Establishing Powerful Virtual Leadership

I wonder whether a leader who is really great doesn’t need to be there? They have developed a team so well the team is self-motivated, self-determined, self-goal setting, self-delivering. People feel empowered, they watch each other’s backs, they feel their life goals are being supported through the process of work. So the leader has effectively done the job, namely putting themselves out of a job.

Many leaders I meet are wondering about technique rather than working on belief. They may wish to know how to best communicate face to face or remotely. How to deal with poor performance. How to retain talent. How to constantly improve productivity. These are great but minor ingredients. The fundamental ingredient is belief.

The simple measure is whether a team member believes in the leader. If so, digital, face to facer or even absence for a while is irrelevant. I sense that many leaders are struggling to be an effective remote leader not because of remoteness but because face to face made them feel more secure, they tended to think they knew more of what was going on when we were back in the office. In other words, they are dealing with a situation where their leadership is imposed not embraced. In this situation face to face or virtual leadership is always more of a struggle than it should be.

In their superb study of leadership over 30 years in cultures throughout the world Kouzes and Posner discovered that there are 4 essential characteristics which remain constant irrespective of time or culture. (The Leadeship Challenge, Kouzes & Posner). The characteristics are Honesty, Forward Looking, Competent and Inspiring. If a team believes you have those characteristics they will embrace us as a leader whether face to face, virtual or even absent. If not, then we will have to impose our leadership on them.

When managers I meet are considering ‘how do I lead more effectively in a remote environment’ I try to re-frame their question and drop the last 4 words. In other words the question is simply “how do I lead more effectively?”. It isn’t a question of leadership techniques for face to face or remote situations. A great leader has tools and we all use them. Those tools include a meeting in the office, a walk outside with a team member, a visit to a coffee shop a phone call, texts, a verbal message via a WhatsApp link, a Teams meeting, sending a card when a family member is ill, buying an occasional gift …. The list goes on. These are tools in leadership and they boil down to … being the type of person who cares about our people and the business at the same time, and doesn’t just care about the business alone. Great leaders of course don’t think of them as tools, they are just ways of communicating, and they are natural.

The first aim is to produce a team who believe in you. If they do then remote leadership is a walk in the park. If they don’t then remote or any other type of leadership is going to be a constant struggle no matter what ‘remote management’ techniques are employed.  If the team does believe in you life becomes sweet, because potential problems of remote communication can be solved by the team themselves, they are free to offer their thoughts on how to adjust to more remote working and consensus brings team buy-in. Let’s not forget that our real role as leaders is to discover what the team members know about communication and productivity that we couldn’t possibly come up with ourselves, then help them implement improvement. Too often we as leaders see ourselves as needing the answers. We don’t need answers, we need belief from the team to enable an atmosphere which will release the energies needed for the team to willingly construct answers to our challenges.

I read recently that the CEO for Bigby Coffee Mike McFall turned a business round by running a survey which revealed that most of the workforce didn’t trust him. I should actually clarify that .. they felt the relationship between workforce and CEO was actually ‘abusive’. (see https://apple.news/AmIMk4PZmTCChtH2nT4aBSQ) He set about changing it through a listening and implementation exercise, and as a result now 90% of the workforce rate the organisation as 9 or 10 on ‘our purpose’ and they are aiming at a billion dollar business by 2028. In most organisations to most people the CEO is a ‘remote’ leader. Yet despite this Mike instigated a major turnaround by focusing on belief not technique.

Don’t worry about your remote leadership techniques. Focus on getting your people to believe in you and everything will be good.

Mark Miller – Director Goodfoot