#87 Successfully Leading Remote and Hybrid Teams

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Welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Wayne Turmel, an expert author and advisor on the subject of remote and hybrid work for the Kevin Eikenberry Group. He's co-authored with Kevin a book titled The Long-Distance Leader: Revised Rules for Remarkable Remote and Hybrid Leadership. Available now. Second edition will be launching on September 17th. Wayne, welcome to the Proteus Leader Show.

Thank you, Laird. Looking forward to our conversation.

Well, listen, this is a topic that is, uh, on the top of my mind, the top of mind of all our clients. It started, I'm sure, well before COVID but COVID, I'm sure, accelerated and made it a necessity. Tell me a little bit about what it's like to manage a remote and hybrid team different than a team that's on site?

Yeah, it's funny, you know, especially before COVID as remote work was becoming more and more prevalent and it was growing at about 30% a year, a lot of people were kind of freaked out because they hadn't experienced it and they didn't know what it was going to be. And, and we always told them to relax. There's always remote work. You know, Genghis Khan ruled half the world and did not have a Zoom account. You know, it's always been, been doable, but it was becoming more and more prevalent. Then of course COVID pushed us across the Rubicon. But I've been following this topic for 18 years or so, and to me the big thing is people are always concerned that if they can't see or they're you know, close physical proximity to each other, that they're not going to have the communication and the conversations that they would normally have. And to a degree, that's true. But the change in managing a remote or a hybrid team is kind of a degree of change, not an order of change.

Okay.

The way that, that we describe it is that what you do as a leader I mean, about what a leader does, right? You set the vision, you coach, you delegate. Yep. Still got to do all that stuff. What we do, our job hasn't changed all that much. What has changed, and it's not critical, but it's important, is how we do that job because we're doing it 2 things. One is mediated and mitigated through technology, and that changes how we communicate, but it's also we lack the visual cues that a lot of us use, right? If I'm walking through the cube farm and you're banging your head on your monitor, it's pretty easy for me to go, is everything okay? I mean, I don't have to be the world's greatest leader to go, oops, I better talk to Laird about this. I can't see you at home banging your head on the monitor.

Well, you know, I remember the days of the conference bridge. And working remotely and having a team on a conference call. And now with the advent of Zoom, etc., give me some examples of, as a manager, what I need to attend to differently and how I need to communicate differently as a leader working in remote with remote team.

Yeah, I think there's a couple of things, and one of them seems counterintuitive, which is What you're looking for if somebody is stressed, if they need help, if they need coaching, is silence. Because we don't hear from people. And there's a natural assumption, you know, the micromanager is going to go, oh my God, I'm not hearing from them, and overcorrect, right? And start micromanaging. But a lot of us are like, well, Larry hasn't said anything. And so I guess it's going okay. Right? It's really out of sight and out of mind. And of course, on a hybrid team, that can be really corrosive because the people in the office are getting all the attention.

Sure.

And one of the most toxic things on a remote or a hybrid team is exclusion. So I'm not intentionally excluding you, but if I'm not careful, I'm not intentionally including you either.

Yeah, that, that's really insightful. And, and I wonder, it makes me wonder, you know, if I'm the remote person on the team or one of the remote people on the team, what, what should I be doing differently than if I was in the office?

Yeah, it's funny, you know, The Long Distance Leader came out in 2018, and almost immediately we started the next book, The Long Distance Teammate, which is for that individual worker because There are a couple of things. One is our research showed that people who are proactive in reaching out, in speaking up, in asking questions when they have them, are perceived as better teammates.

Okay.

There's also something as we go to return to work and try to figure out, are we working remotely, are we not? There's something that we call the Spider-Man paradox. Which is, if you know your comic book geekdom, with great power comes great responsibility.

Yes.

Well, if working at home, if you are being given control of your life, your time, you are not having somebody standing over your shoulder, you have a responsibility to the person who pays you. You have a responsibility to your teammates. And while that's always been implicitly true, For remote work to be successful, it needs to be explicit. Hey, I'm not going to stand there, watch your keystrokes, and, and, you know, check how soon you log out, but you better get your work done.

Yeah.

And you'd better add value to the team in the work that you do. So, there's a change going on for both leaders and the led, I suppose.

