Metaverse Leadership: Building Teams That Excel Anywhere

Hi everyone! Hi, how are you? This is Claire Hayek from MSP Team Building. I'm the founder and CEO. And I'm also a neuroscience-certified coach. I am really happy to be here with you on Wednesday. As you all know, I try to go live every Wednesday. So, I try to keep a steady schedule. So, really happy when you guys join along and we can have wonderful discussion about leadership and the challenges that come with it in every single sense of the word, because being a leader is amazing. However, it's very challenging and it takes a certain special kind of person to be wearing that hat, in my opinion. Okay. In my simple, very humble opinion. So today's session is about metaverse leadership. Building teams that excel anywhere. Wouldn't you like to know more about that? All right. Well, we all know that the world is leaning more and more into the virtual-first workspace. And I call it the metaverse. We call it the metaverse. However, recently, actually, a lot of big companies, as well as Donald Trump, announced the new rule about the RTO, return to the office. So, it's kind of, I think we're 50/50 nowadays. It seems that we're moving more towards a balance between working full-time from the office, working remote, and hybrid. It's more like the 3 balance, right? Balance between the 3, the 33%. But hey, who knows? This world changes all the time. We're just trying to keep up, right? So, And the reason why we're having this conversation is that every time there's a change, every time there's a shift, whether it's AI, whether it's new tech, whether it's COVID, or whether it's God knows what, leadership is affected and is redefined. So, it's no longer about managing, just managing. It's about connecting, inspiring, and creating that borderless environment, if I should call it so. And that's all on the leadership because it's a win if the leader actually manages. I guess if the leader manages it in a very conscious, very focused kind of way. Okay. So today, we're going to explore. Of course, I'm going to talk about neuroscience. That goes without saying. We're going to. I'm going to explore with you neuroscience back. Strategies. I'll give you some practical tips and some examples so we can try and lead no matter where our team is, basically, whether they're at the office, whether they're remote, whether they're working from Europe and we're in Montreal, or they're, I don't know, in APAC region and we're in New York, right? As well as hybrid. Okay, so let me just tell you a little bit about my morning. I'm going to share with you a really fun picture. If you're listening to this, the audio, do go back to our LinkedIn, YouTube, or Facebook to take a look at the video. And if you're with me, you'll see Well, a picture of me looking like dressed like a bear, pretty much. Huge coat, scarf, sunglasses, and white everywhere. And with a big smile. So why am I smiling in -15 degrees Celsius weather with gusting wind, taking my walk in the morning with my back pain? Right? So, here's an example of leadership resilience. Okay, I know I don't talk a lot about resilience. But I would be a hypocrite if I don't walk the talk, right? So yeah, my friends, dear friends, this is a picture of resilience. This is a picture of— I mean, it took every single ounce of courage in my body to get myself outside and walking. I mean, despite the crazy weather out there. I mean, I couldn't feel my face, right? But the reason why I'm smiling is because it reminded me that we're always facing a storm in a way as a leader. And we can face it while we groan, or we're just frustrated and angry. We could be sad and depressed, or we can just Face it with a big smile because these challenges are going to happen regardless. So might as well have fun while you're dealing with it. So that's my little philosophical, you know, two cents for for the week. All right. So if you're here joining us live, please do put in the chat where you're joining us from. I always would love to know where you're calling, where you're connecting from, and. I kind of like to envy the people with great weather and sun outside and wearing t-shirts. But no, jokes aside, please tell us, tell me in the chat where you're joining us from. And moving along. So, why does the metaverse, so remote work demand a leadership shift? Okay. So, the whole thing about the metaverse, working remotely, it's not about, advanced techie, flashy techie kind of company or approach. It's about people, right? Research actually shows that remote and hybrid teams can outperform in-office teams by 20 to 25% when they have the right tools because leading in a virtual world feels different. Okay? So, Remote teams outperform, okay, remote and hybrid, okay, outperform in-office teams by 20 to 25% when they have the right tools. All right? Because when we're leading a virtual team, it's a whole different ballgame. As you may know, trust is harder to build. Engagement can kind of wane. And miscommunication. I mean, let's talk about miscommunication. I mean, I can talk about it for a whole hour, right? So, Miscommunication