Leading a Hybrid Team

This month I’m facilitating training for managers and employees preparing to transition to a hybrid work environment. I have been doing a lot of research in this space and I thought let me share some of that in this newsletter. So what is hybrid work?

A hybrid work environment is where a company allows employees multitudes of work arrangement ranging in-office, remote, or on the go. It offers employees the autonomy to choose to work wherever and however they feel most productive.

The key defining factors for your hybrid work is location arrangement and synchronicity of work. I like the above grid because it demonstrate that being collocated does not mean that you are working together as a team. You might be collocated working in the same site but still be not work as a team (ie. working alone together).

What you want to achieve with a hybrid work environment is synchronous work, where you are working together, together, or you are working together even though you are apart.

Asynchronous work is suited for work environments where employees are expected to work on deep concentration work that does not require much interaction with others.

Now that we have this hybrid work context, let’s look at what it means for you as a leader. There are three things you need to focus on to be able lead in a Hybrid work environment: Your Mindset, Your skillset, and your leadership practices.

Mindset shift is key for the hybrid work culture to be successful. How you as a leader perceive work and performance and how you recognise and reward performance is key. If spending time in the office for long hours has been your definition of great performance, with hybrid work that will have to change. You don’t just wake up and change that, you need to redefine your new indicators of great performance and how will recognise and reinforce it. You cannot be preaching hybrid work culture while still incentivising old work practices.

Acquiring some skillset to enable you to lead a hybrid workforce will also go a long way to help you foster a successful hybrid work environment. These include goals setting, Diagnosing and matching. I have written about these skills before in previous newsletters.

We are all familiar with goal setting, we?are even more familiar with that SMART goal setting methodology that helps make our team goals aligned and easy to understand. The most important part for hybrid work is ALIGNED. You will agree with me being aligned on what work to focus on is even more important if you are working from different locations.

The second skillset is having a common language to be able to openly discuss and ask for support you need. For an example being able to say “in this task I will need more direction because it’s the first time I’m doing it”. Or “in this project I only need you to support me because I have done something similar before”.

In a hybrid environment you are not together to see and read your team members non-verbal behaviours and provide the leadership they need. You all need a language to communicate what support you need from your colleagues and from your leader. This is the skill of diagnosing your development level and asking for the leadership or support you need. You will agree with me as leaders we are not mind readers, it’s important that our team members are able to tell us what support they need from us. But if we do not teach them to do that they will not know how to do it.

Once you are clear what your team member need, the skill of flexing your leadership style become important so that you match the right leadership style to the needs of your team members. A Directive Leadership Style is suited for situations where a team member is learning and possibly doing a task for the first time. Whereas a Supportive Leadership Style is suited for situations where the team member is experienced but might be having doubts, confidence issues which might be impacting on their ability to perform a task.

You will note that these are not new skills, for some of you, you already have adopted this Situational Approach to leadership, and this is just a reminder that in a hybrid work environment these skills become even more important.

So lastly what leadership Practices can you adopt to lead successfully in a hybrid work culture?

Being mindful and present - to communicate intentionally with you remote team members, to structure conversations for maximum impact, and to honor each other’s work preferences.

Being deliberate in Fostering a Community – Helps you as a manager build trusting and supportive relationships that stay positive and involve all your people, using the technology available

Accelerating Performance and Development – building resourcefulness and autonomy of your team members in a way that will accelerate their performance.

In summary, in this newsletter, I have covered the Mindset shift, the skillset and practices you can adopt as a leader to lead successfully in a Hybrid work environment.

If this is new to you and you would like more training, Feel free to contact me, I have access to lot more resources. We are also licensed to provide in-house training on all the tools shared.

Happy Leading, Plesae share sme tips and prcatices that work for you and your hybrid team