WLP181 - Long Distance Leadership
A packed show today, where we look at some of the issues concerned with leading and connecting over distances – as we must in the virtual workplace.
Stay tuned for further developments, including our powerful new tool for ‘learning out loud’ – developing a team podcast together.
Meanwhile, on with our own podcast!
3.07 The Voice Behind the Book: Kevin EIkenberry, The Long Distance Leader: rules for remarkable remote leadership (coauthored with Wayne Turmel)
Kevin and Wayne have been in the leadership business for 25 years (congratulations on the milestone anniversary!) – so they’ve seen many changes, in the way the workplace looks and feels.
Acknowledging that some very senior people are now having to lead in a very new environment, where they don’t see their teams all the time, they wrote the book to explore the new skills and techniques this world demands… Whilst affirming that leadership in essence has not change.
Kevin walks the talk: his hybrid team is spread across the US, rarely all meeting in person. He and Wayne collaborated remotely on the book too. And of course their work with clients is all remote, enabling them to identify common areas of conscious and unconscious incompetence in the remote leadership space.
Some great insights in this interview, about how we model everything as leaders, from use of technology to intentional communication.
Kevin has many new projects in the pipeline, so watch this space! Connect via his website, and that of the Remote Leadership Institute: ‘if you can spell my name, you can find me online’.
29.01 Recommended Tool: Proposify
Maya’s latest shiny thing, is a tool for creating proposals.
Proposify is a bespoke app for compiling costs and deliverables quickly and effectively, and making them look nice. Lots of great templates, but they’re fully customisable, so you can create a completely unique proposal template and documents for your business or team.
It’s a premium browser-based application with user access control, it also offers tracking and analytics – so you can see if your client has opened the document, even how long they spent on each section.
And it has signature boxes, so you can use it for contracts and agreements – which would work well for internal use too.
A final bonus is really excellent and high quality customer support. This tool does have a learning curve, but they do help you to get the most out of it.
34.33 Oh No, My Team’s Gone Remote! How will team members know I value them?
Appreciation can be hard to squeeze in to a busy and productive work environment. We manage what we can measure – outputs, sales, milestones… So the softer indicators of a thriving professional environment, such as pride and respect and affection, can get overlooked.
Even in a colocated team, gratitude and acknowledgement might get squeezed into little looks and moments – and these can be too easily omitted from the kind of tools we use to get things done online. If you make them a part of your regular practice of ‘working out loud’, which we have discussed before - they’ll become part of your working day more naturally
In this reflective piece, Pilar shares some practical ideas for making use of remote collaboration tools (like Canva, discussed more fully here) to express thanks, publicly and privately, for a job well done – and all that our remote colleagues bring to our working day.
For more on showing appreciation in virtual teams, check out this blog post too.
We’ll see you again in two weeks, and meanwhile remember that we’d love to hear what you think of our content - why not contact us, or tweet @Virtualteamw0rk
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