often gets amplified when we're working from distance. Okay. So, well, neuroscience can offer a solution. So, understanding how our brain works, brains work in digital environments, helps us nourish and push those stronger connections. Okay. It's all about the brain, how we use it. Self-awareness and being basically taking the lead, mind over body. Okay. So, here are the 2 things I'm always talking about. Okay. The importance of psychological safety and trust. Okay. So, as you can imagine, if you want your team to perform well in a remote or hybrid setting, You need to make sure that the workplace provides psychological safety. Actually, I have another stat here. So, teams with high psychological safety are 12% more productive than their peers. Imagine that. So, it's as simple as that. So, what does that mean? So, establishing psychological safety at the workplace is all about open communication. That the people, the team, they feel that they can come to the leader and discuss certain things that are bothering them. That if they express their opinion, they're not being yelled at. They're not being judged. Feeling that it's a safe space to communicate and be their creative self. So, bringing forward ideas that even if they're not great ideas, just Accepting them, being open to listening to them, practice active listening, being attentive to their needs, then they feel valued. And then, they feel that they can just come forward with any idea or come forward and be themselves. So, just by doing that, it doesn't mean you have to agree, right? So, but just by establishing that open communication, that psychological safety, will earn you 12% more productivity. I mean, sign me up, right? Who doesn't want to sign up to that? I would. Knowing that, I would just jump right at it. It's as simple as that. So, the other thing is trust, especially in digital environments. Okay. So, here's the thing. People are more likely to trust leaders who emphasize transparency and emotional intelligence online. Okay. So, the trust is all about trusting the leader. Trusting the leader basically in the way they communicate, that they are sensitive towards the needs. They're active listeners. They provide again that safe environment. But also, trust is a two-way. I believe you need to trust your team that they're going to be doing their work. You can't be micromanaging your team because now they're remote. Are they doing their laundry? Are they making a banana bread? Did they go pick up their kids? They're supposed to be here. They're supposed to be working. If you trust your team as a leader, they will excel. Trust me, I know. Providing flexibility is huge. And You have to have the right team, of course. Like, the team has to be committed, engaged. And the thing is when you provide that trust factor and the flexibility, you are giving them the chance to decide and take responsibility for their work. And people just want to do that. People will love their job if they're given responsibility. Really, you know, they will step up. Trust me, they will. Again, if you have the right team, if you've recruited the right team. Now, if you recruited somebody that doesn't care about the job and is just literally just getting paid and is really bad, they're not performing at all. That's a whole different ballgame. But we're talking about a good team that you recruited that love what they do. And let me get rid of my picture here. I just realized. So, So, you recruited a team that— how do I get rid of it? There it is. Okay, back here. So, you recruited a team that you trust, that are performing. They're really excited, engaged, etc. And then, you give them that trust. So, they trust you. You trust them. Boom! Easy. All right. So, let me pull up the poll here. Here's a question for you. Do you think building trust is harder in a virtual environment? Yes or no? So, please do put it in the chat when you get a chance. And I'm just gonna go over to the chat and see who's with us today. Hello! We have somebody from Montreal. We have somebody from Knowlton. Hello, both of you. I can't see who you are for some reason. LinkedIn is not showing me. But welcome, welcome. I'm glad that you joined. All right. So, back to the poll here. Do you think building trust is harder in a virtual environment? Yes or no? Please do put it in the comments. All right. Moving along. Let's talk neuroscience. So, our brains are wired to connect. Period. Mirror— I talk often about mirror neurons. Okay. The mirror neurons actually Activate when we empathize or collaborate even in virtual settings. Imagine that. The power of the brain is not contingent upon somebody being right in front of us. We can actually connect and collaborate virtually. But how do we do this, right? How do we do this properly? So, It goes without saying, visual communication. How many of you, okay, how many of you have a team that is remote or that working in a hybrid setting? And when you have a meeting, everybody's video, maybe 90% of your staff have their video off. I mean, please put it in the chat. Raise your hand or go, me, me, me, right? This is such a