Three Common Remote Leadership Mistakes
AND
How YOU Can Avoid Them
Most teams are working remotely these days, many for the first time. Whether your team has recently been rushed into a remote work situation without much time to plan or prep or you’ve been leading a remote team for years, you may not fully realize how different working remotely is to being in a traditional office space.
As an expert in remote working environments in the telehealth industry, I’ve spent nearly 2 decades leading remote teams, as well as training remote leaders in the healthcare industry and beyond. Today we’ll outline three common pitfalls that will ultimately poison your team’s productivity without the proper antidotes.
Poison #1: Not enough focus “on” the work
It’s much easier to spend time “in” the work, without actually working “on” the work. Meaning it’s easy to continue doing things as they’ve always been done, without paying much attention to HOW they’re done or WHY they’re done this way. This allows bad habits to continue, and even worsen in a remote environment.
Michael Gerber, in his book The E-myth Revisited, unpacks this important concept for entrepreneurs. The concept being that leaders (or in the book, entrepreneurs) must create systems and teams that, in the end, will work without them. The endless time you’re spending on the treadmill “doin’ it “doin’ it, doin’ it” will ultimately lead to you and your team getting overworked, and unfocused, instead of fulfilled and productive.
Antidote: Sacred Strategy Time
Time spent answering emails should be wholly different from time spent strategizing and prioritizing. Both deserve time in your day and week. Especially with a remote team, you must set aside time to focus “on” your work. This is what Stephen Covey calls a “Quadrant II” activity something that’s important but doesn’t feel urgent.
Each week you must set aside two types of strategy time -- for yourself and for your team. Spend time alone reflecting on the week and the capital “W” Work. Then, check in with your team. I call this time “Sacred” because nothing should displace or override the purpose of this meeting time. No deadlines. No client needs. Nothing. Set aside half an hour to an hour each week to discuss “what’s working” (and what’s clearly not) with your team. You don’t have to come up with solutions all by yourself! It is easy for you, and the process itself is an engagement booster (more on this in Poison #3). Your team will tell you what’s working and what’s not, and what needs to be changed. Surprisingly, if you do this regularly, you’ll find many team members have already created solutions, and will gladly share and teach others if you ask. You’ll save time, encourage problem-solving, and boost team engagement all in one!
Poison #2: Too Much Tech
You want the best, the most efficient, the top of the line for your team. The problem is that “the best” changes constantly, usually comes with a hefty price tag, and also costs you time. Time to train, time to hammer out the bugs, time to bring the whole team up to speed.
The reality is that most productivity programs or apps have too many features. And each app has its own terminology and lingo. It’s easy for a team, especially working remotely, to become preoccupied with collaboration apps and technology solutions meant to make things “easier” that end up having the opposite outcome.
Antidote: Avoid Fads. Use What You HAVE.
Naturally, in remote work, a lot of time and money are spent on finding technology solutions. Do not allow yourself or your team to be caught up in what is shiny and new while ignoring the tried and true.
Go easy on the technology. Ask yourself, do you really need the latest features of the latest software, or do you need to train yourself and your team on what you have and make it work better? Do you know who the power users are of what you have? Are you willing/able to pay them - paid time or extra incentives - to teach others? Do you have an internal training manual created by collective input of your team?
In my experience, Google Drive/G-Suite is a perfect example of a free/affordable resource that is often ignored because it is seen as an amateur product for high school and college students. It’s easy-to-learn, automatically integrated, and intuitive for most teams, even when working remotely for the first time.
Find something simple. Ignore the lure of what’s “best” and find what works best for your team.
Poison #3: No Team Engagement
Most teams, remote or not, have leaders who don't have a plan to engage their team. Gallup Studies show that 69% of leaders and managers don't even like talking to their team members, or get nervous trying to do so and avoid doing it. YIKES! Research also shows that remote teams have 2-3 times more malfunctioning behavior patterns than teams onsite.
This worsens performance & morale, and creates an environment ripe to create lack of trust, infighting and burnout. It’s the ultimate poison when working remotely.
Antidote: Proactive Communication
As leader, you MUST have an engagement plan. Engagement brings your team together so that even when working in different locations, your team can relate to each other as humans first, not just a name signed to the bottom of what they perceive to be a snarky email. Real human connection prevents burnout and boosts performance.
The good news is that an engagement plan is easy to put in place. Usually, organizations have a separate engagement plan, a separate burnout initiative, another department for alignment, and yet another who does surveys to measure any of these things. And what’s worse, the surveys are done without any plan to make any changes. That’s like taking a patient’s temperature and not doing anything after that. Decades of research show that all of these separate activities need to be rolled into one.
So, how do you actually create engagement? By using the most powerful tool - communication. You must communicate proactively and practice relentlessly. The reality is that most leaders in healthcare (and in other industries), are technically proficient people who get promoted beyond their technical skills without any leadership or communication training.
If you’re struggling as a leader right now, please understand that this is not a deficit of will. It is a deficit of SKILL. All you need is training, someone to guide you who’s been there before.
As a seasoned veteran of telehealth leadership -- a leader of clinical and physician teams since January 2006 -- I’m happy to give your remote leadership a boost with the antidotes above. And if you’re in need of more guidance through crisis, I’ve assembled a larger toolkit for remote leaders to find success during these trying times. Because a functioning community requires quality communication. And you, as the leader, set the tone for communication and ensure the entire team is on board.
You must be…
Proactive
Consistent
Available
Accessible
You must ACT TODAY. Join me for a 6-week course created with your success in mind.
Remote Leadership Survival
Create Virtual Communities that Deliver RESULTS
Move Beyond Crisis into Opportunity
6-Week Training Program for Remote Leaders
Download the info packet now, and contact us today to start your team’s transformation
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