Yeah, right.

In how this works, the dynamics of building a team and what does it mean to go to work. It's a pretty seismic shift we're going through.

Yeah, it seems like, you know, the core of your message is communication is so critical and important.

You know, if I had to boil our message down to one thing, and it— whenever you boil a book down to its core, it sounds like a big duh. But it's about being intentional.

Okay. Right?

The first rule, we have a number of rules in the book, but the first rule, think leadership first, location second. If you stop and think, as a leader, what should I be doing right now? I'll bet most of your listeners will be on the right track. If you don't stop and think about it, It's really easy to not include people in conversations. You know, it's really easy to default to the easiest form of communication.

Sure.

You know, send an email rather than pick up the phone or have a real conversation. You know, the most evil example of this I know is my wife was once fired by instant messenger.

Oh, no.

Now, The horrified look on your face is exactly appropriate right now. Did it get the job done? Sure. She was unemployed at the end of it. I guess it was mission accomplished. Any sentient human being knows that's not the way to go about it.

Right.

And that's an extreme example. But, you know, it's Thursday afternoon, it's 4 o'clock. I give Laird feedback and you know what he's like. I'll just send him an email and deal with it tomorrow.

Yeah. Well, I love the message of intentionality because to your point, whether it's remote or in person, a leader needs to be intentional about what they're trying to accomplish and how to accomplish it. So, I love that.

Well, and there's also the added component of expressed expectations, right? Do people really know what's expected of— and it's stupid things like, are you using your status updates on Teams so that people know? Are you at your desk? Are you away from your desk? Am I sending you messages and you're just ignoring me? Am I sending you messages because you're not there?

So, Wayne, let me ask you this question. How explicit should teams be about setting those types of expectations? You know, setting your statuses and Expectations for response time and those types of things?

I think you cannot be explicit enough at the beginning. I mean, eventually you will settle into a rhythm and adjust and maybe, you know, based on individual work styles, some people need more of one thing than the other. But if you don't express those expectations upfront, you know, Napoleon said you can avoid war by avoiding the 1,000 little pinpricks that lead to war. And it's simple things like, you know, I've got a 31-year-old daughter who seems to not know that telephones also transmit voice. She does everything by text. And that's generational and one thing or another. Well, at some point, you know, older leaders need to adjust to the way the world is working. But younger leaders sometimes need to know that that is insufficient.

Yeah.

And if I need this information for you, you might hate having your webcam on, right? You're working at home, you're in your AC/DC t-shirt and your bunny slippers and whatever. But if we're having a coaching conversation and we can't be in person, I want you on camera. I want to be able to see you and, and for you to see me and for us to be able to have a richer conversation. Your work style, your preference may be for something else. I don't care. This situation demands certain things. And I think if we just leave, you know, we all know leaders who manage by email. That's usually a communication style preference, but it's not always appropriate. Yeah.

What are some misconceptions about remote or hybrid work that either cause issues or that if people were aware of them, they could manage more effectively?

I think one of the misconceptions— we heard this a lot in the early days of COVID— was, well, it's going to be just like being in the office except you're on webcam. And we found that, A, that's not particularly true, but also, B, by the time kind of the world started emerging from its cocoon, You had 3 years of college graduates and new hires who didn't know what it was to be in an office.

Right.

You can't just assume that people know. And, you know, conversely, coming back to the office, I remember talking to one HR person who looked at me with a straight face, and I said, okay, what's the biggest challenge returning? And she looked at me and went, they've gone feral.

What does she mean by that?

That, you know, the kind of thin veneer of civilization that we worked with in the office kind of disappeared, right? You couldn't get people to wear business clothing anymore.

Yeah.

And people had no problem discussing and screaming at each other because we'd all been living in this little bubble, right? We had to remember how to reconnect and how to act.

It's so true to think about, you know, those of us who've been in the work world, just going to a different mode maybe was a, a little bit of a shift. But those who had not yet been in the work world and started during that period, I have to imagine just even the onboarding process and connecting to colleagues and the, the learning and, and knowledge transfer that typically takes place in the work— in the workplace had to have been—

One of the things that we've learned, which was I suppose shouldn't have been surprising, but was, is that how successful you can be working remotely depends on 2 things. It depends on what you do, clearly, right? Some jobs lend themselves to it, but it's also where you are in your life.

