The 4 Must-Know Skill Areas to Be an Effective Virtual Leader

What I want you to get out of our time together today is I want you to be aware of some key virtual leadership concepts. So I'm going to talk to you about a concept called distance bias. And I want you to know what these four must-have skill areas are to be an effective virtual leader. And I want you to be change agents. I want to give you a couple of tactics that you can take back to your teams and use them as you're working across the distance with your teams.

So let's start out with what's happening right now. It's not normal remote work. I've been a 10-year remote worker, and normal remote work should be a seamless environment. It should feel seamless to whoever it is that you're interacting with. A big part of my career working remotely was working with a large company that many people were co-located together, and I was remote. But what's happening right now is extreme work-life integration.

Is anybody have kids at home with them right now? A couple. OK. I have two kids at home. My husband and I are supposed to be helping them with school in the house while also working. Because we're in a pandemic, we might also be responsible for helping some of our family members who need to be taken care of. There might be people in our households that are sick or ill. So we need to remember as managers within our organization or if you're working with clients, for example, that a lot is going on outside of what you can see on the screen when you're videoing in with someone. So we have to be really empathetic right now to the fact that we're juggling a lot.

So I start off with this to say that I understand if maybe a kid comes into the frame and sits on your lap, or if you have a pet that's making noise in the background. This is a whole new frontier that we're now figuring out as we go in this remote work.

So, as Dennis asked, what's my background? Actually, I'm a marketer by trade. I spent 18 years working in marketing. I worked for advertising agencies first. And then, I spent 14 years working for the Clorox company. So the Clorox is a multinational six billion-dollar company, majority of our sales are in the US. And of those 14 years, I worked remotely for eight of them.

About two years ago, I left to start my own company to teach the skills to lead and communicate and collaborate across distance. I've been working with different companies and teams from the car industry to consumer packaged goods and health care to help them during preCOVID and during the pandemic on how to work in this virtual environment. Because many of us were so used to being co-located, at least with part of our team. Or if you're in sales, we're very used to having an in-person relationship with our clients or new business prospects.

I went remote back in 2010; I was living in San Francisco at first working for Clorox. And then, in 2010, I decided to move to Philadelphia. I moved from West Coast to East Coast to 3000 miles away, and I was an experiment. I was one of the very first people to work fully remotely for this company. I had to relearn how to do everything from a distance.

So a lot of what I'm going to talk about today was important before the pandemic, is important right now, and will continue to be important into the future, because organizations are now kind of figuring out the right balance of working fully remotely or working in a hybrid or virtual environment.

So pre-pandemic, a lot of organizations were called geographically distributed or hybrid or virtual organizations. Geographically distributed meaning you have a headquarters in one area, maybe some satellite offices. Hybrid meaning you have some offices, but people who are also fully remote. But the pandemic, at least in the US, caused a lot of these organizations to overnight shift into a FROG — a fully remote organization.

I would never tell an organization to jump into being a FROG without having skills, processes, and policies to enable that. But that's where we're finding ourselves right now is that rapid transition to figuring out how to work in this FROG environment. As time goes and depending on what's going on with your country in terms of the pandemic right now, you might start seeing this fluidity back and forth. Maybe some offices are opening back up where some people are coming back into the office, but some are still staying fully remote. So I foresee the future being at a hybrid future, where the majority of large organizations will have office sites still but will continue to have some people who are either working part-time remotely or fully remotely. That's why these leadership skills are so important, not just now, but into the future.

Before I get into those leadership skills, I want you to have an awareness of two unconscious biases that we need to be aware of, that are playing against us when we are working in these virtual hybrid or fully remote organizations. So the first one is called Distance Bias. This is something that the Neuro Leadership Institute has proven. Distance Bias is our brains' natural tendency to put more importance on the people and the things that are closer to us than those that are further away. So where this pops up a lot is when you have co-located people in an office building in one place and when you have other people in the location minority who are either working fully remotely or working from a smaller office somewhere else. And this distance bias comes up. The big group of co-located people often are thinking more top of mind of the people that are nearer to them.

Many people also might be feeling right now in a FROG or fully remote organization is something called Recency Bias, which means your brain is putting more value on the people you have heard from or seen more recently. For example, if you're managing a team of people, you might find yourself thinking more about the last two or three people who sent you an email or a message on Slack or did a video conference with you. And you might have forgotten about part of your team that might be a little bit more quiet. This is something that, as a manager, you need to be really aware of, and you need to create ways to overcome that so that everybody, regardless of their location and regardless of how quiet they are or not, stays at equal with you.

Here's my virtual leadership success framework:
✔ Tech Tools and Training
✔ Expectation Settings
✔ Virtual Skills Training
✔ Relationship Building & Culture

Expectation Settings
Let's start with expectations setting. So many of you are probably feeling this right now: video meeting fatigue and communication overload. I'm hearing this across my clients across all industries that it's back to back meetings, and we're getting so many emails, we're getting so pinged and dinged with Slack messages or whatever tool you're using.

It's really important to take a step back and talk about your team's expectations in terms of the communication norms you want to set for your team. What tools do you want to use? For what reasons? And as you're doing that, you want to have a conversation around communication in these two buckets: synchronous communication, expecting a real-time response, or asynchronous, meaning not real-time, not live. I find it happening in many organizations that they're relying too much on synchronous communication because that's what they were used to in the office.

