After eighteen months of working at home, of endless video meetings and isolation from clients and colleagues, how are your team doing?
I’m assuming you have a team.
Whether you’re the leader of a team, a department or a division, whether you own the company or you’re part of a network of Associates, I’m guessing there are people who look to you for guidance and direction. Maybe not all the time, but certainly when the going gets tough.
I keep hearing the phrase ‘remote leadership’. Meaning, I assume, leadership from a distance, rather than the kind of distant, don’t-speak-unless-you’re-spoken-to kind of leadership that nobody wants or admits to.
Remote leadership is about providing direction and guidance to people you can’t be with face-to-face. Is it different from any other kind of leadership? Not really, it just requires a different kind of awareness and a bit of creativity.
Of course, there are lots of business leaders for whom managing a remote team is nothing new. Reliance on video conferencing, email and the occasional phone call is familiar territory for many and isn’t seen as a problem. Or it wasn’t.
Why is it a problem now? Because your team members are facing a different set of problems:
Any one of them might be:
- Fed up with working at home
- Worried about job security
- Tired of interacting via screens instead of in person
- Exhausted by uncertainty
- Needing an opportunity to get out of the house
- Frightened of returning to the office
- Suffering with ‘long COVID’
- Looking for another job
- Anxious about the future
- Feeling under-valued or under-utilised
- Out of touch with what’s going on in the business
Need I go on?
How would you know if even one of these were true about one of your people? In an environment where you only see them on screen for a part of the day, would you know if they were putting on a brave face during a meeting and then subsiding into desperation or distress once the camera goes off?
In the office, you can get a much more complete sense of a person, even if you’re not directly interacting with them all day. On screen, it’s much harder.
I’m flagging this up in case you’ve been under so much pressure to figure out when and how to return to the office that you haven’t been paying as much attention to your people as they might need.
Just because you can’t go for a walk around the office, doesn’t mean you can’t keep an eye on people. You just have to get a bit more creative about how you do it…
Please feel free to share your top tips for remote leadership below.