bad one because would you turn off your video if you're in person? And then would you put— literally, let me show you here what it looks like. It looks so ridiculous. But would you look— would you do this in a meeting? Would you hide your face or would you show your face? Right? So this needs to be emphasized by the leader. Establish that culture of communication, open communication. Again, psychological safety. And kind of like a, look, this is kind of our ritual. When you have our meeting, we turn on our videos no matter what's going on. Okay? Even if you're in PJs, even if you don't have your makeup on, you're not feeling good, you're not feeling well. All right? Just turn on your video because when you do that, studies show that 55% of communication is nonverbal. So, video tools can actually bridge that gap, right? So now, we are feeling one another, sensing what's going on, the energy in the room, even if it's virtual, right? So, it's really simple, people. It's really simple. And be kind about it. You can't impose this, right? But I usually make a joke. We did the team building actually last week in Ottawa. And it was a hybrid team building. It was very challenging but it worked. It was really nice. We did Lego Serious Play. We had one team joining in remotely and the rest were in person. And when we started, half, actually more than half, probably 80% of the remote team had their video off. How do you want to do a team building when your video is off? So, I approached this very, very smoothly. It's not a big deal. Don't make a big deal out of it. But I did say, and I was honest, I came straight. I was straightforward with it. And I said, remote team, we are so happy you can join us. Unfortunately, you're not here with us in person. But we really would love to see your face. We're trying to connect. We did icebreakers. We did Lego serious play. We talked neuroscience. It was great. Great workshop, 2 to 3 hours. And I kindly asked, can you please, please turn on your videos? Can we see your smile? Can we see you? I don't know who you are. I really would love to see you. And they did. They did. And they kept the video on the whole time. It was interactive. It was engaging. So, don't ask people to turn on their video. Let's say you're in a hybrid setting, for example. Don't ask them to turn on their video and they turn on their video then you ignore them. Take the time to talk to them. Engage with the chat. If let's say you're in a room and you're facing the conference table but the camera is not facing you, so you have your back to the remote team. You understand what I mean? So, make sure everything is positioned in a way that you are connecting with the remote team. Now, if we're in a setting just like me today here, it's easy. We'll have the Zoom or the Teams and everybody's facing everybody. But in a hybrid setting, it's a bit more tricky. You got to think about these things. It makes a big difference. Okay, so visual communications. Let's get those mirror neurons firing and wiring so we can connect better. Practice deep listening. So again, here's a statistic for you. Leaders who practice active listening improve team engagement by 47%. Let me remind you what that is. I talk about it a lot. But in case you haven't listened to my previous lives, Active listening is listening with intent, looking the person in the eye and, you know, meaning it and listening, really listening to the words. You're not thinking of the next thing you're gonna say. You're not thinking, oh, that's wrong, I gotta interrupt. You're just listening completely, 100% present listening and connecting with the person. And then You can say what you have to say after that. Okay, so that's deep listening, active listening. A third tip on how we can, we can do, you know, we can, we can have a great communication and, um, and a great connection in the metaverse is, I mean, you can create a ritual for connection. Um, here's one, you can do weekly stand-ups. Why not? Or virtual coffee chats. What that does, it reduces isolation and it increases team cohesion. So, take 5-10 minutes and do that. Why not? I call them the virtual TEDx or the virtual lunch and learns. You all have lunch together and somebody just teaches you something. These are great tips. You should write this down. If you're listening, write this down and try it and let me know How it goes. Okay, let's go to the next poll question. How are you currently building connection within your team? I'm very curious to know. Share your strategies in the chat if you don't mind. Would love to know. Let's go over here. Alain Roy. Hi, Alain and Connor. Of course, Connor. I'm sorry. I should have mentioned you. Connor is part of our team. In case you don't know Connor, he's our superstar, and he's always doing the moderation of these lives. And he's here to basically comment, get you engaged, share some links with you. And so, hey Connor and Alain Roy, thanks for joining. I'm very happy that you joined. From Nolton, I believe you are. So, how are you currently building connection within your team? Okay, and if I want to say it in French, I know