The Art and Science of Hybrid Work

Hybrid working is a reality. We all juggle home, travel and work in our daily lives ... today it's just blended differently, right?

Sure ... but it's hard to get right.

I was privileged to catch up with SVP sales and all-round high-achiever Strider Denison of LS Networks while he motored towards meetings in Bend, Oregon. Strider’s hybrid day even involved making time for a Brit on mobile zoom 5000 miles away. Finding a safe place to Park, Strider talked training, coaching and how to strike the right balance with teams. Look out for "Kinetic learning": Strider’s true masterclass in getting things done.

Summary keywords: organization, work, sales, leading indicators, frontline leaders, people, kinetic, learning, challenges, appointments, enabling, activity, scalability, gaps, leadership

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Robert:?So set the scene for us. What's the overall direction of travel for LS Networks, and how far are you along that road, would you say?

Strider:?We want to grow the LS Networks to be a $1bn-plus company over the next several years. So, that is the revenue goal. The ambition is to be the number one fiberoptic provider in the Pacific Northwest.?

Robert:?The fascinating?part of the conversation here is that LS Networks is responsible for enabling a new work culture based on ultra-fast broadband, as well as living it too right? Being right at the heart of it yourself, leading by example with your own teams. Working with people virtually, your own group, and your own organization. What are the challenges you’ve faced? What are the human aspects of keeping a team together?

Strider:?You have to learn how to communicate and have some level of empathy for each other because things are just different. Life's different. Things happen in the home now where you're working, just as work stuff happens when you’re with family. There has to be a new respect for real-life intervening. I want to make sure that I'm out in the field and that my organization sees me. I'm learning the challenges by going out there and participating. This way I can have frontline knowledge and see what the challenges are, where we can adjust, and how we can be better as an organization by putting myself in that situation.

Robert:?You obviously have an eye on the future. How scalable is being out among your colleagues and customers for you as a company and how does that reflect on how your customers can begin to blend their lives, a little in the workplace, a little on the move, where they want to be, and add as much value as possible?

Strider:?I think it's very scalable and the reason I do is you have to have the faith to put your frontline leaders. You need to put them in ‘power of the power’. My leaders are out, three or four days a week, every week either on appointments or attending activities with our field reps and from a sales leadership perspective, trying to communicate synergies to those who they don’t normally interact with.

The scalability comes by having your frontline leaders do the same thing as you. But also most importantly, spending time with your colleagues in other parts of the business as well. I'm going to Bend Oregon today, and I'll also meet with the operations teams, customer service, and other departments that are located in that office and out in the field. So, it's not just me leading my department, it's being a servant leader of the organization as a whole. Back in the old days of 2019, we would walk around the halls of offices and buildings, you kind of bumped into your colleagues. Now you have to be intentional about it and I think that it scales because the whole organization embrace, it is not just sales. We have all embraced that kind of philosophy.

Robert: That's very cool. “Intentional bumping”

Strider: Yes, exactly!

Robert: Physically the 'water cooler conversation' that used to be part of the glue, has disappeared, right?

Strider: I suppose there's still water cooler talk, kind of without the cooler!?To some degree I encourage it because I think it's valuable, as long as loose gossip doesn't become viral. I think it's okay for people to think and talk through their challenges. You don't replicate that environment in a hybrid/zoom world very easily … it just becomes just two-dimensional and inauthentic. Again, I think intentionally trying to be in-person and seeing each other really helps with that social 'glue' and maintaining a great atmosphere.

Robert:?On the leap of faith side, how do you feel when we're talking about more hybrid, more remote? You've got to be really sure about the people who are working for you because you can't see them all the time. How do you not lose sleep at night?

Strider:?To quote Ronald Reagan: “Trust but verify”. What I mean by that is, that you have to let your people run their realm. You’ve got to trust that you hired professionals. And I also use KPIs, dashboards, and the numbers that we use in measuring the success of sales, from activity to result. I call them leading indicators and lagging indicators. Those leading indicators are the things that the frontline people can directly impact right … its their activity. When the leading indicators and the lagging indicators have a healthy ratio, then all is well in the world.?

