If the last couple of years have taught us anything about leadership, it’s that the way we once led isn’t so fit for purpose in a hybrid or completely remote team environment.  Yes, we need to be flexible, adaptable and keeping up with change at rates like never before.  And then there are the fundamental things that, if we aren’t doing, will make it harder to adapt, lead through change and truly engage with our people.  The things that if we aren’t doing them at a basic level, will erode trust. The trust you have in your team and the trust that you have in yourself to be able to lead effectively.

Below I hit the high points for what you can be doing to get the basics right in a hybrid or remote team environment.

1. Ensure alignment with clear directional objectives

Ensure your team are pulling in the same direction, no matter where they are located, and that everyone in the team is on the same page regarding the:

• Purpose of the team (what is the team’s reason for being?)
• Shared team objectives and how they fit with the bigger strategic picture.
• Individual objectives that everyone is working towards in achieving the team objectives.

When we are clear and transparent about these three directional levels, your people will know where and how they need to be investing their energy.  Importantly, our experience shows that it also creates a collaborative and connective team dynamic that is so essential for success in teams that are virtual or hybrid in nature.  Be brave enough to ask your team how they feel about sharing their individual objectives; introducing this level of transparency can help reduce the psychological distance and increase collaboration when we realise that our actions, no matter where we are located, may be able to contribute to the success of a colleague and therefore the team.  Track and discuss all team objectives openly and regularly – they are the binding factor of your team – so use them to your advantage.


2. Set Your Team Up for Success

When we don’t trust our people to get on with things in a remote or hybrid environment, this can often say more about us than our people.  We’ll talk more about us a bit further on, but when it comes to our team, we can remove doubt by applying a couple of simple strategies:

• Equip your team with the skills and team systems to work remotely.  On one level, it’s helping the team learn how to be a hybrid team, and then there is understanding capability of individual team members to work remotely.  So focus on both levels.  Develop your team through simple but effective teaming activities that allow you to co-create the rules of engagement (like a Team Charter) and define the team governance for communication and collaboration – what does good look like for our team?  At the same time observe your team members individually.  Who is thriving, who is doing ok, who needs help.  Identify development opportunities, whether it be through buddying up, mentoring or formal courses.  

 

• Don’t assume everyone is comfortable with working remotely.  Use your 1:1’s to dive into how your team members are really doing on the days you aren’t together in the office.  Or if your team has transitioned to being completely virtual, learning how this sits with individual team members.  You may need to become a ‘mentor manager’ to support them in their transition and their effectiveness.  

3. Set Yourself Up for Success

• Understand your own mindset.  You were once leading a team that was co-located – so how are you with the fact that you are now leading in a hybrid or completely virtual environment?  Do you trust your team to do their job when no one is watching?  Even when they are capable, confident and have the right supporting structures in place?  If you haven’t done your own piece of reflection on this, you may be leading at only half your potential effectiveness, and this will be impacting your approach to how you get your own job done as well as how you lead, engage, and inspire your team.  

 

• Adapt your approach.  Similar to the above; the skills, techniques and tactics we use as leaders in a co-located environment will need to be different for a team that is spread out.  Little things like consciously make time to connect with your team members will make a difference, as will using effective delegation.  Your ability to communicate well and consistently across more than one medium is also a must-have capability.

The final word…Reflect

Carve out time each week to reflect on the team and yourself.  This is a practice that is fast becoming a non-negotiable for leaders in a hybrid world that helps us stay in touch with reality, ourselves and our team.  Reflect on yourself and your team through the lens of the points in this article.  What’s working well? What could be better?  Then build this discipline into your week, because leading to get things done through others is the big part of your job…and how we do this is changing faster than ever.​

How often do we see it that the results of an employee engagement survey come out, and one of the main messages is that your leaders aren’t engaging enough.  Whether this is due to poor communication, not managing performance or giving feedback, or knowing how to recognise or acknowledge their people.  The reasons are often varied, and sometimes the survey output isn’t granular enough to let you know where the focus for development needs to be.  But that’s not the purpose of this article. 
 
