A New Way of LEADING VIRTUAL EXECUTIVE TEAMS

Many of my clients lead virtual teams with members who cross functions, geographies and time zones. For them ‘working from home’ or at an office that is remote from other team members is ‘normal’. So, for them there has been very little adjustment to the pandemic ‘stay at home’ requirements from their employers. However, for many of my clients their executive team members have offices in the same building or down the hall from each other. When they have meetings, they meet together in a conference room or informally drop-in to each other’s office to share information, perspectives and make decisions.

And then came the pandemic and these executive teams’ way of working together and with their own teams suddenly changed.

I was recently coaching one of my CEO clients who had told me on our last call that he was staggering his executive team members’ schedules so that a third of them would be in the office for one week and then would be working from home for the next two weeks. I asked how that was going and he said he had just finished an executive team call that lasted 3 hours. He confessed that he (and his team) were struggling with figuring out the best way to communicate, make decisions and balance day-to-day problem-solving with looking for future opportunities in this virtual world. So, we spent the next 90 minutes talking through some new “best practices” options that I’ve seen my other cross-functional virtual teams use that could serve his executive team well. Here are some of the ideas we discussed:

• Executive team meetings should be no more than 90 minutes and be scheduled initially every 2 weeks (individual team members could also schedule ‘informal’ meetings with each other).
• The meetings had been conducted via telecon and we decided that he should organize meetings on a video-based platform such as Web-ex, Zoom or Google Meets and that it would be mandatory for his team members to use the video and chat room features.
• While the CEO should lead the meetings once a month, he should rotate facilitation of the meetings among his team.
• Each meeting should have an Agenda (with pre-meeting materials/reading). Each Agenda should begin with some form of ‘personal’ sharing, e.g. what are some “fun” ways they each are coping with working from home,
• Following this Agenda item, each team member should report what he/she’s learned the last 2 weeks and suggesting some ‘best practices’ for his/her fellow team members to consider
• Prior to the meeting’s end, each team member should highlight what their leadership challenges are for the next 2 weeks
• Each meeting should end with an Action Plan that the next ‘facilitator’ can use to start the next meeting to review progress on goals
• Earlier this year the CEO and his executive team had taken the Clifton Strengths assessment https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/253676/how-cliftonstrengths-works.aspx  He had given them individual coaching on their top strengths (i.e. which top 5 strengths give you energy and represent your innate abilities and talents.) I suggested that maybe at the end of the next month he call a special executive team meeting to only discuss their Strengths Report results and how they were each using them to address their challenges
• I also suggested that the CEO host a virtual “happy hour” maybe once every 2 weeks with executive team members and direct reports as a way of keeping people connected in a more informal way.  

My CEO client will be presenting these ideas to his executive team at their next team meeting. Not all of them will “fit” but at least this set of recommendations will start a productive discussion about how they can work most productively as an executive team in this new virtual workplace. I personally believe we’ll never go back to those “good old days”, nor maybe should we. So, let’s use this disruption of executive work lives to critically examine how to communicate and collaborate in new ways.

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