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Leadership is the enablement of a team in pursuit of a positive outcome. Enablement is helping when it is needed and getting out of the way when it is not. Achieving this with a newly remote organisation can be difficult but rewarding challenge.

Remote working brings both new opportunities as well as pitfalls. This mode of working is new for many people and organisations. While much is said about how people should work remotely, I feel there is a lot to be said about how to lead remotely. This pragmatic and philosophical guide is aimed predominantly at leaders in organisations who find themselves faced with leading without being in the room. It is meant to inspire you to further thought and action in your professional life. I would welcome your feedback and your own experiences if you wish to share them.

We are all used to the modes and methods of traditional organisations. Grown around both the physical structures they inhabit and the often-pyramidal nature of their hierarchies, these organisations operate on the premise of physical presence to form and guide daily activity. A traditional team sits together, gravitates towards personalities and uses a great deal of non-verbal communication to function effectively. Great personal friendships are formed, conflicts arise, lives become intertwined while the ebb and flow of people affects the dynamic of the team. To a large extent this is true whether you are working in a small local business or a large multinational. The scales and structures may look different but the intrapersonal stories that drive a team are very similar.

Transferring this kind of organisation or team to a fully remote one changes the substance and shape of these structures. In the current climate it is safe to assume the driving force behind a move to remote working is the prevalence of COVID-19 and the negative impacts it is having on the global population. In this time of heightened stress and anxiety for many, leaders are called on to perform in an environment where their people are under assault by both professional and personal pressures.

No matter how well you prepare your people before they start working remotely, they will feel isolated. Most humans are capable of adapting to change at a measured pace. Few are as capable of adapting to rapid or unexpected change.

For many organisations, business continuity is defined by the nature and means with which they maintain normal business operations during times of extraordinary events. It is however vital to add the nurture of the human capital with which an organisation is blessed to these plans. The team you lead is a context sensitive social circle. The context is a professional one but humans always build social structures within which to cooperate. Finding themselves removed from their colleagues and the familiar humanity of their day, they will find their sense of place and connection broken. This sense of their place in the microcosm of professional life, takes time to rebuild. Simple things like going for a coffee, popping out for a cigarette break, getting a quick drink at the end of the day or going for lunch are important activities which are often taken for granted. They form part of the fabric of a person’s daily experience. Prolonged disruption of this experience may cause your people to suffer. This will have an impact to their productivity and enthusiasm.

Many people in our economy have some exposure to working remotely for short periods of time. However, in most disciplines of employment, people will not have any such exposure. This change will seem to set them in an alien environment for their professional lives. An environment they are used to associating with their personal and pastoral lives is now being polluted with their professional one. A home is often a place of safety and distance from the pressures and politics of work. Bringing these things into a person’s home can have detrimental effects on that person and their home environment. Your team will need time and help to adapt to this. You will need to lead by example and build a new set of behaviours with your team which allows you all the time and confidence to adapt. I have found the following to be good behaviours to integrate into a team’s operation. They will help you to replicate some of the qualitative measures by which humans measure their integration with a wider community while at a distance:

• Make sure your team’s working day is time bound. Some of us are used to our professional lives spilling into our evenings. When working from home that spill can become a flood and soon overwhelm us. Be clear when you expect people to begin and end their working day. Follow this guidance yourself.
• Create a central gathering place online. This is normally best served by a common ‘channel’ where you can all be present when not in meetings or engaged elsewhere. Be present in it yourself as much as possible. Turn on your camera and be visible to your team. Use this to reinforce the message that you are available to them rather than watching them.
• Life happens. There’s a good chance that if you have children and are reading this, that they are at home because of school closures. Having children in the background is ok. It does not make you look unprofessional. It shows them that you are in the same situation as they are.
• Make time to catch up with each of your team every day in the morning. You should aim for at least a five-minute conversation with them if possible. Those of you with large teams will find this a challenge so you will need to rotate who you speak to on any given day. I have found spending my first hour ‘with’ my team helps to set a positive and encouraging tone to the day.
• People need to vent. Be the person they can bend the ear of. Allowing them to get rid of the detritus of their professional lives to you will make sure they take little or nothing of that into their personal lives. It will also allow you to quickly identify challenges before they become problems for your team. Once again, you must seek to make an overtly human connection with your people.
• Give people time to adjust. Avoid expecting them to move into a remote mode and deliver at the same quality and pace as usual. You are all adjusting and learning and will need time to get back on track. Add flexibility to your workflows and re-negotiate deadlines to give yourselves time to make mistakes and work them out. Deadlines can sometimes be immovable, but you may find that there is more leeway in the current situation that there would be normally. It never hurts to ask.
• Many of you will be leading teams delivering critical services to clients. Talk to your client partners. They will most likely be in the same boat, so making that connection will help you come to some agreements and give each other the leeway needed to continue delivering without antagonising. As always with humans, communication and kindness are the keys to success.

