WLP303: Successful Hybrid Leadership
In today’s episode, Roberta Sawatzky talks through her research on what remote team members want from their leaders and the competencies shown by successful hybrid team leaders.
Roberta Sawatsky is a “research storyteller”. As well as running her own consultancy, SAM is Remote, she is a business professor at Okanagan School of Business, Canada with a focus on HR and management. She blogs at Probe and Ponder… learning from life and travels.
Roberta’s research is around remote work/hybrid work/work from anywhere. When her youngest child was in kindergarten, Roberta was offered a job. She accepted with the condition that there was a high degree of flexibility around this - but also committed to never lag behind in her responsibilities, and be available to her colleagues. This was way before when we all started talking about “remote work”.
Her interest in remote work started in 2008, when she started to think about how remote work would amplify some of the problems we were facing in the workplace. Mindset and technology changes have changed the nature of remote work a lot since then! It has become desirable for both younger people and people near the end of their careers who don’t want to be tied to one physical space.
We need to remember as people asking for flexibility in our work, that we also need to explicitly commit to the work in return, like Roberta did all that time ago. When we are working as part of a team we have to take responsibility for being there for team members and delivering great work.
““You have to be willing to take the responsibility, if you’re asking for the flexibility.””
Roberta has had an interest in and has been involved in leadership her whole adult life, leading teams, or in a volunteer capacity. Whenever people are in a position of leadership or something less formal, leading by relationship, they have a responsibility to take it seriously, as they are influencing people.
Roberta’s recent research started in 2019, looking at the core competencies of remote workers. She then decided to build on that research, but focus on leaders, so she extended her study leave.
Travel has always been an important part of Roberta’s life, and it’s an important benefit of working from anywhere. So Roberta decided that her research into leading remote teams would be enhanced by travel. She travelled over 8 months, living in Portugal and Spain. Currently she’s struggling with the few people that speak English, highlighting the importance of learning the local language when working remotely somewhere else.
““Never underestimate the impact of culture shock.” ”
Check out Roberta’s post.
Roberta Sawatzky
16.00 MINS
The research into leading hybrid teams.
The first few months of the research were focused in North America, before moving to Europe. The research incorporated leaders of hybrid teams, and members of remote teams - for some this experience was in the early days. The initial intent of the research was to learn what it takes to lead successfully in a work from anywhere context ensuring proximity equity. But after interviewing about 110 participants, the research took an unexpected turn.
Proximity equity: the unconscious treatment to give preferential treatment to those in our vicinity.
Hybrid: Some people are colocated in the same physical space, or in the same town but not working in the office, while there are other members of the team working in other parts of the world.
There is a danger of people working physically close together to form stronger bonds than those who are further away. Proximity bias was a challenge in Roberta’s mind, although it’s not a new concept but it’s beginning to be more widely experienced.
From the perspective of the remote worker, it can create an “out of sight, out of mind” feeling. Feeling passed over for promotion, access to the same information and support and being on the outside from socialising with others are all very real concerns.
Roberta was looking for positive stories from workers, how equity had continued during times of disruption. This led her to ask about strengths and competencies that leaders draw on while they strive for equity in their hybrid teams. What began to emerge was a strong emphasis on the behaviour and skills of the leader that mirrored those of servant leadership.
Robert Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership encourages questions like “Do those served grow as persons?” “Do they become healthier when being served”?
Roberta found that people in teams were looking for this in team leaders and it was connected to the experience (or lack of) of proximity equity. Getting this right is key to having successful hybrid teams. This kind of leadership is sustainable and works in all contexts: hybrid, remote, colocated etc. So Roberta switched the focus of her research to examine what leadership behaviours help people to be great at their work.
26.30 MINS
In the end, the philosophy behind what we do is important. What is a leader’s philosophy of leadership becomes important because of their impact over others’ lives, so Roberta started to ask questions around that. She mentions the book “Humankind by Rutger Bregman”.
Whereas Roberta recognises the leader is not the most important person in the team, they are the linchpin, they hold everyone together. With that in mind, she started looking at the world view of a leader, which is informed by what they add to the workplace and people, and the value they place on how people should be treated.
If a leader doesn’t value the people on their team and trust them, believe it’s their responsibility to nurture and celebrate them, how are they going to lead them to fulfil their potential?
When you think back to proximity bias, the philosophy of caring and nurturing is key in hybrid teams. In the remote space, we have to be more intentional in all this, consciously working to understand ourselves and communicate what we’re thinking.
Participants in the study shared that they needed the following from their leaders:
- Clarity of expectations. How to communicate, deadlines, who’s responsible for what, etc.
- Constructive just-in-time feedback, including the opportunity to give feedback to the leader, in order to have the conversations about how to support each other. (By the way, this bit about how to have a conversation about your own performance with team members is usually missing from leadership training! -ed) This is part of bringing humans to the workplace. (It’s also a good way for leaders who don’t like “socialising” to get to know their team members better, and open up - ed).
- Support for autonomy and flexibility
““Autonomy in the workplace is not about passively letting employees be independent, it’s also not about working in isolation or doing work without guidance, boundaries, supervision or collaboration. What it is, is about allowing people to work the way that is most conducive to their own best performance.” ”
- Facilitating collaboration and co-creation. In design thinking, co-creating is bringing something from the ideation stage all the way to creating new products and services. Remote workers want to go all the way from ideation to production, whatever that looks like. Without their involvement, decisions can be made that doesn’t really take account of the workforce.
Could all these scale? Probably. And remember that team leaders are also team members. Organisational culture becomes very important, as none of this will happen in a culture that doesn’t truly value its employees. Of course, we don’t have to address all four points above, take baby steps…
A joyful way of looking at this is to take this on as a team, involving team members in any change. This can be scary as we might not have had to do this before, or instigated change.
42.24 MINS
After covering the actions that leaders can take to nurture their teams and team members, Roberta turns to the leadership competencies.
- Building collaborative teams
- Ability to demonstrate vulnerability (Being open to uncertainty, risk and exposure - as defined by Brene Brown) and rethink your opinion and re-learning
- Creating psychological safety
- Able to coach and facilitate growth
- Practice cultural competence and teach it to team members. Roberta mentions Theresa Sigillito Hollerma’s book Virtual Teams Across Cultures
- Have the ability to network, to maintain relationships and advocate for our team
- Demonstrate Emotional Intelligence
Someone leading a team can grow these competencies and be aware of what they are already good at.
Link to Competencies for Successful Hybrid Leadership by Roberta Sawatzky
Roberta hopes that this research will reach leaders and will be incorporating this into her classes in September, as well as her consultancy and coaching work.
Connect with Roberta on LinkedIn and check out her research and company, Sam is Remote.
An AI-generated transcript is available on request, just get in touch.
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