3 Guiding Principles for Leading Remote Teams

As the Covid-19 crisis has swept across the globe, many teams are quickly pivoting to remote work and collaboration. At ConantLeadership, our small but hearty team went from being a close-knit group of contributors who are accustomed to seeing one another in the office every day to a group who works from the safety of our own homes overnight.

Hearteningly, in a time of great uncertainty, we are finding ways to manage the complexity, preserve our camaraderie, and continue to get work done in a timely way. It’s a learning process. While we’ll continue to course-correct and adapt on-the-fly, there are three guiding principles for leading remote teams that have served us well in recent weeks. Perhaps they will be helpful to you too.

Honor
People

At ConantLeadership, honoring people is at the core of our entire suite of leadership behaviors. It’s about listening. Without first demonstrating to people that you value their perspective and specific situation, it will be difficult to compel them to value the agenda of the enterprise—in times of prosperity or uncertainty.

This
is a crucial guiding principle right now. As people’s lives have been suddenly
upended, their routines have drastically changed in new and stressful ways. Many
employees are now working from home with young children in the house who require
home schooling and care (myself included), others may have spouses who are suddenly
finding themselves out of work reducing their household from two incomes to one,
some may have family members who become sick or may even get sick themselves, and
an overwhelming number of workers are now managing untold anxiety and even grief
about a unique threat that requires precautions that are unprecedented in our
lifetimes. It’s a lot. But work still needs to get done.

Leaders
must listen carefully to their teams and adapt, proceeding with a “people first”
approach.

Things
that are working for us:

• Honor
  people with your time and attention (to whatever degree is feasible within your
  own hectic, new daily life). Let people know you are available to them for
  check-ins and communicate when you will be on email or looking at slack or
  basecamp.
• Create
  flexibility around people’s schedules – especially those with young children in
  the home or elderly parents living with them. Be responsive to team members individual
  situations and collaboratively develop new systems that allow space for this
  new paradigm.
• Lead
  with listening. Allow and encourage candor. Seek first to understand, then to
  be understood.
• Assume good intentions. It’s best to
  regard your team with respect rather than suspicion as a default.

Overall, at ConantLeadership, we believe leaders must be both tough-minded on standards and tender-hearted with people. To influence your team effectively and get stuff done, the “honor people” principle is paramount.

Communicate,
Communicate, Communicate

When
the daily connection of face-to-face contact is severed, it’s important to show
your team you are still paying attention. It’s helpful to implement practices
that allow for increased communication—both with your team and with whomever
you report to as the leader too.

We have a saying at ConantLeadership that “clarity is next to godliness.” People need to know which way to go; there must be clarity about the shared direction of the enterprise. As the routines and structures that allowed for that direction to be expressed regularly in-person are collapsing, it’s wise to implement new routines so the message doesn’t get muddied or lost.

Here
are some ideas:

• Daily team check-ins. We have implemented a daily 10AM zoom call so everybody can see the familiar faces of their colleagues. These check-ins are crucial to keep us on track with work tasks and goals. But equally as important, they provide an opportunity for leaders to see how everybody is doing on a personal level (see principle one).
• Daily check-ins with the “big boss” (or bosses). It’s important to stay connected with your boss too. It gives you an opportunity to continue to talk about and express the high-level direction from the executive level to the team and keep a free flow of information going in every direction—up, down, and sideways.
• Expand your technology repertoire. Of all the times in history for a pandemic to render us all remote, this era is the best equipped to support it. The amount of tools to facilitate team communication is limitless. We use zoom for check-ins, slack for messaging, and basecamp for project management with our third party vendors. Some of these we were already using but are using them more (zoom) and some are new to us (slack) but they have all been useful. Use technology tools. They work.

Think of this as the over-arching idea: When complexity increases, communication must increase relative to the degree of complexity. What can you do to increase and enhance your communication practices? Do that.

Grow or Else . . .

Our Founder, Doug Conant, writes in his new book The Blueprint:

“The rapidly changing business environment is competitive and unforgiving. What is tried and true today may be obsolete tomorrow. What is innovative this week may be passé the next. That’s why the best leaders, and organizations, understand that they must either grow or die. It’s a Darwinian world. The competition is fierce and unrelenting. The pressures are unceasing. How can you keep up? If you are not constantly evolving, you are withering toward obsolescence.”

He wrote this before a pandemic raged across the world, with the following close to the paragraph, and it’s even more salient now:

“As a leader, you owe it to your stakeholders to use every tool in your arsenal to remain vibrant and competitive, to thrive in the face of adversity, and to deliver high performance in an enduring way.”

This
has to be the guiding idea for every business. And now, we are being forced by
circumstance to bring this idea to life. We think of it as an opportunity
(albeit it not an ideal one).

With
restraints on what is possible, creativity has to blossom to work around the
obstacles. Many business are quickly adapting. Gyms are shifting to virtual
workouts, therapists are transitioning to telehealth sessions, learning and
development companies are finding ways to create virtual experiences. At
ConantLeadership, we’re brainstorming ways to bring our leadership resources to
an even larger audience by developing new digital offerings and products.

Now
is the time to innovate.
Find news ways to generate income. Fan the flames of ingenuity. You really don’t
have a choice!

Here
are some guidelines we’re using around this principle:

• Be
  radically curious. Actively solicit new ideas and be genuinely open-minded. Discuss
  and kick things around. Nothing’s off the table.
• Listen,
  listen, listen. (Notice how each guiding principle in some way circles back to
  the first, “Honor People?” That’s by design. Honoring people creates the
  conditions for you to communicate and to innovate. It’s the foundation for
  every other leadership behavior).
• Remain
  operationally diligent. In our office, the difference between a good idea and an
  outcome that actually executes on that idea is always a timeline.
  Once you’ve agreed upon a new product or path forward, make a timeline with
  clear deliverables for who’s doing what.
• Be
  flexible. Once you have a plan for an agile approach to today’s changing
  circumstances, be both diligent and nimble. Expect things to proceed as
  planned and hold people accountable. But also be ready and willing to
  course-correct as the need arises. One thing we always know about a plan? It
  will change. (But we’re still going to get where we’re going, even if we
  need to troubleshoot a new map.)

With these three guiding principles—Honor People; Communicate, Communicate, Communicate; and Grow or Else—we’re trying to create an effective way to lead newly remote teams in the face of adversity. They’re working for us so far. But we can always do better.

What’s working for you? Let us know in the comments. We’re all in this together.

Get started on your Blueprint leadership development journey with a free chapter here: https://start.conantleadership.com/the-blueprint/