Remote leadership relearned

For many of us, this year is a struggle on many fronts. COVID-19 pandemic is leaving some profound marks that flipped society upside down. I want to share my journey as I relearned to be a remote leader. It’s a journey about care, better communication and resilience.

Working has found new avenues to keep going and more specifically, remote work is now the new normal in many industries around the world. Leading teams has also inevitably changed. While the invention of remote teams was not new to the last 3–4 months, the scale and rapidity of this change indeed had no precedence. Leaders jumped in full-remote work life, leading fully-remote teams that jumped as well into the very same shift. It has been a unique challenge to learn again how to manage our stress, how to be resilient and productive. Many questions are still unanswered: will this be my new normal? How hard is to imagine the changes an entirely remote workforce can bring. As leaders, this change put back into questions years of learning.

Rethink how you communicate

Communication is the first, loud change you may have noticed. Work remotely by definition is depriving us of the most intimate and human form of communication we know: our presence. We try to compensate presence with synthetic surrogates: video conferencing, instant chats, phone calls or even emails. It does not taste the same. We need so badly to take back the informal.

The water cooler chat with our work friends that made us feel we belonged to that space is gone. We stare at every glitch and lag of our daily video conference as a constant reminder that we are not just there; we are disconnected and more than just far apart. It is an entirely different reality: what we see in that call, may not be the same if the other person has a very low-bandwidth internet connection.

Has somebody ever tried to share with you a piece of music in a video conference? I don’t think there is a more resounding reminder of our digital division than hearing music clicks, lags and pops. Sharing ideas, while being remote, is not the same. Needs adaptation and a few tips to make sure your real message is received intact from the far end receiver.

As leaders, we need to remind ourselves what our teams are going through and the different weight it carries for each one of them.

Early in my career, I tried to hook into short bite-size learning to improve my communication and be more productive. One of the things that stuck with me: if you want something to be remembered, say it three times. How many of you have heard this before? Sounds like an easy trick to remember and it is as effective. Sharing your message without a direct human eye-contact is harder for the ones listening to you. It’s harder to know what you care for: saying it three times tickles the mind: it is something important that I should remember.

How many times you have the feeling of being alone talking over a phone call? In the search for a human connection, we often resolve to video conferencing as the closest solution for a meeting. It is hard to account for other factors like attention and energy. A full day of videoconferencing is much more energy-draining as both our eyes need focus and we need brain-power to understand what is going on. Make regular checks to keep your team engaged: ask questions, call individuals out to share their opinions. It will give you a useful test if you are talking to a living audience and include people that naturally shy away from talking on a microphone.

Keep things asynchronous if you can. Can you use a sharing platform like Google Docs or Workplace? Privileging people’s time is your priority. It also means to realise that not all decisions are urgent and might not be inclusive enough to ask round-up questions like “does everyone agree?” on a phone call. Have you ever had difficulty speaking up on a phone call and interrupt the one speaking? It is frustrating and dropping another cause of stress that push teams apart.

Different Location, Different Work

How many times you have the feeling of being alone talking over a phone call? In the search for a human connection, we often resolve to video conferencing as the closest solution for a meeting. It is hard to account for other factors like attention and energy. A full day of videoconferencing is much more energy-draining as both our eyes need focus and we need brain-power to understand what is going on. Make regular checks to keep your team engaged: ask questions, call individuals out to share their opinions. It will give you a useful test if you are talking to a living audience and include people that naturally shy away from talking on a microphone.

Eventually, not everything is a video conference. How many times you have said, “this meeting could have been an email”? Relying on a single medium to get things decided, to get things done is not enough anymore. Be smart about what you need and how you are using your team’s attention. Video conferences are best to receive live reactions, whereas specific decisions may involve reading a document, more lengthy dive deeps. Keep things asynchronous if you can. Can you use a sharing platform like Google Docs or Workplace? Privileging people’s time is your priority. It also means to realize that not all decisions are urgent and might not be inclusive enough to ask round-up questions like “does everyone agree?” on a phone call. Have you ever had difficulty speaking up on a phone call and interrupt the one speaking? It is frustrating and dropping another cause of stress that push teams apart.

Resilience to the power

Change is hard to embrace, and there is no year like this one when a series of rapid, radical changes put us to the test. As leaders of people, we put the well being of the team in front of everything. After all, that’s why we get into the game: make sure that our folks thrive and succeed. In this chase for the optimum balance for our team, we risk forgetting who in this scheme also needs our attention, remotely more than ever: ourselves. The job that most of all is disrupted, reinvented and changed while being remote is the people manager. We need to acknowledge what is inevitably changed, what does not work anymore: walking one on ones, five-minute chats, stand-up meetings, white boarding are not there. The very first thing I noticed when moving remote is that all the time I was spending with my team dramatically decrease in quality (less spontaneous conversations) and increase in duration (get the same things done needs more time).

Jump diving into this different way of leading people took a while for me to be able to resurface again and understand where should I spend my time. I refocused my energies on fewer things, on the most important of them all: the well being of the team. I indulged longer one on ones, more frequent chats and an even opener door approach to my team’s problems (big or small). I dropped all other activities and openly shared with my peers, where I decided to focus my time.

I thought I knew what resilience meant for me and others. This experience taught me the big difference between powering through a difficult situation and build resilience. To paraphrase the quote of the famous sportsman Alex Zanardi: “when you realize that you can’t give anything anymore, that’s where you need to be strong and learn to keep going only five seconds more because that’s where nobody else can go on”. I learned to build my resilience through understanding how I spent my energies at work and add five more seconds every day.