What we often overlook is that results like this create some of the most unnecessary, and unspoken, challenges felt by managers.   That is, the immediate pressure to become an engaging leader overnight. The idea that there needs to be immediate improvement is backed up by the rhetoric that comes with the results, the way they are shared (often without thought to framing, context or a supporting plan) and the fact that there will be another engagement survey next year and possibly some pulse surveys in between.

And in this moment we have created the ‘Engagement False Reality Trap’. 
And this is why it’s a false reality:

• Under normal circumstances, for the average leader, it takes time to build engagement with their people and within their team.  How long depends on factors like personality, leadership skills, the desire of the team members to reciprocate on the trust building front, and the extent to which the organisational factors enable all of this with things like clear direction, clear roles and responsibilities, a good capability development strategy. But it takes time.  And at the same time we can’t put a timeframe on building trust.  That’s the reality.

 

• Even the most experienced and inspiring of leaders will not build engagement with everyone. Yet, the implied expectation is that we need to build engagement – with everyone. 

 

• Based on the above, we know from experience that if a team is starting from a dysfunctional place, it can easily take a year of concerted effort before healthy change is seen.  Maybe longer if there are no supporting organisational development strategies or structures in place. And longer again if the higher layers of leadership are dysfunctional themselves and role modelling poor leadership behaviours themselves.

 
If the above factors are even partly true, and the managers of the groups with the poor results are not great people leaders, then we tend to see the following scenarios play out:

• Those leaders will try harder, for all the right reasons.  But sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know, and in these cases the effort to improve can be easily misguided.  Often what we see in this case is that the leader tries harder with the same style that led to those results in the first place, reinforcing the unhealthy levels of engagement.

 

• They opt out and become fully disengaged themselves due to feeling helpless.  They may already know on some level that they aren’t great ‘people’ leaders, so rely on their skills as a very good ‘technical’ leader.  The risk is that if they choose to opt out, the technical side of their leadership can be impacted by the overwhelming sense of disengagement

 

• A third scenario sometimes plays out, and that is when the manager seeks to find out who ‘nailed’ them in the survey.  This is not often seen, but it does exist, driven from a place of lower self-confidence and a lack of wanting to take any sort of ownership for how we arrived here.

​1. Be comfortable in your own skin.  Being eclectic needs to come from an organic base.  You are building a style that works for ‘who’ you are.  So, being comfortable with who you are is important.  I know that, for some, this is easier said than done; however the more comfortable you are with being yourself and not feeling you have to be someone you’re not, the more natural being eclectic will feel.  The key here is to have a sense of your beliefs and values.  What is important to you? What do you stand for?  What can you live with? What can you live without? There is no point looking to build a strong assertive style if your energy is more subdued and you value a more subtle or nuanced way of leading.

 2.  Look for Inspiration in "Out of the Way Places".  When working out who you want to be as a leader and how you want to be leading, be prepared to get inspiration in places you least expect.  As an example, if you want to find ways to keep things real whilst at the same time bringing a sense of optimism and hope to your style observe the style of people like Turia Pitt, Kurt Fearnley or go back a bit further and get acquainted with Helen Keller.  When leading in times of uncertainty what better place to be looking for ideas on these leadership attributes than in the people who have had to achieve success in the most uncertain of circumstances.

 3. Experiment and Evolve.  If you are comfortable in your own skin, and getting good at observing those around you for ideas on leading, the next step is to start experimenting with different techniques, ways of thinking or behaviours until you get to a place where it becomes natural for you.  A good sportsperson doesn’t just get that way.  They practice.  Sometimes they need to experiment with their style.  And then practice some more until it becomes natural.  It’s the same with being eclectic.  Truly eclectic leaders don’t stop at the experimenting stage. They get that the world is continually changing and that over time they may need to tweak aspects of their style to remain relevant. 

