Balancing Humanity and Performance when Leading Remote Teams

The events of 2020 and 2021 continue to test us in new ways - both personally and professionally. With the market rebounding and many Talent Acquisition teams facing an intimidating number of open reqs, managers are forced to evolve. It surfaces an age-old question with novel underpinnings and nuance. How can leaders balance the drive for performance and results with the empathy and humanity needed for managing fully-remote teams? Below are three areas where you can begin to make inroads with this critical evolution.

1. Reveal your True Intentions

It's the first and most pivotal step on the path to building trust with your team. If we accept the premise that people want to perform their jobs well while also maintaining a healthy balance between their personal and professional life, then the first thing to do is call this out as a group and build a strategy for living it together. Have an open, transparent conversation with your team, and straight-up tell them what you want to accomplish - for them, for yourself, and for the organization.

Too many times managers use antiquated tactics where teams feel they're being "sold" the importance of KPI's or OKR's, but typically what's missing in this conversation is the why behind it. I have had tremendous success simply telling my teams: "Our function is critical because of X. Doing Y consistently with energy and enthusiasm will accomplish that goal. Accomplishing that goal means we can do Z." Obviously a lot of thought, attention, and diligence goes into living-up to this declared intent, but sharing this early and often with your team means that you have a common mission around which you can align. Your team feels more secure knowing the framework for performance, and talking through the why behind it allows for each of them to develop their own unique reasons (drive) to perform.

2. Develop and Share a Leadership Commitment

About five years ago, I was lucky enough to have a mentor tell me something that has forever improved my leadership practices. They told me to spend a month or two being brutally honest with myself and to document my leadership principles. After two months of agonizing over it, I felt pretty good about what I had down. None of this is all that groundbreaking - after all, writing something in a Google doc doesn't really change anything in the real world. The true genius of this was in what they told me to do next: "Now, read it aloud in front of your team as your 'Leadership Commitment' to them. Lastly, ask for their commitment in holding you accountable to those principles daily, weekly, monthly...." you get the picture.

While I have learned a ton about what it means to lead over the five years since, I'm shocked to see that I've made only one or two very minor changes to that document. It's who I am at my core and I've used it to make some really tough decisions with team members over the years. It's been an extremely valuable way to be vulnerable in front of your team, and have a shared commitment to one another that further deepens your relationships. When (not if) you have to have difficult conversations around performance, your team members will know what you stand for and where you're coming from. The shared ownership and accountability around your leadership commitment means there won't be any ambush-type moments.

3. Build an Activity Plan, Together

You hire adults and it's high-time that you started treating them like adults regardless of where they're working from. Being an adult means you have to see the doctor now and then. It means that sometimes your water-heater bursts, or your dad needs to be picked up from the airport, or your kid drags their toilet into the background of a Zoom call because they are potty-training during COVID (for real, though). So, stop monitoring the little green dot next to your team member's name on Slack or doing the quick ad-hoc "sync" to make sure they're in work mode. Instead, take a half hour to talk with them over a video call and build an activity plan together.

This activity plan is a roadmap to productivity and success. The entire goal is to align your individual team member's activity to the desired results while ensuring they don't feel (and aren't!) micro-managed. While new initiatives may come up at work, the activities on this plan should remain pretty much uniform week-to-week. You won't check it unless asked by them, but it will be a great way for your team to plan and manage their time effectively. It also gives them the ability to do a Friday retro, determining how much they moved the needle and where they may need to adjust for the following week if certain results weren't achieved. Ideally, if there is a performance issue, there will be an identifiable gap on past weeks' activity. Best of all, you will have no need to micro-manage their hours, schedule and activity. Because their activity will be aligned with the desired outcomes and results, your regular 1:1's will be the perfect place to discuss any issues. Now you can focus on serving your team, providing them the latitude to "make room for life" while still being a dedicated, high-performing professional.

Leading remote teams presents a variety of new challenges that many managers haven't faced until now. The drive to perform combined with not being side-by-side with your team in an office can lead to mismanagement and poor leadership decisions. Hopefully the three steps provided here can help you reset and evolve your style where necessary to achieve the results you want while helping to show your team they are trusted and valued.