The Emotionally Intelligent Manager’s Guide To
Leading Remote Teams
There’s no videoconferencing platform more powerful than a dose of
empathy.
Earlier
this year IBM followed other big companies like Aetna in turning back to more traditional work
arrangements. The tech giant drew criticism for telling thousands of remote employees to
re-acclimate to office life or else find work elsewhere. According to Gallup, the remote workforce is actually growing
despite moves like these, with 43% of U.S. employees working remotely at least
some of the time over the past year, up from 39% in 20 12. Gallup researchers
found not only that this trend is progressing across virtually all industries,
but also that employees who spend three to four days a week working offsite tend to report higher “engagement” in their jobs.
But
for remote work to pay off–both for employees and their employers–one crucial
factor needs to hold true, and it’s a familiar one: teams need to have great
working relationships with their direct supervisors. No amount of technological
wizardry or personal autonomy negates the fact–which has long been true for
office-bound workers as well–that job satisfaction is still closely tied to having an effective, emotionally
intelligent boss. With that in mind, here are a few ways managers can continue
to be the same thoughtful, compassionate leaders of remote teams as they’ve
learned to be in the office.
DON’T CREATE TWO CLASSES OF EMPLOYEES
Perhaps
the biggest challenge managers face is a “mixed mode” team, with some in the
office and others located remotely. That’s a really common circumstance, and it
takes extra vigilance for managers to avoid playing favorites or accidentally
making their remote folks feel like second-class citizens.
There
are simple things you can do as a manager to avoid this trap, says John Wulff,
SVP Software Development at CUSO Financial Services. “If there’s a meeting and
even one person is remote, have everyone attend as if they’re
remote using the same tool, so there’s no inequity in how people are
participating.” This not only normalizes the remote experience, it also forces
you to find an approach (technological as much as methodological) to remote meetings that
isn’t disproportionately painful to the people offsite.
While
staying informed is a day-to-day concern for remote employees, so is the fear of that their careers won’t progress. In one recent survey remote workers reported having 25% fewer
conversations with their managers about career growth than their colleagues in
the office. All it takes is a little empathy for managers to rectify that.
Anticipate your remote team members’ anxieties about not being recognized and
schedule a quarterly career-development meeting to check in and talk about
their progress and professional goals.
LEAD WITH TRUST, NOT CONTROL
Micromanaging your team is dangerously easy when you work in an
office: You can simply walk around and look at their screens. But when you
can’t physically see what your employees are doing at every moment, nervous
managers may resort to other ways to look over their remote employees’ shoulders–none
of which are likely to be terribly productive.
“Micromanagement
comes from trust issues,” says David Haney, an engineering manager at Stack
Overflow. “The biggest thing you can do is create trust. You can’t buy trust,
you have to build it,” he points out. “If you don’t trust the people
you’re working with, you have a much bigger issue than just people working
remotely.”
This
may sound obvious enough, but too many managers mistake delegating for trust.
Just handing your direct report an assignment and saying, “hop to it” isn’t the
same thing as entrusting them with a task they feel
sufficiently supported to tackle on their own, and this mistake is one reason
remote workers can sometimes feel adrift. On the flip side, moving from
control to building trust can feel tricky for bosses who are used to playing an
active role in their employees’ day-to-day work. Fortunately, a dose of
emotional intelligence helps solve both problems.
The
best starting point is simply to empathize with your team members, which according
to Guillermo Rauch, CEO of the mobile computing company Zeit, means
understanding “the context” of others’ work experience. Rather than focusing on
what your team is doing at every moment, ask yourself how they’re likely to
feel about accomplishing the goals you’ve set for them: Will they be
challenged? Empowered? Stressed out? Confused? Then self-reflect on your role
in bringing about those reactions, Rauch suggests: “In a remote environment, as
a leader, you have to be a lot more introspective.”
Rauch
has found that by working to become more empathetic and introspective himself,
his remote team has learned not only to trust him more but also one
another–making everybody more productive. And since trust often starts with a
personal connection, which virtual teams lack, it’s important for managers to
set aside work and spend time just getting to know each other–including
remotely.
A few
years ago, tech founder Randy Rayess and his team “started holding personal
check-ins rather than just discussing work on our usual calls,” he told Fast Company in 2015. “We made sure to talk about
hobbies, interests, and family at least once a week” and quickly found
that the habit built trust and led to stronger collaboration.
In a
traditional office environment, it’s easy to rely on physical cues to sense
when a team member is getting ready to quit. But when you lose that casual,
in-person contact you can miss important clues. “You have to spend a lot of
time drawing people’s feelings out of them. Otherwise you run the risk of
someone getting detached, getting frustrated, and leaving,” explains Nickolas
Means, VP of Engineering at Muve Health.
Listening
is a skill that’s at the core of emotional intelligence, and great listeners are
also effective questioners. As a manager of remote team
members, that’s your ticket to filling in any missing information you’d
otherwise get in person. Rather than just constrain your one-on-one meetings to
being quick status reports, use those interactions as a time to connect and dig
deeper with your remote employees. Ask your team members questions about what’s
most important to them and the challenges they face–don’t just wait for them to
bring up those issues themselves. You’ll not only better understand what
motivates them, you’ll make them feel more valued, too.
TALK ABOUT THE TOUGH STUFF
Communication
is harder when team aren’t co-located, especially when it comes to giving direct
feedback and heading off conflict. Lack of daily, physical presence can make it
easier to sidestep uncomfortable conversations, but that’s not exactly the most
emotionally intelligent approach. According to Katie Womersley, director
of Engineering at Buffer, the most successful leaders of remote teams embrace conflict.
When managers “don’t want to hurt feelings or step on toes, artificial harmony
can creep in,” she says.
Womersley
prevents emotional gridlock by taking preventive measures. If there’s a new
team or a new phase in a project, for instance, she calls a meeting whose sole
purpose is to focus on conflict. Womersley asks her team members to take turns
talking about their conflict styles, and designates one person in the meeting
to look for potential areas where team members are likely to clash. This helps
get everything out in the open, where people can discuss potential points
of friction, before they encounter it unexpectedly later on, once everyone has
hit the ground running.
As
these four tips suggest, your own emotional intelligence as a manager is
critical when you’re leading a team of remote workers. But that’s the key to
developing those same skills attributes–empathy, trust, listening, and comfort
unearthing disagreement–in every one of your team members, no matter how far-flung.
BY SUZAN
BOND
https://www.fastcompany.com/40495919/the-emotionally-intelligent-managers-guide-to-leading-remote-teams?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast%20Company%20Daily&position=8&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=11162017
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