Being eclectic isn’t about giving yourself a makeover.  It’s not about giving up who you are (unless it makes sense to let go of some stuff).  It’s about understanding who you are and knowing where you could strengthen your style…then acknowledging that you could go some way to filling those gaps or enhancing your style by learning from the world around you.  And being brave enough to look beyond your immediate environment and beyond your culture and your biases for those ideas.

A longitudinal study by Google over a period of two years shed some further light on this.  They found that team performance across their business was less about who they hired, and much more heavily related to the environment they worked within and how this enabled (or not) team members to work together constructively. More specifically, this was about the environment created by the leader to build trust among team members, and to allow them to put forward ideas and have healthy dialogue without conflict.  The Google findings and subsequent publications identified four key elements critical to team collaboration and ultimately high performance: 

1. Psychological safety – essentially, this is the ability for team members to speak their mind (respectfully, of course), float their ideas, and take measured risk without fear of reproach.  A team environment where members feel psychologically safe is now consistently recognized as the most critical element in driving high performance. Such an environment is a prerequisite for innovation and autonomy.  Physiologically this can be explained by the fact that when we feel criticized or judged, the body’s ‘fight or flight’ response is activated by the amygdala (the part of our brain that controls reasoning and decision making), rendering us unable to respond rationally and think laterally – let alone strategically.

2. Trust between team members – closely linked to the culture of safety within the team, the strength of the relationships between its members is key to its overall performance.  Teams with high trust depend upon each other, support each other, and ultimately collaborate to achieve a common goal; this last point being very important.  The distinction here is that high performing teams are more focussed on the overall team’s outcomes than their individual results because the inherent trust between team members serves to override the potential human inclination to compete with other team members in order to prove our own worth.

3. Role and goal clarity – it stands to reason that the team must have a clear understanding of its ‘north star’ in order to deliver exemplary results.  This also means that team members must have absolute clarity of their own accountabilities and how each member of the team contributes equally to its overall success.  This belief that each member of the team is equally vital to its success is another key element driving genuine collaboration.

4. Autonomy and purpose – as identified by Daniel Pink in his book “Drive” it is the intrinsic motivators of role autonomy, mastery and purpose that have the greatest impact on human performance.  Pink found that as a collective, we are motivated far more by our connection to our work and how it contributes some way to the greater good, than by extrinsic rewards such as salary, bonuses, and recognition awards – although we must clearly feel we are compensated fairly and equitably for this to be the case.  The confidence to effectively exercise our own skills in the team environment, our sense of autonomy, is also directly related to the levels of trust between team members and with the leader.  

In these complex and ever uncertain times, the role of the leader in creating clarity for the team regarding strategy, direction and priorities cannot be underestimated.  But even more important is the leader’s role in connecting team members, building rapport, interdependency, and trust.  Especially when team members cannot connect physically in natural and organic ways as perhaps previously taken for granted.  The current work context requires leaders to role model the behaviours which engender trust: authenticity, consistency, empathy, honesty – and personal vulnerability.  This is the bedrock for establishing a psychologically safe team culture where people can generate ideas together and truly perform to their highest levels. ​

​Of course, all this of this does not come without some challenge.   Some things to consider and be aware of before you depart on your new career adventure include: 