Alain you speak English as well. I'm assuming. Comment présentement vous établissez les connexions avec votre équipe? Okay, partagez vos stratégies dans le clavardage. Not bad for. An impromptu translation, Claire. All right, okay, um, I make jokes. I'm, I'm on my own here, okay? I know you're there, but you know, I try to make it fun. It's not always funny, but I try. Okay, so, uh, let's put those in the chat and let's tackle on— we have 10 more minutes left, uh, let's tackle on the, uh, third thing I want to talk to you about. Some practical strategies. So again, leading in a virtual-first world requires adaptability for the leadership, empathy, and creativity. So there's 3 things, 3 takeaways that I want to share with you. Setting clear expectations. An actual Harvard Business Review study found that clear role definitions increase remote team productivity by 25%, by 25%, just by making sure that people know what their role is and what is expected of them. So setting clear expectations is one important thing to establish in a remote setting. The second one, prioritizing mental well-being. Teams will access With access, sorry. Teams actually with access to mental health resources report 41% higher satisfaction levels at work. I mean, come on. That's huge. So, just by providing mental health resources for your team, they will actually be 41% higher, report higher— sorry, report 41% higher satisfaction levels at work. Why wouldn't we do that? Why wouldn't we do that? And the third one, this is great. Okay, so use VR tools and platforms for collaboration, like spatial and immersive learning tools, to enhance that team engagement. And actually, studies show that by using these tools, you can enhance communication and engagement by 30%. So maybe you can Google it. Maybe you can put it in the chat, Conor, if you don't mind. Spatial, spatial.io. You can go check it out. I mean, there's a whole bunch of them. Just one, this one is really, really popular. So you can put it in the chat for everyone to go check it out. But it's basically a platform where you are remote. But the whole room, you have your VR headset. You feel like you're together in a in a in a VR setting. Not only it's fun, it's original, it's creative, and you have your avatar. It's hilarious, actually. Why not spice up the whole remote meeting? Why not, right? So I know some people are kind of not really open to these things, but more and more companies are, especially the ones that they don't even have hybrid teams. They're just 100% remote. I talk. To a lot of clients that are just 100% remote. So why not invest in a platform like that? So again, I'm going to put it in the chat here. Here you go. And maybe if you can't see it, you can— we'll share it right after. Oh, okay, Connor, you already did. Thank you. I wasn't seeing it, so I just saw it. Thank you so much. All right. So again, Let's talk about 3 things you could do, some tips so you can improve connection in a remote setting or hybrid setting. Set clear expectations. People should know what you expect from them, what their role is. That's going to boost productivity by 25%. This is based on studies out there. The second one is prioritizing mental health And mental well-being. Here's an example. So, how do you do that, right? So, actually, I think that's a great segue to what I want to talk to you about. Just put a little pin on this one, okay? The third one is leveraging rigs like VR platforms. So, your meetings look like you're in person but you really have your VR headsets and your avatars around the table, okay? So, the second one here is talking about mental well-being and how you can boost that. So, if you're allowing your team to be more productive, eliminating repetitive tasks that nobody wants to do, etc., that would free up their time. And the pressure and the frustration over these repetitive tasks that require no creativity on their end. They're just simply frustrating. So, imagine you shave off 3 to 5 hours of frustrating work that nobody wants to do. Then, maybe you don't give them 3 to 5 hours free time. Maybe you give them 3 hours. If let's say you shaved off 5 hours, you give them 3 hours every week to choose to do a mental mental well-being activity, whether 3 hours a week from their actual work week, no question asked, free time. Whether they want to go take a nap, whether they want to go for a walk, whether they just— anything just to relieve the stress and the pressure in their day-to-day. So, what am I talking about? AI. Leveraging AI at the workplace, getting rid of repetitive tasks that you can program and AI can do for you will basically shave off about 3 to 5 hours from your people's schedule, even from your schedule as a leader. Then, you can take the time. The idea is not to remove 5 hours and replace it with more work. The idea is to remove 5 hours and maybe replace half Or more with free time. And then maybe give the option of your teammate or you can have a consensus like, what do you want to do with the other 2 hours? Okay, maybe we want to spend it on doing brainstorming sessions, being more creative together. Okay, so