Does Leading Remotely Require Different Skills?
The large-scale shift towards remote work has become the new normal. Your team may be adjusting — but what about your leaders?
The issue of remote leadership is not new, but has never been so topical. Last year, the pandemic forced (and continues to force) millions into a giant work-from-home experiment which we’ve never seen before. Some hate it, while others hope it will be permanent, seeing more pluses than minuses.
We hear a lot about how teams are adapting to remote work, but hardly a thought for the leaders. Positively, leaders overall seem to be making a good impression on employees. One recent British study looked at the impact of COVID-19 on work-lives and found almost three-quarters of employees felt well-supported by their manager, with no drop in the quality of leadership during lockdown periods. In fact, more at-home workers than office-based workers said their boss was good at checking in on their health and well-being.
However, leaders themselves seem to be less confident in their performance. In the summer of 2020, Harvard Business Review published the results of a multi-country survey that looked at the challenges leaders faced when managing remote teams. Forty percent of respondents expressed low self-confidence in their ability to manage workers remotely. A similar number said they lacked the confidence to influence remote workers to do their job well.
Faced with a new remote-work reality, many leaders are still finding their bearings. What started out as “How can we keep our workers safe and relatively productive while riding out the crisis?” has turned into a series of much bigger questions:
● What leadership techniques worked well in the office but now have little impact in the virtual world?
● What should a great leader do if remote work becomes a permanent situation?
● Am I helping my team or holding them back?
What’s different about remote teams?
Leaders of all stripes often find themselves grappling with a major dilemma — on the one hand, the need to direct and control the work carried out by the teams to maintain productivity; on the other hand, the necessity to just step back and trust others to do their job. As technology makes everyone available and accessible in seconds, it’s easy to think the ‘control dilemma’ is more or less the same, regardless of whether your team is in-person or remote.
In reality, distance makes everything harder. Consider the following:
How do you spot a struggling employee?
In-person involves a lot of emotional feedback. You can quickly gauge comfort levels, needs and struggles through a person’s body language, facial expressions and vocal tone, such as someone being quieter than usual. Without these cues, it’s easy to assume nothing is wrong and miss important signs that intervention is needed.
How do you communicate?
Email, Slack, WhatsApp, are all great, but none are as rich or as fluid as in-person interactions. E-communication is more condensed, so there’s always a much greater risk of misinterpretation; people say things on email or text they would never utter in a meeting.
When I work with leaders, some of our time is spent coaching them to adapt their natural communication style, based on whom they’re interacting with. We all view the world through the lens of our own values, beliefs, and experiences. By far the best way to influence someone else is to communicate in a way that makes sense to them. For instance, does the other person prioritise facts over feelings, or prefer the big picture rather than the details.
If you’re a leader, speaking the other person’s language is the best way to convey critical ideas, to motivate, inspire, and maximise your own impact. That is incredibly hard to do over Teams or Zoom.
How do you build trust?
When you can’t actually see what someone is doing; when there are no words slipped between doors or around the water cooler, an important layer of informal control is lost. Yet those informal controls are the workplace’s unwritten rules, behaviours and cultures which show ‘how things are done around here’. Good leaders play a vital role in shaping the tone of control in their domain. They do this by using their presence, compassion and charisma to maintain the lead on the team.
What happens if you remove informal controls? Doubts creep in as to whether team members are in fact, working. There is little choice but to then multiply the formal control mechanisms, such as performance targets and meticulous productivity checks. The bond of trust gets broken, and even the most laid-back leaders turn into micromanagers, much to the dismay of their employees — and themselves.
New environment — new skills, or new behaviours?
Leadership requires skills in all sorts of areas, from communication to motivation; from empowerment to quality control. Being successful virtually as in-person requires conscious shifts in all these areas, and new skills aren’t always needed in order to adjust. But you will have to create new behaviours around how you use such skills.
As researchers are finding, the more remote and virtual you are, the more conscious you need to be in adjusting your leadership behaviours to the new environment. In a low virtual environment where you’re engaging in-person, traditional leadership traits like extraversion, conscientiousness and cognitive ability continue to carry great weight. But with highly virtual teams, where everything takes place digitally, what a leader does and how they consciously behave is correlated much more closely with success.
An expert in leading remote and hybrid teams, Aliza Knox suggests, ‘managing a hybrid team may sound complex, but leaders of multinational corporations have been doing a version of this for years. She highlights, “the real challenge, in keeping a hybrid workforce energized is not technological or logistical, but emotional.”
In other words, you can no longer depend on your creativity, charisma or intuition to lead and motivate remote staff — at least not exclusively. With fewer social cues and more opportunities for miscommunication, leaders need to dial up cognitive empathy and increase feedback. These skills will always be important, but you have to proactively develop new reflexes in the way you are using them, and add certain strings to your bow, to maximise the performance of your team.
If that sounds straightforward — it’s not. It can be a shock to the system for leaders who have spent years honing their soft skills to suddenly use them in an entirely different way. Unravelling old behaviours and replacing them with new ones can bruise one’s self-confidence, which may impact performance. Leaders need to be more confident, not less, when making high-stakes decisions in uncharted territory.
As a coach, I know the value of coaching relative to developing a leader’s confidence in their own judgement, as well as enhancing their creativity. A good coach will steward leadership skills and behaviours, acting as an independent thinker to challenge current perspectives. Coaching can provide that much-needed space to reassess one’s skills and determine how to calibrate to the demands of the moment.
I’ll next address how we can coach the high-potential remote leader — and how to coach remotely, as virtual coaching has unique challenges. There’s fertile ground for real-time learning, as remote coaching has many of the same obstacles faced by leaders and teams. Virtual coaches must rely on different tactics to be effective. Virtual leaders will have to apply new tactics to lead effectively, a fascinating dynamic!
