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.

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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One of the greatest challenges, and inhibitors, to building a high trust and engaging relationship with your team is time.  And this is for two key reasons:

1. Relationships Develop Naturally
When have you ever experienced a moment in your life when you've said to yourself, "I need to build trust with this person in one month"  - or something like that?  Probably never.  And for good reason too.  Relationships evolve over time; sure they follow a set of steps in the way they develop, but there is no timeframe attached. In fact if you have ever tried to force the development of trust, or have been on the receiving end of someone trying to force the development of trust, you've probably taken longer to get there, or not gotten there at all.  When we accept that leadership in a team commences in a place of Unconditional Leadership, a time in the relationship when we are responsible for building rapport and creating a deep sense of recognition in the hearts and minds of our people, we accept that each relationship will take a different course and require slightly different needs to help it develop.

2. Timeframes and Relationships Don't Mix
The minute we attach a timeframe to the idea of achieving an engaging and high trust relationship with someone is the minute we put artificial, and irrational expectations on our shoulders to achieve something that may actually be impossible to achieve.  Yet organisations do this with their 18 month employee engagement survey cycles...they are effectively saying that you need to have built an engaging relationship with your team by the time a survey period starts.  This can force leaders to push through the early stages of relationship development and leap straight into the high trust stage of the relationship where the expectation is that our team members will just open up and be vulnerable. But who's going to do that with someone they don't know?  We don't just do that unless there is a pre-existing relationship and we feel safe enough to do this.  

So, in short, if you want to develop healthy relationships with your team remove timeframes (they are really time barriers), and invest the time in establishing a rapport with each team member in ways that acknowledge who they and at what point they are starting the relationship.

Want to learn how to be an engaging leader?  Take our 12 week Lead2Engage Inner Circle course and start your journey toward more meaningful and authentic leadership. ​Click here for more information...L2E Inner Circle

These are just a few ideas for increasing your chances of collaboration or buy-in that have worked for me over the years.  However the most important element that underpins all of these suggestions is very simple.  When looking to gain the support or cooperation of others, approach them in a way that you would like to be approached.  Don't just tell them what you want; give a why.  And allow the opportunity to save face if you are seeking cooperation to a change that impacts them personally. After all, sometimes it’s hard to change our way of thinking over night, and some behaviours are deeply ingrained and gained from years of being the accepted way of doing something. The more you allow the opportunity for buy-in to your message in a way that protects sense of self, the more you improve your chances of collaboration or buy-in.

Dialogue. For many people, let alone leaders, this is a scary concept. However for a leader, dialogue is often the single most important activity that can establish your credibility, solve issues, pre-empt issues before they need solving, and bring a team closer together.  In a team that is already close, regular dialogue is a key contributor to maintaining high trust and engagement.

In the wider organisational context, dialogue can do all of the above and more, especially when deployed throughout significant change events. 

As a leader, consultant and facilitator I have been using the power of healthy dialogue as the key medium for helping:

• teams learn how to succeed together,
• countries and companies learn how to collaborate more effectively on multi-billion dollar projects, and
• leaders become more effective in building engagement.

Outside of anything I've done, there are countless examples of really good leadership where dialogue has been the main tool. One example that comes to mind was that of a regional CEO of a global pharmaceutical company who turned his poor performing executive team and business around through the use of effective dialogue. He learned very early that his regional executive team were not connected; they were not a team.  Silo's were present in his team, and this was reflected down through the organisation with poor collaboration and communication. One of his first team leadership tasks was to have the executive team meet for one hour...everyday. The purpose of the meeting was simply to talk. Sometimes there were specific topics, but mostly it was about the connection that comes with mature dialogue. In a short space of time his team went from begrudging the daily hour, to looking forward to it. This was simply due to the natural sharing, personal and professional, that occurred...everyday. Soon the silo's started to disappear, collaboration increased and natural solutions to problems started to occur.  Best of all, the team started to build a rapport and momentum that was reflected down through the organisation.

So let's take a brief look at what I mean by dialogue, and some tips based on my own experiences for how you can use dialogue as an enabler of growth.

• Dialogue is an unconditional conversation, a discourse that invites people to contribute without being judged or rescued.

 

• Before the dialogue, set the boundaries for what needs to be covered, whether it is a specific topic, or you simply want the team to connect, as in the above example. This is easy to do for traditional meetings where there is an agenda; but more critical if you want to facilitate a conversation that is more open and not as fixed.

If you want to facilitate a conversation with your team that is more exploratory in nature, like solving an issue in the team, brainstorming, teaming etc... the following guidelines are critical.

• .At the beginning of the conversation, confirm with participants that they understand the scope of the conversation. It's like an unwritten, psychological, contract. 

 

• Let the conversation go where it needs to go. If you have set the boundaries this is easier to manage. 

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• If there is no fixed agenda, and the meeting is for the purpose of building team trust and connection, then you will need to set the example for contributing. People naturally like structure, and are used to having a meeting agenda. When you think about it, an agenda is easy to hide behind. It gives a reason for people to contribute, but more importantly if your name is not listed, or you don't know the topic, it is easier to remain hidden. With no agenda there is no room to hide, and the room isn't so safe after all. In lieu of this, acknowledge that you will need to ensure each participant feels welcomed and acknowledged for being present, to make up for the perceived lack of structure and safety. 

 

• As the facilitator, don't rescue, finish sentences or discount the contributions of others. Make these rules clear for the participants as well. It's not always easy to do these things; however any effort made in these areas will encourage more open contributions. Importantly, you are inviting all members of the conversation to transact in a mature way, and you stand a better chance of leaving the political and psychological games at the door. 

 

• Use dialogue tactically...and sensibly. You don't have to go it alone as a leader. When you want a solution to a problem a quick focused team conversation can do the trick. When you sense there is an issue in the team, again, use the power of the team to contribute to the solution. When morale is down, or the team is stretched or tired during a busy time, a timely conversation can allow for constructive venting, as well as a chance to reflect, look forward and if needed, laugh! For many years now, in the teams I've lead, I have found that a simple weekly catch up, with no fixed agenda (unless there was something important to be addressed) is a great way to build trust amongst the team and maintain momentum in tough times. 

My final thought with regards to dialogue relates to you; the leader. To use dialogue constructively you have to trust yourself as much as your team. Why? Because the agenda is unknown, and driven by the group. This can be seen as giving up the 'power' that comes with being a leader. The only thing you are controlling is the flow of conversation, and working with the energy in the room. 

The risk with using this approach is potentially high, simply because it isn't what people are used to, and everyone is invited to be 'present' to the conversation in a largely non-traditional and non-structured way. And as mentioned above, the leader or facilitator, takes a slightly different approach to leading the meeting. 

Having said that, the risks may be high, but so are the rewards. 

To understand the role of conduit management, lets consider a recent scenario we observed in a large manufacturing firm. The national head of Operations was preparing for an ERP roll out across the country, including four large manufacturing sites. The single biggest issue he faced was the conflicting opinions held by his two managers:

• The country head, also his line manager, felt that it was the wrong product and also disagreed with the timing and approach proposed by the global project team. 

 

• On the other hand his functional manager, the regional head of operations, agreed with the proposed ERP and the aggressive timetable proposed by the global project team. 

This is a big example; yet it is the sort of scenario we see played out on many levels.  The fact remained though, that irrespective of whether the two managers could find common ground, the roll out would still occur.  The other more difficult reality was that if his direct reports or the wider manufacturing workforce caught on that there was a difference of opinion at senior levels of the organisation, this could add greater complexity to an already arduous roll out that had involved internal politics and a long  tiresome process of ERP selection.