• The impact of culture shock – and this cannot be underestimated.  Living and working overseas presents a myriad of challenges big and small, that you will need to work through in your initial days, weeks, and months overseas.  From learning a new language, finding accommodation and schools, through to opening a bank account in a foreign country (where you may not be able to speak the language), purchasing a car, transferring your driver’s license, driving on the other side of the road, working out where to shop (and how to read the labels in a foreign language), to mention just a few. And all this within the context of an administrative system that may differ wildly from what you are accustomed to back home.  
• Loneliness – whether you are overseas on your own or with your immediate family, you will find yourself away from your extended family, friends, and broader support network.  Your network may also be in a very different time zone making it difficult to facilitate spontaneous catch ups in times of need, or to align calendars for regular calls – both personal and professional.  The same applies of course to your family members if they are with you on this assignment. 
• A sense of professional displacement – you have most certainly been offered this opportunity because of your demonstrated achievements and performance back home.  But think back to your past job moves.  You know that awkward feeling when you start a new role and haven’t fully assimilated into the new team and the nuances of your job description yet?  Transitioning from the comfort of knowing your place, and value, to the learning curve of a new (and probably bigger) role is always a little uncomfortable.  And when this new role is in a foreign country, it is oftentimes considerably more uncomfortable.  It can take longer to get up to speed in the new context, where ways of working may be diametrically opposed to what you have previously experienced.  The impact of different corporate and national cultures on business models and practices can make you feel like a fish out of water, so being as prepared as possible for this will expedite your progression. 
• Not everyone may be committed to your success – I hate to say it, but it is possible that not everyone will welcome a new foreigner into their team with open arms. As is always the case, there may be an individual or individuals within the team who applied for the role you have been granted and feel that you stole their promotional prospects.  Or they may feel that your position should be filled by a local and not a foreigner or expatriate.  People may not readily share information with you and may passively observe you in a bid to determine whether or not you have the mettle for the position. It can take time and real tenacity to build trust with your new colleagues and demonstrate the value that your diverse experiences bring to the team.   

While it is important to be aware of these potential challenges, much of this can also be exciting to navigate, if approached with sensitivity and a positive mindset.  
Below are a few things to consider before you embark on your new job abroad….or as you develop yourself for a potential future move. ​

​1. Research the culture of the country you will be moving to (or want to move to) 
The deeper your understanding of elements such as the history, social norms and politics of your destination country, the greater will be your ability to build rapport and connect with people respectfully, avoiding inadvertently offending anyone.  This will help you build critical networks during your time abroad. Understanding how people work and play (like standard work hours, norms for socializing – or not – with work colleagues, important rituals at work – such as taking lunch together) will help you understand what work will feel like in your new role and prevent unnecessary surprises. 
 
2. Research the culture of the company you will be moving to (or want to move to) If you have an overseas post already secured, or you have set your sights on a particular organisation overseas, invest some time in researching their company culture.  What does their website and/or other platforms indicate about their culture? Are their cited values aligned with your own?  Can you talk to people within the organisation about what working in this company looks and feels like?  If applicable, ask your new manager what it takes to be a successful team member in this company. 
 
3. Understand your own working style 
Understanding how you think, and your approach to work is the first step in identifying where you may need to modify or adjust your approach in a different cultural context.  Take the time to elicit feedback from your manager, peers, and direct reports about how you work.  For example, what kind of leader are you? Are you direct or indirect in your communications?  Are you directive or participative?  How do you respond to problems? What pitfalls might you face working in a culturally different context where people have the opposite approach to you? 
 
4. Get ahead of the curve with respect to learning the local language (before you go!) 
I cannot stress enough the importance of being able to communicate effectively with people in your new environment. Yes, you will learn the language (in time) when you are immersed abroad.  But it is very difficult to build relationships with people when you can only communicate in rudimentary ways and the ability to share stories together is impossible.  And building relationships in your new post and life is key to your assimilation.  Not to mention the day-to-day difficulties of living in a new environment when you cannot speak the language.  When working in France a few years ago I couldn’t even set the voicemail on my phone at work when I first arrived because I couldn’t understand the furiously fast Interactive Voice Response!  And that is one tiny example of how the simplest things can quickly become overwhelming when you constantly need to ask for help because of the language barrier. 
 
5. Enlist a relocation assistant to help navigate the tactical elements of your move  
Engage a relocation specialist to assist you and your family (if applicable) to transition abroad.  Having a local expert assist you in the search for appropriate accommodation and schools, and facilitating practicalities such as opening back accounts, will go a long way to streamlining your assimilation into life in your new location. 
 
6. Set yourself some goals for your time abroad 
Someone once highlighted to me before an overseas move the importance of identifying your key objective or objectives for your time abroad – and the importance of reminding yourself of this higher goal whenever things were tough.  This was the best advice I ever received.  Whether your goal is to become fluent in a new language, tick 25 new cities off your bucket list, or gain specific international work experience – it will anchor you and transport you through any moments of culture shock or loneliness.   
 
