5 Rules for Leading Virtual Teams

With the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic, 70% of the global knowledge workforce was forced to go virtual. Suddenly, hundred of millions of workers were logging in from home and trying to adjust to this new normal. However, it wasn’t just workers who were forced to adapt, organizations and leaders had to figure out how to upend the longstanding way they had traditionally done business. Sadly, for many organizations the transition has been far from seamless.

Initially, the biggest issue was one of technology. How do you replace the omnipresent schedule of meetings that ruled most of our lives? Zoom and Teams quickly filled the void. So, for most organizations going virtual has meant a seemingly never-ending series of virtual meetings and a workforce that is drowning in them; desperately struggling to keep their head above water.

With the initial technology challenges resolved, broader issues began to emerge:

• How do you maintain a cohesive team culture when people aren’t co-located?
• How do you assure people are focusing on the right things, the action items that drive productivity; versus all of the distractions?
• How does a leader foster trust, engagement and collaboration outside of the typical office environment?
• How does talent development work in a virtual environment?
• How do people build their network of connections and relationships across the organization without impromptu opportunities to meet other leaders?

These are but a few of the issues organizations are grappling with as the pandemic stretches on with no clear end in sight.

As leaders, how are we to fix these issues and reap the benefits promised from having a highly engaged, virtual team?

To succeed in this new world, the first thing we have to do is let go of the assumption that leading a virtual team is the same as leading a team in the office just with Zoom meetings. We have to own up to the fact that the game has changed. Therefore, we must understand the rules of this new game if we are going to win at it.

So here are some of the new rules for leading a virtual workforce:

Virtual Rule #1: Virtual Teams Thrive on a Shared Purpose and a Sense of Belonging

We’ve long recognized the power of purpose. People and teams don’t take action without having a compelling reason. The more clearly they understand the “why”, the more they are inclined to act. Having a well-defined vision of what the team is seeking to accomplish, and why it is so important to get there is critical for virtual teams.

Employees who are going through the motions without feeling a sense connection and purpose quickly begin to feel isolated and disillusioned. When you lay communication issues and delayed responses on top of that, you can begin to see how people would start to develop a sense of self-reliance to find answers and get things done. Normally, self-reliance is a good thing. In virtual teams it becomes an issue though when it builds up mistrust and breaks down collaboration.

As leaders, we must make a concerted effort to pull the team together to achieve the shared vision. Form small teams to achieve short-term objectives. Celebrate the wins and learn from the setbacks together as a team. No blame, no finger pointing, just keep showing the forward momentum towards the realization of the common vision.

Always remember, when leading a virtual team, purpose drives productivity.

Virtual Rule #2: Ambiguity is the Enemy

The great Irish Playwright, George Bernard Shaw once said,

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has happened.”

Working with organizations around the globe for more than three decades, it has been our experience that employees almost always list communication as a problem. As such, it is easy to accept that communication is a challenge in the best of times. In a virtual environment the problem increases exponentially. Certainly, Zoom and Teams meetings have helped, but they are poor substitutes from being able to walk down the hall and have a conversation.

Another challenge that has given rise in this new virtual environment is “over-communication.” Many employees report that the volume of messaging has increased exponentially with the onset of the pandemic. As such, people are struggling to keep up with the volume of emails and trying to discern what’s important and what’s not important.

In the virtual environment, context is king and ambiguity is the enemy. If context isn’t clear, people fill in the gaps with their presumptions and imagination. Negativity quickly follows and soon people find themselves in a tailspin of mistrust and doubt.

As leaders, we can’t make the assumption that “our people get it”. We must consciously define: Who needs to know what? When do they need to know it? And, why do they need to understand it? It’s the “why is this important” piece that is so frequently missed, yet so critically important. We then have to help our people to cut through the clutter and understand what information is truly important.

Virtual Rule #3: Leaders Must Set the New Playing field

For the majority of workers, the office environment has been all they’ve known, so it is their only reference point. They understand the social norms and the schedule. They know the way to get things done in the office. However, when everything went virtual, all those knowns went right out the window. Suddenly there was no set start and stop times. There were no impromptu conversations in the hallway. Candidly, there was no social norm for anything. As such, going virtual meant a whole new set of standards for everything. The challenge was all of these new standards were largely left undefined.