Yeah.

And what we have found is that younger workers, and especially, you know, and even those that are onboarding, like to be together more often than not. And there's all kinds of reasons for that that I can geek out on, but we don't have time. But they want to get to know each other. They want to know the culture. They want to pick up all that stuff through osmosis. The people who most clamor for remote work are those who aren't in their jobs.

Yeah.

Right? I know what to do. I know how to do my job. I'm good at my job. I don't need you standing over me. By the way, at this stage of my life, I have a wife and a kid and a dog, and I'd like to see them on occasion. And by the way, I may be a leader, and my team is scattered all over the place anyway. So, why am I going to the office when none of them live there? Yeah.

Well, so, you know, just judging from my clients, I would say most organizations that we serve are probably in the office between 3 and 5 days a week. these days, right? What is the status of hybrid and, and remote work expectations, and what does the future look like?

You may have pushed the button that is going to make this a much longer conversation.

Okay.

Because I am becoming mildly obsessed with hybrid work, and I think what's happened is that what we have in most cases is not truly hybrid work. It's a hostage negotiation. It's how much can we make them come into the office before they quit? And how much can I whine about going to the office until they fire me? And we kind of reach an agreement and we kind of make it work and nobody's completely happy, but nobody's going to quit over it. So we move forward. And that is not true hybrid work.

Yeah.

A hybrid, if you want to be pedantic about it, and who doesn't, You want to be pedantic about it. A hybrid is not just a blend of 2 things. It's 2 things coming together to form a 3rd entity. And for hybrid work to really, really take off and to be more than just a compromise, it's not just who works where, but when. The concept of time and what work should be done asynchronously and what work needs to be done synchronously? You know, does it matter that we're all online at the same time? Should there be certain times when everybody crosses over?

What is the difference between those organizations for which it seems more like a hostage situation and those who are successful in creating that, you know, third entity that is productivity and satisfaction and all those things that are good about work?

Yeah, I think it boils down to asking the hard questions. And senior leaders need to ask themselves these kinds of questions because it's often, well, we have to get people to work because of the culture, because we want to create a culture.

Mm-hmm.

Well, we know, and we talk about this in The Long-Distance Leader, we talk about it more in our book, The Long-Distance Team, but culture is very specifically made up of observable, doable behaviors. And if you know what those behaviors are and you know your business and you know what's supposed to happen, clearly it's easier to do before the boat's in the water, right? If you're a startup, you can pretty easily create whatever the heck culture you want. If the boat's in the water, it— you need to stop about and think about 3 things: communication, collaboration, cohesion. How are we going to communicate with each other? And that's not just what technology do we have to do it, but how frequently and what form does that communication take? Collaboration is how does the work get done? What does it take to get the widgets out the door, the customer satisfied, right?

Yeah.

And some of that may be able to be done remotely. Some of it may have to be done in person. Some of it can be done part-time, one or the other. But if you know that, right, form follows function. And then the third thing is cohesion. How are you going to get along and get to know each other and build relationships that drive the forward? It's not just building relationships, it's building relationships to get the desired result. And if you think about those 3 things and again, you're intentional about them, you'll figure out the right answer.

Yeah, I, I really like that framework because it does allow you to get very explicit about what each of them means to your organization. Well, Wayne, this is, uh, something I'm sure we could talk about for forever, but we are limited with time. So for our listeners, let me just say, for more information about leading remote and hybrid teams, look for Wayne's book, The Long Distance Leader: Revised Rules for Remarkable Remote and Hybrid Leadership. First edition is available now. Second edition coming out in, on September 17th. You can find it at kevineikenberry.com. Find out more about Proteus. Go to proteusinternational.com. Click on what we do and leadership development to find out more about leading teams. Thank you all for listening. Until next time, here's to creating the life you truly want. Thank you.

We hope you're feeling better equipped to create the career, the business, and the life you want. To find out more about how we support our clients in leadership, learning, and change, visit us at proteus-international.com. Have an excellent day, and thanks for listening.