Communication is more than the practicality of making ourselves heard. It is the clear transference of intent from one to another, incorporating the motivations and perils inherent in that intent.

Technology provides a clearer canvas, but we humans must still paint the picture. While we may be able to speak to people across the world in an instant, communicating with them is still a challenge. Human communication is both verbal and non-verbal. Most of us use electronic means of communication poorly. Social media platforms are an excellent example of where the ability to be heard has become more important than the substance of the communication we are engaging in. E-mail is an even older example of where technology has allowed us to be heard while harming our ability to communicate. There are some practises I have found to be helpful in enhancing my communication that may help you:

• Prepare a TOR ahead of time. A TOR or Terms of Reference outlines the structure, purpose, participants and time bounds of any formal interaction. Use the same approach when sending out meeting invites. Avoid a one-line reason. Make it clear to those attending what is being discussed so they know what to prepare for.
• Begin each interaction with a warm welcome. It will lift them. You do not know what state they will be in before joining the meeting. Whatever it is, a smile is always welcomed. Remember to keep smiling while you are talking, it naturally produces a better timbre in your voice.
• Slow down. Avoid rushing through what you are trying to communicate. You are not in the same room and they may not be able to absorb your non-verbal communication. Your posture, attitude, voice and words must do all the work.
• Actively compose your sentences. Try not to run questions or actions directed at multiple people into one sentence. Making your communication discrete allows those who are listening to clearly capture your intent and intended actor. It also means you get to address that person by name and bring them into the focus of any group communication. The earlier point of slowing down will help greatly with this.
• Keep e-mails short. If you find yourself writing a small novel in an e-mail – stop. While complex subjects can be effectively communicated with the written word, this should happen in an easily recordable and searchable medium. Use your organisations knowledge base, something like SharePoint or Confluence.
• Talk to people. Avoid having a conversation with someone over e-mail. I can still remember when forty characters was as much as you could fit into a text message. If you find yourself writing paragraphs in your instant messenger application, call that person. Speaking to someone ‘in person’ with your voice will allow you to communicate far better.
• Engagement is a key component of effective communication. When we are in a video conference most of us do not have our cameras directly in front of our faces and we rarely look directly at it. Make the effort to speak into the camera as you speak to individuals. Humans engage better with visual stimulus than with audible stimulus. There is a reason that TV killed the radio star. Be more than a voice to your team. Let them see you. Subconsciously they are building a connection with the person they see. We humans are a simple lot. What we see – is real.
• Watch for those being left behind. It is easy to get lost with the amount and pace of change. You need to ensure that each member of your team is visibly engaged and engaging with you and the rest of the team. If you find people who are drifting into silence and becoming hidden in plain sight, encourage and support them back into the team. Leave no one behind. Seeing this happen to someone will damage your team’s morale.

The hierarchies of your organisation will need to adapt to remote working. You must accept this fact in order to benefit from the opportunities that remote working will place before you.

There is a tendency with leaders who are new to this medium of work, to want to own all the actions and become too deeply engaged with the daily activities of each member of the team. Not only will this not do you any favours, but it will hurt the cohesion and morale of your team. This normally comes from our own fears and anxieties and the way in which human beings try and gain a sense of control of a chaotic situation. The panic buying of household goods is a good indication of a community of any size unthinkingly seeking control over that which is out of their control.

Leaders can develop a blind focus on quantitatively measurable tasks to feel they are in control of their professional context. Leaders of remote teams but learn the qualitative measures of gauging their team’s performance and engagement. This can be a challenge to anyone new to remote leading. Add the current economic uncertainties and issues of job security and you may end up in a perfect storm of chaos.

The secret to dealing with this challenge is composure.