When you're having these conversations with your teams about these communication norms or these expectations, you might also want to have a conversation around setting some boundaries. So I started off the conversation around this is not normal remote work for many of us. We're also having to juggle things in our personal lives that we normally wouldn't have to during the workday. So to help people with some boundaries and to avoid burnout, you want to have a conversation about things like core meeting hours. What are the times when we expect everybody to be available for live meetings, especially across time zones, or what do you expect in terms of responsiveness? Do you expect that if you send an email at 10 p.m. that somebody is going to respond to that? I hope that the answer is no and that you could say if I send an email late at night, I do not expect a response until it's working hours the next day. So my point in bringing this up that you need to be really intentional, really strategic about setting those expectations with your team.

As you can see on this remote leaders' skills list, there are things like leading effective and efficient virtual meetings (just because those meetings are different) and influencing across distance. I think this is the most important skill and a skill that people don't realize until they've been working remotely for a while that they need to have. It's about thinking about how do you influence other people with your thinking? How do you get them to decide on something in your favor when you can't run into them in an office setting? And it's especially important right now as most organizations are working as FROGs or fully remote organizations.

Then there are things like managing a remote direct report who's not sitting next to you or how do you work with a manager that's remote? So I won't go through all of these right now, but there is that resource for you.

While we're together today, I wanted to give you something tactical, something you could go and use. So let's talk about something specific to virtual meetings, because I'm sure all of us are responsible for facilitating virtual meetings.

The first thing that I want to start with (back to that synchronous and asynchronous idea we just talked about) is before you send an invite for a meeting, I want you first to ask yourself: Do we really need a live meeting for this? People usually just put the meeting on the calendar and then figure it out as they go. But many of the things that you're you're probably setting up meetings for could be handled in a different way: through Slack, email, through a Google document, where people can comment asynchronously. I just beg of you all to first think, do I really need a meeting or is there another way I could get to my outcome?

If you say "Yes, I still need a meeting!" here's another tool for you — a 5-piece framework:

It's how to build a good agenda prior to the meeting to make sure that you have an efficient, effective, engaging and inclusive meeting.

Usually, people get the first part — the purpose, but people usually don't think this level of detail is the meeting's product. What is the specific intended outcome of the meeting? For example, suppose I was leading a meeting where the purpose was to finalize a timeline for a project. In that case, the meeting's product should be: we will end the meeting when we have a completed timeline, and we have identified the top two risk areas for the timeline.

Then from there is the process. How are you going to facilitate that discussion to get to a decision? If your team was used to huddling together in a conference room, putting sticky notes on the wall, how are you going to do that in a virtual environment? Do you need to use a new software tool like Mural, for example?

Thinking through the pre-work, maybe you can assign some work to be done asynchronously, that people could do ahead of time so that you spend a shorter amount of time together live.

And the last thing is thinking about the people you invite, trying to have a small group of the right people. Oftentimes we like to be inclusive, so we invite lots of people. But we should be inviting the people who are adding the most value to the meeting. The other people can read the meeting notes later.

It's really important to have these agendas ahead of time for the meeting, so people can come prepared, they know what value they can add and they know what value they are getting out of the meeting.

Relationship Building & Culture
I want to give you one more skill area with some tactical tips — the relationship building and culture building. I want us to all get on the same page in terms of what we mean by culture because oftentimes, I hear people say that team culture is the same as having virtual happy hours and doing those fun activities. While having fun is part of your team culture, but really, what team culture is? It's the values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors shared by a team. It's how people work together toward a common goal, how they treat each other. And different teams can have different cultures within the same company.

If you have a large company, you have some company values and company culture, but in the team that I led, for example, we had to figure out what was our own team culture within that kind of bigger umbrella of the company. And what's interesting about this is that when you're working in a virtual team, when you're not all co-located together, it can be very hard to know what the culture is of the team. Because you have these virtual curtains between you where you only get little peeks into this, depending on whether you are reading into a digital communication like email or Slack or a little peek when you have a meeting and see how people are behaving and treating each other.

So what to do about this? So I do a whole workshop on building culture and distributed teams, but part of that workshop is setting some of these foundational building blocks is to think about:
✔ Team Values
✔ Team Goal Setting
✔ Operating Principles

Have we established our team values? And if not, we need to have a discussion to establish them, make them public, recognize and reinforce them. Also, have we established team goals? Not just individual goals, but are we sure that we're all aligned to the team's same goals cross-functionally? And lastly, the operating principles. Back to expectations setting, have we defined what these expectations are for our teams? And have we made that public and transparent? Many of you, I'm sure, are familiar with GitLab, and it is a great standard to look at their employee handbook in terms of how they make their operating principles, their values, their culture really accessible and searchable through their online handbook.

We can talk endlessly about remote work because we practice it ourselves and believe in it. But, the words of other remote leaders with teams distributed around the world sound much more convincing. Go ahead and check out other recordings of our Remote-First Conference here.

And in the end, three steps not to postpone, but to act:
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3. Hire remote with 6nomads.com within 72 hours and just for $360.