If lagging indicators get to a point that if the numbers are really out of whack, we know that people aren't working. It's not that they're intentionally not working, maybe they need coaching. So that's a training item, a coaching item, and something that I pay close attention to. I don't assume that people come to work every day, with the intent to not do well, to not work, to not perform, to not put food on their table, of course not. What I do think is that people struggle with asking for help or knowing what they need help with. So KPIs allow you to have at least a lens into the part of the business that human interaction doesn't give you. I call it science. The science side of things is just the measurements, the research, the tools, and the KPIs (key performance indicators). And then when you go back to the art, that's where you apply the coaching, the leadership, the mentorship, the training, whatever the gap is.

Robert:?What are some of the training gaps that you're seeing in terms of these conversations that they're having almost on your behalf? What do you feel are the challenges for you?

Strider:?We lack osmosis. People learn from being around other people, you used to learn this intrinsic component when you're in an office together and you're working and collaborating in real-time. I think that knowledge transfer is much more efficient when its kinetic and it’s definitely a challenge over zoom. I think that that's the thing that we have to constantly be mindful of. And I believe the learning curve has suffered because of the virtual element increasing. I think it takes longer for people to get up to speed than it used to, which is a learning challenge we need to address constantly.

Robert:?It's difficult, isn't it? There's some nonverbal stuff that you and I know from our years of experience in the old world of work, that creates problems today because initially you feel people get it. But actually, because you're not together in a physical way in a room or an environment those nonverbal pieces just don't get across and the whole message is unclear. It's like we need a new toolkit and to slow down to speed up. Weird, isn't it?

Strider:?It is weird ... and, you know, as goofy as it sounds, I miss the “Hey, scoot next to me, Come look at it. We'll write it together. We'll go to the whiteboard.” There's this kinetic component that I think is missing from people's learning curve. I'm a very kinetic learner so I would rather sit with you and problem solve on a whiteboard together than do it in a reading format or have you just orally tell me the answer. I would rather work it out with you next to me. I find that most people have a blend of learning of all three methods, reading, oral and kinetic, but kinetic seems to be the one that resonates the most with people. If you can see it and do it and participate in it, then you'll learn it faster.

Robert:?So by kinetic, you mean visual learning, and with the physicality as well?

Strider: Right, so like all business coming out of digital transformation [accelerated by Covid of course] we’re missing some sort of dynamic activity or tuition. Some sort of active learning.

Robert:?Do you invest in learning? Do you have a period of time where you get your people in a room and you double down on that kind of process, as you said earlier, to compensate for the gaps that we've left behind?

Strider: Very much so, one informal learning process is obviously for the field managers, such as myself, to get out in the field, so that helps. We also do stand-up 10 to 15-minute meetings every day, and it's called a stand-up intentionally. We don't want you to get comfortable! It's not a training or a two-hour meeting, it's just a touch point. The third leg of the stool, if you like, is our quarterly meetings. We have the entire organization or the department get together and break bread. Maybe we'll do a little team building, and mix up formal learning with workshops and then spend time working on a complex problems together. So, there's a little bit of human rapport building as well as, how we work kinetically.?

Robert:?There’s that word again. I love it.?It’s really interesting just to hear about those pieces of the puzzle. You’re enabling organizations [with fibre] to get into this kind of modality like never before, enabling people and trusting people to work in their own virtual environments, and then intentionally bringing in the personal, kinetic component to create the perfect balance. I think this is brilliant thinking. It's a missing piece of the puzzle to take that hybrid model forward. You know, enterprises want better networks and better communication so that they can have these virtual communications work right for them, but many are missing simple human signals which if they don't fire, cause problems in the long run.

Strider: Sure. The Internet is the lifeblood, right? It's the nervous system of any business. A business cannot operate without it, just like your brain, telling your toes to wiggle. No network, no wiggle! To have an efficient communications system is critical, and you have to bring in the human component plus training and merge it all together to create an optimal environment. We’re about as good an example as any - still figuring it out - still intentional about the human dimension.

Robert: You're a fountain of knowledge and wisdom. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much.

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Strider Denison is Vice President of Commercial Sales and Marketing at LS Networks. He is frequently called upon to commentate on sales and work environments, drawing on his deep experience in team management and sales optimisation.

The LS Networks mission is to provide rural communities with local service and fiber-based infrastructure that enables them to maintain and advance lifestyles that support family, growth, and sustainability.

Robert is Founder of Elevate Experts , a community of elite professionals who provide learning solutions in the hybrid world. Follow #elevateelite