How to Manage Remote Teams | Johnny Campbell & Jason Lauritsen

It is Wednesday, the 11th of November. Welcome to the Christmas edition of the Shortlist. I promise you it's not the Christmas edition. Don't panic. We're not there yet. We've got like six weeks to go. There's loads of time. You can go on Amazon, do all your shopping. You'll be fine with. We'll count down and we'll do a Christmas special. But we're not going to do it now because you shouldn't be putting up your Christmas trees. It's too early. We are today going to be talking about something that I think affects all of us right now. Certainly all of us who are professional workers, white collar workers, whatever you want to call the category. You're the type of person who's probably logged into LinkedIn and watching this live, right? You're probably in the category. If you're listening to this podcast, I guess you could be in any category. Maybe you work with somebody or so you live with somebody who is this kind of worker, but workers who work remotely or working from home or working from anywhere since this pandemic kicked in. And that's going to be our theme today. I want to talk about how do we manage remote teams? How does remote working work? What are the secret sauce ingredients? What's it going to look like in a year from now? Will it be different? What can we learn from examples out there today? And to hear from our guest today who's really, really passionate about this topic. This topic, by the way, not being necessarily remote, but being leadership and someone who's talked about that for a long time. Before I dig into the meet and introduce our speaker for today, our guest speaker, he'd kill me if I called him a speaker. He's going to have a conversation with us, maybe even an argument, which would be fantastic. I want to remind everybody that the Shortlist is a weekly show. It's a podcast and live broadcast. You can subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast as you go for your walk with your dog or your run. And please do subscribe and give us a five star rating while you're at it. We'd really appreciate that. We can't send you bags of goodies for doing that, but we'll give you love and more content over the coming weeks. But you can also watch us live on LinkedIn or YouTube and you can find links to all our previous shows and you can sign up for emails that will tell you about our future guests by going to SocialTalent.com for forward/ the shortlist where our lovely nice people will write up lots of things on our website to tell you all about the fantastic shortlist and what we have coming. So those of you listening live, by the way, we love you, the live listeners. We want to hear your comments and opinions. We know this is a topic that affects you. We know you might be bored talking about it. But you know what, we're going to take a new angle on it. We want to hear what you have to say. I want to hear your questions for our guest. Which brings me to our fantastic guest. The topic though, let me just talk about the change we've gone through in 2020. It's felt dramatic for many of us, right? Many of us are still not coping well with this, right? Having to work from home or work from a remote office. And many companies and organizations around the world have really scrambled to adapt to this new way of working as it's called disconnected teams working asynchronously, schedules all over the place, little ones coming in, older ones may be coming in on your calls, but others have really loved this. They've embraced it. It's like the best thing that's ever happened to them in their work life. They're cutting their commute by three hours. They're getting so much time back. They love the, the, the, the ability to, to, to move to a different location maybe, you know, but the difference between the two, you know, when you look at it, you look at the people who are struggling and the companies are struggling, the companies who aren't typically comes down to leadership. That seems to be the big, big difference between the organizations that are making it work and not making it work. And our guest today is a friend of mine at Brian, known each of them for many years and he's my go to person on the topic of leadership. And that is Jason Lauritson. And Jason hails from Omaha in the US but he's a thought leader and award winning author who really focused on helping companies deliver an incredible employee experience. That's what he's always done, always spoken about. He's passionate about bringing humanity back to the workplace. And I've seen him speak in person the first time I ever met Jason when he was leading a room of 5000 hr folks in some massive conference center in Chicago. I and he's here to talk to us today about what bringing humanity back to the workplace looks like in a virtual workplace. Jason, maybe you can tell us more about why this is the topic you ended up making your career out of why are you so passionate about this subject?

I think it's because my early career was working for really bad managers and having really terrible work experiences, largely. I think that's where this came from. You and I have talked a little bit about this in the past, but my early career I was in sales and then I got into recruiting and I worked in some pretty terrible workplaces. And then even as a recruiter, I started seeing inside of other organizations and I started to realize that there's a lot of people having suboptimal work experiences and they didn't like their job, they might hate their job. It was miserable. And then I had an opportunity. I joined corporate hr. I went inside with an awesome team and we proved what was possible. I saw that it didn't have to suck. And then I was hooked on it, like forever. I knew it could be fixed and so I wanted to go fix it. And so that's what I dedicated my life to doing.

So I'm a talker, Jason. I like to talk about these things. You write about these things like it is an amazing feature. The feat of writing a book is fantastic. You've written several books, Social Gravity. You've talked about Unlocking Hyperbole, Performance. Just going to give a quick plug to your books. I think they're, they're amazing. And you write so well and you have some amazing insights in this topic. Right. But I want to maybe kick off with just a sample of what's out there. I want to try and look to other writers and see what they're talking about, good and bad. And this is the section we call in the show, Jason, the News. I don't know if it's news per se because it's not exactly something brand new happened this week. Not like what happened last week in the US we won't go there. But let's talk about this article in Forbes that I want to bring to your attention, Jason. I think you read through this as well. And Forbes wrote last week Matt Ranta wrote about three leadership skills necessary for managing remote employees. I want to get your thoughts on this article. We'll share the link in the show notes and also live here as well. Anyone wants to check it out. What did you get from this, if anything, what did you agree with, disagree with in this article?

You know, it's what's hard to disagree with what's in this because it's, I mean, so that the, the gist of it is they're like, okay, here's what you need to do. Empathy, have Empathy, communicate and give more feedback. It's like, okay, sure. Same advice that we've been giving managers for the last, you know, 20 years. If you know those that really are trying to improve management or prove leadership, this is what we should have been doing. I, for me it was, it was, it's like, yeah, of course. And then there wasn't a whole lot of how to. So I mean it was sort of just another reminder of. And I think leaders are getting a lot of. I don't know what you think, but it seems like there's a lot of articles out there that are saying the same things like be more empathetic, communicate more. And managers are hearing it, but like how to do it is an entirely different thing.

Without that tactical how to. Right. Can you give me an examples from your experience that you've heard of where people like completely mess it up. They take the verbatim kind of headline like you get in these three tips and go, yeah, I got that. You know, like maybe communicating more. And they just muck it up completely.

I think that they're, you're seeing a lot of that right now where they're, they think, you know, our, traditionally when we as managers, we hear communicate more. What we think is push out more information. Like I need to get more information to my people, be pushing out. And so they sit behind their desk and send emails, right? Send emails, send email, send email, send email, send a lot of information. It ends up being overkill. And the employees are already overwhelmed. They're already trying to like they're, they're under, you know, underwater and it just is like an avalanche. And so it's actually counterproductive because so instead of it being push, it's. I think what they mean to say in communication is be in conversation, right? Be in two way communication with your people, not one way.

I heard at the very start of this, I was in some leadership groups with other business leaders that I do educational programs and with a bunch of folks who run companies.