Remote Leadership: Adaptability is Key
One of the most fundamental aspects of remote leadership is the ability to adapt to change swiftly and effectively. Cultivating a change and growth mindset within and across teams is one of the most important characteristics of an effective remote leader.
Being highly adaptable builds greater resilience and agility in you and your team. Studies have shown agility and adaptability actually lead to higher productivity and profitability in your department and company.
Change Management Strategies for Remote Leaders
It then goes hand in hand to say that when a team or department’s work environment is flexible or regularly changing, it takes even greater focus on communication and connection with the people you lead. Below are key attributes of effective change management for leaders of evolving teams, whether that’s remote or hybrid teams.
Celebrate a growth mindset: Share stories of how you, as a leader, had to pivot, adapt, and change course and how you learned from the experience. Encourage team sharing and celebrating when folks see change as an opportunity for growth rather than a threat. Reward a culture of continuous learning and adaptation, where experimentation and innovation are celebrated – some companies go so far as to reward and incentivize failing by creating regular awards for “failing faster”.
Communicate transparently: Keep your team informed about changes in strategy, priorities, and expectations in multiple channels, including 1:1, group meetings, email, chat, video training and more. Everyone learns differently and you may need to share the same message multiple times, especially for big organizational or department changes to get the message across. Transparent and frequent repeated communication also fosters trust and alignment, ensuring everyone is on the same page even in a remote setting.
Provide support and resources: Provide the team with the tools, resources, and training they need to thrive in a remote environment, but give space so that they can learn, experiment, grow, and work on it in their own way and on their own time, especially when they are building new skills. Invest in and use technology that facilitates collaboration, communication, and productivity because connectivity is not the same as genuine connection. It’s important to use technology to actually connect with one another and not just to have an open channel.
Use project management approaches to communicate on projects: Build or use available tools to communicate on projects. Meeting time should be reserved for collaboration, ideation and strategy, not simply status updates. There are countless outstanding team project management tools that enable seamless communication on tasks, timelines, deliverables and deadlines and teams that want to efficiently use meeting time and minimize micromanagement that sometimes happens should use tools instead.
Remote and hybrid leaders - stay tuned for the next post about the top five remote leadership fails. It’s not easy to be a remote leader, and our next post will help you avoid the most common pitfalls of leading remote teams.