As leaders of virtual teams, we need to recognize it is our responsibility to help redefine these new critical social norms. We must gain agreement across the team on important questions such as:

• How do we communicate? Is email enough or if something is really important, do we first have a conversation about it and then follow up in writing?
• How quickly should emails be responded to? What is the expectation? What if someone is working at 2 am and sending out emails? What are the defined hours when people are expected to respond (or should everyone be looking at their emails throughout the night)?
• Is everyone expected to attend every Zoom or Teams meeting they are invited to? Or is it okay to decline some invites to keep from getting overwhelmed?
• When someone is running into a challenge, when should they reach out for help? And who should they reach out to? Who are the team’s designated subject matter experts (or does everything have to funnel through the team leader)?
• What is the best way for leaders to support their people? Is it one size fits all or should it be more tailored to the individual? Should leaders be highly proactive or wait for people to raise their hand and ask for help?

These are but a few of the critical questions that leaders and their teams must answer to establish a clearly defined, virtual playing field.

Virtual Rule #4: Manage Outcomes not Time

In the early 1900s, Frederick Taylor became the forefather of what we today know as “management”. Studying workers, he refined the process by which things were done, increasing efficiency and the amount of work that could be completed in a given amount of time. 

Little changed over the next one hundred years, managers focused on getting the most from the time their employees were investing. As such, for many managers they rested their faith in the fact that things were getting done by looking out and seeing people working away in their offices.

The challenge is, in this new virtual world, we don’t have a real-time way to look into people’s homes to make sure that they are working. The old measure of seeing someone sitting in a chair from nine to five just doesn’t hold up in this new virtual world. So, we have to choose a new model from which to manage. This is a critical decision right here, one that is essential to make when you have people working remotely.

The first virtual management model is a transactional model. This one works well for production-oriented teams. We have a number of clients in the travel industry, they have remote workers who take inbound calls from customers, so success is dictated based upon how many calls are taken and how effectively they are handled, it’s a transaction. We have another client who is one of the largest insurance companies in the world, they have remote workers who process claims, again, it’s about volume and quality. If your team functions this way, the transactional model is best for you. You pay attention to the number of transactions and effectiveness of how they are handled.

The other virtual management model is a project model. This is perfect for employees who do more complicated, non-repetitive type work. Software programmers, account managers, salespeople who have longer sales cycles, knowledge workers who do product development, design work or research; these roles all fit into the project model. In a project model, you manage more by milestones completed than by transactions completed. You look at everything as a project.

In a virtual environment, if a manager takes a transactional approach with a team of project workers, they will be accused of being a micro-manager and quickly alienate their team. If a manager takes project approach with a transactional team, they won’t create enough accountability thus productivity will suffer.

Virtual Rule #5: In Virtual Teams – Leaders Win and Managers Wallow

By definition, management is all about the process of doing business. Managers create goals and strategies that outline what people should be doing and how they should be doing it. The challenge is, in the virtual world much of this process dies.

Virtual workers have more autonomy, more freedom to explore and discover their own process. As such, old style management techniques not only don’t hold up in the virtual environment, they actual serve to alienate the team.

Virtual teams have to be led, far more than they have to be managed. 

Great leaders know that the key to moving people in better directions is all about positively influencing what they come to think and believe. Our thoughts and beliefs drive our actions, and our actions dictate our results. As leaders, we can’t change a person’s actions without, first, impacting what they come to think and believe.

So, leaders of virtual teams need to always be looking for positive ways to engage their people and impact the mindset of the members of their team. This can be done through encouragement or recognition. It can be done by cajoling or asking challenging questions. Let the team take the lead in conversations, ask for their insights and recommendations. Give the latitude to implement their ideas and let them know you have their back. 

Psychological safety is a powerful motivator for virtual employees.

The Silver Lining in the Cloudy Sky of the Pandemic

In the 1930s, author Napoleon Hill made the observation that:

Every adversity carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

The COVID pandemic has certainly brought adversity. However, it has also brought an even greater opportunity. As leaders, we have the opportunity to redefine the way that work gets done. We can let go of long held and long outdated traditions.

We have just been given the opportunity to rework the nature of how we communicate and collaborate. We can shed the time-wasting methods of the past and find new efficiencies. We can open new pools of talent when we are no longer restrained to recruiting people from a given location.

It has been 250 years since the beginning of the industrial revolution and the rise of business as we know it, this pandemic has given us the opportunity to create Business 2.0.

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David Naylor is Executive Vice President of Global Learning and Development at 2logical, one of the top 20 global leadership development companies. At 2logical, we help organizations fix their people problems by shifting employee mindsets and developing higher levels of motivational intelligence (the driver of growth mindsets).

?Forward thinking, industry leaders in more than 90 countries leverage 2logical's expertise to develop their Leadership and Sales talent.

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