inherited from the industrial revolution and definitely not suited for the digital world. Counting tasks do not make sense when you have so many different levels of complexity and people collaborating in different ways for an outcome.
Valuing performance and delivery over tasks and hours spent working also demands trust, but not only. The goal-oriented leader must have a clear understanding and communication of what results are expected and when they should be delivered.
So the emotional challenge is checking how much you are influenced by this belief. What do you think when someone leaves work at 6 pm? Do you think they are not committed? Do you think less of yourself if you finish a project faster than you expected? Do you know the results you want to achieve?
Focusing on results does not mean delegating everything
A common misunderstanding about focusing on results is that leaders must only delegate and expect people to deliver what they wanted.
You may have interns or junior people on your team that is not quite mature enough to deliver without further orientation. You must know what to expect from each of them and that will be the result you are focusing on.
If you have an intern you will probably have to explain each part of the process and monitor the work closely. If you adopt the coaching leadership style you will help each collaborator in your team to get the results they are ready to achieve and prepare them for a greater level of maturity. Use Hersey and Blanchard’s Situational Leadership Model to assess your team’s level of maturity for delegation.
Knowing how to manage the tasks will be even more important now that people will need reskilling and upskilling to face the digital acceleration. Senior employees might be motivated to attempt the task or use a new technology even though they lack the skills, knowledge, and/or ability to do so.
Reviewing responsibilities and agreeing on results must be done together with your team. This is how you are going to guarantee people’s engagement to deliveries.
Engaging Remote Teams
Being distant from your team can create a communication barrier, especially for quiet leaders. A remote team will demand all your ability to connect with people to engage them in pursuing common goals.
Leaders are being called to create a purpose-driven culture as a way to engage and motivate people in a digital environment. That means you will have to have a clear understanding of the mission you are trying to achieve as a team in a way that you can ripple this purpose in your communication and practices.
Leaders that reduce communication to passing on information will lose connection with the team. You don’t have the coffee breaks, the group lunch, and the water cooler small talk to bond.
Connecting means foremost listening and having a true interest in other people.
When you have this ability it does not matter where the team is, they know they can count on you. You become more accessible and represent a safe shore for your team.
Written communication may even be a problem for extroverted and outgoing leaders. Messages that are too objective may be interpreted in different ways and most of the time, not in a motivating way.
Once a team member that was working remotely (before the pandemic) said that he felt more stress after he decided to work from home because every message he received seemed like an urgent order.
You really don’t have to worry too much about that when you are all together in a room, for usually, these messages are only the result of a previous conversation or interaction, but in digital environments, you must double your attention to showing emotions and intentions in your written messages as well as interacting in a more personal level on video meetings.
To be purpose-driven is to be constantly asking WHAT FOR.
The latest research and all the specialized publications show the increased importance of nurturing Culture and company values. That might seem very subjective and hard to know if you are actually in tune with that or not.
As a psychologist, I can’t help analyzing things from the behavioral perspective. As I observe leaders I work with and the ones I interview, I realized that those leaders that are truly connected with their purpose, committed to the Culture, put intention in all their actions. Sometimes they don’t even see that, because they do it so organically, but the fact is that they know what they want to achieve with every action, every communication they make.
Of course, that demands a lot of Emotional Intelligence. Because being aware of your intentions is an ability for those that are not reactive to the environment, that can empathize with people and understand that their behaviors are rarely personal attacks.
So, if you want to get connected to your purpose start asking yourself what you want to achieve before you act. What is my goal in saying this to Mark? How do I want him to leave our conversation? What I would like him to do?
What can you do to become a purpose-driven leader and engage your team?
As you will see in figure 2 of the MIT Sloan Report, while you might think that you are driven by purpose and connected to the company’s values, your team may not fully agree with that.
If you are not creating opportunities to talk about this issue you could probably be doing more to foster this environment.
So, gather your team to have a co-creative meeting and check how the company’s values are currently being practiced. Use this opportunity to listen to suggestions on how you and your team might create ways for that to happen through communication, meetings.
If you don’t have a Team Chart start working on one. Make sure the team collaborates to build the team’s mission, vision, and goals. Participation is the best way to ensure engagement. People will commit to things they agreed upon. This is the template I use on Team Coachings. A fun team name will help to create a sense of belonging and unite the team even more.
Once you are all on the same page constantly come back to the chart and recognize employee contributions to nurturing the values.
If you are not creating opportunities to talk about this issue you could probably be doing more to foster this environment.
So, gather your team to have a co-creative meeting and check how the company’s values are currently being practiced. Use this opportunity to listen to suggestions on how you and your team might create ways for that to happen through communication, meetings.
If you don’t have a Team Chart start working on one. Make sure the team collaborates to build the team’s mission, vision, and goals. Participation is the best way to ensure engagement. People will commit to things they agreed upon. This is the template I use on Team Coachings. A fun team name will help to create a sense of belonging and unite the team even more.
Once you are all on the same page constantly come back to the chart and recognize employee contributions to nurturing the values.
Conclusion
Thriving in the Digital World demands that leaders transform themselves.
When you want to make a change you have to be the change. Don’t be an obstacle to the results you are trying to achieve.
Check how much you really trust your team to get the results you need. Focus on delivery instead of effort and analyze how deep are your virtual connections and conversations about meaning and purpose.
When you have the mindset of an orchestrator you adopt a new leadership role and will guide your team to get the results you need and still be happy with it.
Let me know what your thoughts are on this matter and if I can help you any further with that.
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