Every level of leadership must demonstrate a calm and composed set of behaviours when dealing with the people in their team. People are mimics. They unconsciously mimic the behaviours and patterns of those in any hierarchy above them. Even in flat hierarchies they still look to those they see as leaders and managers and model their own behaviours on those they see. Humans learn this kind of behaviour as children. It is one that is never truly unlearned. Under extreme pressure and stress, all humans revert to this mode of behaviour.

Working remotely as a team means the locus of authority may become wider. Be clear and generous on how authority is distributed. You are still accountable, but you must allow responsibility to be given to others. Trust your people to make the decisions they need to and allow responsibility to be shared. If you are working in an Agile way, you are probably already doing this but take this time to overtly make the distribution of responsibility and your trust in your team clear:

• Define key areas of responsibility. Split your areas of activity into discrete functions and identify the people capable of making decisions in that area. Use your knowledge of their experience and maturity to identify those people.
• Use a SOR or System of Record. Have all your people record their activity in some system of record like JIRA. Avoid demanding extreme levels of detail but trust that they will record what’s important. You are not trying to replicate the information you would have gotten had you been in the same physical location. You are trying to find the new level of information you need in order to enable your team to operate and deliver. You will find that your team requires coaching in understanding what is important to record – be their coach. Build the trust. Avoid using e-mails or spreadsheets to record and track activity.
• Do not micromanage. Even if you did not do this before, being remote may lead you into thinking you must now be all seeing! Trust your teams to get on with the tasks and to self-organise with only the pertinent information coming to you. The trust you show in your team will deliver a greater level of productivity to all of you.

Natural leaders emerge in times of stress. Within your teams you will find people who others gravitate to for support during this time of transition. Make sure you find those people and support them yourself. Using any natural leadership talent and championing them will allow you to better enable your team. Make sure your team can see you doing this. Demonstrating this as a positive behaviour which will encourage your team to support each other.

You may find that people in your teams are wondering whether they can really do their job effectively anymore. The challenges faced by people unused to remote working can translate into self-doubt. Each of us has suffered the sting of self-doubt at some point in our professional lives. You may have seen this before in members of your teams. The added anxiety of the current situation can however exacerbate this self-doubt into something quite destructive. The risk to that person and your team will be greater than when you were all in one place. Finding these people early and supporting and encouraging them will stop this challenge becoming a problem.

Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves. It is easy to spot when these members of your team are struggling or suffering. There will be people in your team who are struggling but won’t show it. Those people are harder to identify.

As a leader, you should know the members of your team well enough to know their ‘tells’. Unless they are new, you already know these signs and subconsciously respond to them. You will need to pay active attention to all your team during the early period of the transition to make sure you are consciously aware of these signs. If you have new people in your team you must get to know them quickly. Spend more time with them. Be active in your interactions and consciously watch for their behavioural patterns. You will not know what ‘normal’ looks and feels like for them but by being actively engaged you will find out.

• You are all in it together. Avoid pretending you know something they do not. Building your experiences together will build strong bonds within your team. That will enable you to better retain your talent and improve your working day.
• Technical support is vital. Ensure they have the technical support they need to be effective. Organisational technical support teams are going to be under extra stress currently. Try and help each other and share lessons and approaches. Make sure the wider organisation benefits. Encourage learning and sharing.
• Reassure your people. They must always feel that even as they may be struggling with the transition, they have your trust and confidence. Provide positive feedback explicitly and visibly. Overt positive reinforcement is vital when physical presence is absent.

Activity and presence are the keys to taking full advantage of the benefits to your people and your productivity when working remotely. You may find this an extension of your existing practise or something quite alien to you. Even if you find this mode of leadership comfortable, remember not to take it for granted. Experienced remote leaders understand the importance of consistent repetition.

During this time of extraordinary change and anxiety everyone one of us will suffer with our mental health. No matter how resilient we regard ourselves as being, we will be tested. Be mindful of your people’s well-being. Expect tears. Expect anger. Expect fear.

Your people’s humanity will be viscerally exposed at times. Your role as a leader and a fellow human will be to encourage them to process these emotions and offer a comforting and friendly face to those who need it. Be aware of any tension between people or within the group and actively engage to resolve it.

It is easy to be a good leader when things are all sunshine and rainbows. It is in these times of trial that your team will need your leadership. It is in these times that you will need the counsel of your peers and your own leaders. Remember that you also need support and encouragement.

However the future unfolds for us, the greatest resource and wealth we have is each other. Whether in our professional setting or personal one. Take good care of yourself and extend that generosity to those that look to you for leadership.

Best of luck to you all.