So should you embark on an overseas post or start to ready yourself for working abroad, I make one final comment.  The culture shock passes.  The loneliness passes.   But the magic, the memories and the invaluable learnings from your time abroad stay with you forever.  

​Need some support before starting your expat journey? Have a look at our expat optimiser coaching program

Suzanne is an experienced international HR leader, coach and organisational development facilitator with a background in biochemistry.

For the first time in recent history, thanks to the pandemic, leaders of the world over are sharing the same impacts on the way they lead.  Dealing with the volatility of change, feeling largely the same way (exhausted), and being forced to embrace different ways of leading to drive engagement and at the same time remain relevant.  The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) was probably the last time we came close to this, but even then, we could still maintain social and business norms, and know that (if you still had a job) you could still head into the office.  But not every country was impacted by the GFC in the same way that all countries have been impacted by Covid. 

This is what makes this such a unique time in the world of leadership development right now.
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When I think of the soft skills that will be necessary for leaders to be effective this year as we transition to living and working alongside Covid, there are three that stand out for me. Depending on where you are reading this article you may need to make s​ome nuanced changes to what I’m sharing, but by and large, I do think these leadership skills should be making their way into the playbook of any corporate leadership development programs around the globe this year.
 

We need to be in touch with what’s going on inside of us and understand how our mindset and emotions may be impacting our decision-making and behaviours.  

Why is this important?  
The last two years have not been easy, and right now we are heading into 2022 leading the fatigued, when we ourselves can be counted amongst the fatigued and battle-weary.  It’s common knowledge that we don’t make the best decisions when we are tired, stressed or just not in the right headspace.  It’s up to us as leaders to firstly acknowledge that it’s ok to be feeling a bit tired (even the most self-aware leaders would be coming into 2022 with some residual fatigue!).  By making this acknowledgment internally, we are also making room for the same acknowledgment to be made amongst our team.  This is a conversation that probably needs to be had sooner rather than later…is your team doing ok?
 
Being in touch with our mental and physical well-being also means we can do something about it so we can be setting ourselves up for success.  There’s nothing selfish about this.  How can we be fully present for our people if we are running low on fuel and barely making it to the end of the day or week?  We can get in our own way on this front and inhibit our efforts to look after ourselves.  Sometimes it’s pride, other times we can be unnecessarily self-sacrificing or just poor at delegating.  Perhaps we just put ourselves second, whether that’s due to lower self-esteem, self-confidence, or other factors.  Whatever the reason, own it and be brave; do something about it.  Otherwise, the other factors below won’t be so easy to address.
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The last two years could be considered practice for this capability; and this year could be considered ‘game day’!  Before we transitioned to virtual and then hybrid ways of working it was taken for granted that we could more easily connect with our peers and team members and build relationships spontaneously and organically.  That doesn’t mean we were consistently good at it, but that was our norm.  

Now, we need to think about how we build relationships in a virtual world, where it is still normal not to have met your own manager, peers, or direct reports in person after many months.  It would be nice to think that building relationships virtually has become easier, maybe even natural for some, but we can’t assume that we have nailed it.  Because I can guarantee you that we haven’t.  This year we need to get good at creating rituals with each of our individual team members that allow them to feel recognised despite the physical distance.  (Have you checked out our Lead2Remotely Engage program?)

Rituals tailored to your individual team members creates the opportunity for trust to be built, and the space for genuine conversations and sharing.  Equally important are rituals for the whole team; moments when you come together to connect and share.  Rituals have always been important for building engaging relationships however it was seen as a ‘nice to have’…getting the job done always tended to be more important, especially in Anglo or Germanic cultures.   We can’t afford to keep this mindset; not if we want a genuinely engaged workforce in a virtual or hybrid world.  Creating rituals allows your people to feel connected with and to feel acknowledged.  And when it becomes a ‘business as usual’ practice, it creates a natural momentum in your relationship that leads to trust and a reduction in the psychological distance that we are always aiming for. 
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