Leadership Tools for Hybrid Teams

Whether you are the leader of a team that was “born remote,” or a team that has been remote or hybrid for some time, one of the challenges is not having the face-to-face contact and the in-person tool kit that made you so effective in the physical world. Leadership presence, a powerful feature of in-person management, becomes diminished. The sights and sounds that embodied the world for you must become moderated by the limits of digital media: voice, written communication, or meeting by video. Serendipitous and planned informal encounters are gone. You can’t drop in on someone to invite them for a coffee break, nor can you take your team members to lunch to swap stories in order to strengthen your bond. Despite these losses, virtual leaders can still equip and empower their team. Ultimately, your goal is to make sure the impact of your leadership work continues in your absence, especially when people work remotely from one another, by creating the conditions for everyone to realize their own capacity and power.

1. Minimize differences. Where people are located matters. Differences in distributed team members’ geography, as well as differences between team members who do or do not work remotely, can engender subgroups and social dynamics that result in conflict. Leaders have to become aware of and actively manage these differences. Learning to shrink psychological distance by encouraging empathy and mutual understanding is key.?
2. Emphasize strengths, not status. Divisions will form among groups based on differences in size along with real or perceived differences in status. Leaders can counter the harmful effects of perceptions about low status by taking ongoing steps to recognize individual strengths in all groups and by downplaying perceived and real differences in status between members of the team. Be sure to reach out to isolates, people who are the lone member in a specific city or country, who may feel lonely or cut-off.
3. Promote a common purpose. Leaders can build and stress one group-level identity: the umbrella identity that binds the team together into one and remind team members that they each represent the team. Leaders can also emphasize the common purpose that team members are trying to achieve by reminding them that each individual effort contributes to the team goal.
4. Create structure. Remote and hybrid workers crave predictability. Leaders can support this by providing clear, consistent, and direct communication about job description and responsibilities, including milestone dates. You may want to schedule regular team meetings or one-on-one with individuals where everyone can provide updates, ask questions, and if necessary, re-strategize around changed priorities.??
5. Give feedback. High performance and advancement requires that leaders provide appropriate and constructive feedback to support individual goals. Check in regularly with your individual team members to tell them a job has been well done or what they need to do to improve. Ask about their career goals and aspirations. Mentoring can take place remotely as well as in-person!
6. Promote engagement but don’t avoid conflict. Making sure your team gels is a ceaseless endeavor. Creating time for informal conversation at the beginning of virtual meetings as well as virtual fun times can help teams to bond. Leaders can also encourage team members to appreciate each other’s differences and make it psychologically safe enough to voice disagreements or concerns.

Leading? a hybrid team,? though? multidimensional? and? uniquely challenging, can be rewarding. Much of the time it’s learning to reorient yourself from a solely in-person tool kit that relies on physical presence and informal communication to adding virtual equivalents or entirely new tools. Many of the rules for leading in collocated conditions still apply, but for hybrid teams you have to be more mindful and conscious in your efforts to achieve the same results.

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