the reason why I actually talk about this AI thing, many of you already probably know about this, that we We just actually finishing tomorrow is the last day of our neural leadership and AI productivity, AI enhanced productivity masterclass. It was running over three weeks, and it consisted of the masterclass an hour and a half on Tuesdays and an hour of Q&A on Thursday. It's mainly geared towards AI learning AI tools, practical tools, setting it up, and all the way to getting a bit more advanced on how to program workflows and make sure that. AI can do things just automatically on its own. So we're wrapping it up tomorrow. And since, as you can just imagine, AI is constantly evolving, actually every day there's an announcement, we're just trying to keep up. We decided to launch a membership, a monthly membership where you're able to basically be updated on what's happening with AI and AI tools that are fetched and confirmed from AI experts. We basically, with our CTO Marcel Semin, he's leading this one. He's our AI genius. He completely transformed our company since AI. And this is why we decided to hire him. So, we work together and he's a partner in this. So, this membership actually, there's a standard basic membership which is $19 a month and $190 a year. So that's 2 months for free. And the premium one, that's 1 session. Okay, so that's 1 session a month. But the premium membership gives you 2 sessions a month where the second one is more advanced. So if you're a developer, programmer, or somebody that really wants to learn more about how you can use AI at a whole different advanced level, you definitely want to, want to, you know, sign up to this one, the premium one, and it's only $49 a month or $490 a year. And you can cancel anytime. And the cool part of the premium membership is that it actually gives you access to the possibility to get a certification, AI certifications at 3 levels. I'm not gonna— I'm gonna stop right there. I don't want to do a whole pitch about this, but I think it's important to talk about it because we designed this membership to Relieve people from the repetitive tasks and help them be more productive. So in a way, I am going to talk about it because I'm helping you by talking about it. If you don't know anything about AI, you're not leveraging AI, and you're completely lost and you don't know where to start, you need to join this. Trust me, you are not going to be disappointed. The feedback has been huge, huge positive, really positive from everybody. We had about 100 participants sign up. And you'll see here on the corner, top corner of my screen, there's a little It'll scan me. You can scan that code. It'll take you straight to the landing page where you can have more information. And Connor, I know I'm putting you on the spot here, but if you can find that link, please, and share it with our friends. Actually, I have it here. Let me just copy paste it, and maybe you can let me see. You can also post it again from you because I feel like. When I'm posting something, it doesn't show up for some reason. Very, very mysterious. Who knows? So, last poll question before I wrap this up. I know it's already 12. What's your biggest challenge when leading virtual teams? Building trust, communication, maintaining engagement, or other? So, do put it in the chat. I'm just gonna go over there and see what's happening. Okay. We don't have any questions. But we do have a couple of comments. Thanks, Alan, for joining. Much appreciated. Always fun when we have live attendees. And so, here's the thing. If you want to know, have a bit more information about how to lead remotely and do it well leveraging neuroscience, Type metaverse in the comments and I'll send you more information. And as usual, if you have signed up for this live, we will be sending you one-pager pacing to summarize everything we talked about today. Why do we do that? Because we're nice and we want to just save you time. We'd love for you to join us live, but hey, we know you're not always free, so we try to make things— Easy. Interesting and convenient for you. And finally, next week, next Wednesday, we are going to have the second part of our Breaking the Taboo conference. And this second part, we're talking about humor as a leadership superpower. And I'm going to be joined by 3 wonderful talented women experts in the field and a stand-up comedian as well and a leadership expert, Courtney Bickert. And so, we'll have Vivian as well and Jacinthe. I'm very excited about this. I'll see you next week. Have a wonderful, wonderful day. And if you're snowed under, I think we say that in English, snowed under. Well, think of me there in that picture and keep that smile on your face. All right. Have a good day, everyone. See you next week. See you next week. Bye. I think my stream doesn't want to end. I'm trying to end it, but hey, all right, I'm gonna try again. So when things don't work, you just laugh, right? Connor, if you're on and you can help me out here, I for some reason I can't end the stream. This is hilarious. What's going on? All right, I'm gonna try this another way.