7 Tips for Leading Productive Remote Teams

Pink News Editor | April 20, 2022 Leadership

In her recent CIO article, 7 Tips for Leading Productive Remote Teams, contributing writer Christina Wood says, “Staying productive in a hybrid environment is complicated. It depends on a wide variety of factors, not the least of which is how thoroughly the team’s leader has embraced it and developed the skills necessary to make it work.”

“According to the leaders I spoke to, keeping a remote team productive requires that the CIO – anyone who leads a remote team – create clarity around goals and objectives, develop their own emotional intelligence, become approachable and compassionate, and get surprisingly involved in the lives of team members.”

Christina interviewed numerous senior IT professionals that included Seth Dobbs, CTO at Bounteous; Casey Carey, CMO of Kazoo; Max Makeev, chief development officer at Owl Labs; Dr. Sahar Yousef, a cognitive neuroscientist at University of California, Berkeley; Andi Mann, CTO at Qumu; and Paige Costello, product lead at Asana. To see the attribution for each quote, click here.

Here’s a brief summary of each of the seven tips…

  1. “Trust – but verify – your people: Trusting people to do the work – and verifying that they are – requires making sure your team understands its objectives, is motivated, enjoys safe psychological space to work in, is engaged with the company and team... It requires leaders to be more intentional and thoughtful about how we interact with our teams.”
     
  2. You can’t trust if you don’t verify: Managing productivity is one of the most complex things any one person or organization can aspire to do… The first step, though, is to define what you mean by productive. “You can’t improve or change something that is not measurable.” And you can’t trust your team if you can’t also verify that they are working productively. “I measure metrics that matter – outputs and accomplishments.”
     
  3. Build clear objectives to identify outputs and accomplishments: …set clear objectives and key results (OKRs.) Once you know what your OKRs are, you can break the work into small chunks that can be accomplished in a work session so that everyone knows what the long-term goals are and how they will move toward that goal right now. Work can become a relentless hamster wheel that loses people’s interest and guts their motivation if they don’t know why they are doing it and don’t experience a sense of progress toward a goal. “There is a name for this. It is called the ‘progress principle.’ And, according to the author of the study that defined the progress principle, “the number one driver of inner work life is progress.”
     
  4. Discover what is meaningful to your people: Deeply embedded in the progress principle and human motivation is meaning. Motivating people so they work without prompting and stay focused is about giving their work meaning. This comes down to defining the goals in ways that resonate for the people doing the work. And knowing what is aspirational to your team requires that you know the people on your team. What motivates a coder might not motivate someone working on hardware design or the help desk.
     
  5. You are the productivity coach: For many leaders, this is a big shift in mindset. If you, like many leaders, think of one-on-one meetings as something that happens at an annual review and that speaking to a team member three levels down who might be calling in from an unfinished basement wearing a T-shirt as being outside your role, this might be uncomfortable. “You need to up-level yourself as an executive. Be approachable, human, and understanding. I think that requires change from within, at least for a lot of traditional executives with a facade they are trying to maintain. That approach won’t work long term.”
     
  6. Stop and celebrate: “It’s really important that we take a moment to pause and recognize the good work of the team. When people see the impact of their work, they experience pride and feel like their effort was meaningful. That gives them more energy to keep moving forward.” How you celebrate is up to you, your team, and your culture.
     
  7. Respect time but check in often: Once you have done all this work to define goals, motivate people, and become the sort of leader people can talk to, move obstacles out of everyone’s way. “…I’ve read, if you interrupt someone in flow, it can take 45 minutes for them to get back in. You have to be careful with your people’s time and protect it from other people as well.” But that doesn’t mean you should leave people alone. In the old way of work, one-on-one conversations might have been a low priority. In a hybrid world, they have become essential.”

Whether you’re leading a traditional, hybrid, or remote workforce, superior leadership skills can better support you in your leadership role and/or better position you for success in today’s digital marketplace. As indicated in the seven tips above, communication is a common and an essential skill. Enhance your leadership and communication skills with Pink Elephant’s comprehensive leadership training courses…

Pink Elephant’s Portfolio of Certified Leadership Training Courses

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