A Research Paper By Nicole Paul, Leadership Coach, UNITED STATES
The Predominance of Remote and Hybrid Work in Coaching Leaders
Leadership requires a leader to have a variety of skills, knowledge, and characteristics. A good leader understands that these things are never static and that they always need to be scanned, analyzed, and adjusted based on the needs in front of them. It’s not easy. When the pandemic hit in early 2020, most companies sent employees home to work and this opened up new challenges for leaders. How do I manage employees virtually? For people who had never done this before and to whom remote work was foreign, this was a difficult proposition. My coaching niche is leadership development and this question is interesting to me because many workplaces have since adopted a hybrid work model, so the question isn’t going away. And while many of the questions and skills remain the same, leading in a virtual environment does require different considerations and strategies than leading in a traditional in-person, office environment. This paper will explore leadership, specifically in a virtual context. First, I will look at the numbers today regarding remote and hybrid work. Next, I’ll identify a handful of skills a strong leader needs to possess. Finally, I’ll posit how leaders can demonstrate those skills with a twist toward remote work. As I use a blended coaching approach, I’ll be able to use this learning with leaders I coach, many of whom support employees in a hybrid or fully remote environment.
For many industries, the pandemic forced a need to upgrade and learn new technology. That, in and of itself, brought stress. However, once people settled in and got used to the “new normal” as we kept calling it, the deeper questions began to surface. As leaders, we wondered, how we supervise people remotely. How do we support them? How do we ensure good communication with each other and for the team as a whole? How do we know if people are getting their work done and actually working? Some wanted to wait it out and just get through until we were back in the office. In July 2023, many people have gone back to an office on a daily basis. Some jobs require that and are much easier to perform or better for the customers or clients they serve. Others work a hybrid schedule, with 2-3 days in the office and the remaining days working from home. And yet others remain fully remote as both they and their companies found enough mutual benefits to erase the need to go to an office daily. Let’s start by looking at the prevalence of remote and hybrid work.
It must be noted at the outset that it’s hard to know how many people are working remotely. A New York Times article cites a March 2023 Labor Department report where 72.5% of businesses said their employees rarely or never teleworked. This is only slightly lower than pre-pandemic figures. But it also cites a Stanford University survey that indicated remote work remains prevalent, accounting for over 25% of paid full-time work. The two sources aren’t comparing apples to apples – the first statistic reports the percentage of businesses that don’t provide remote work availabilities and the second reports the number of people who identify doing remote work. The article questions the definition of remote work as well as data collection and oversampling of fully in-person workers. Regardless, it goes on to note that hybrid work is a reality for over half of the workers surveyed. So, for many, supervising remote workers, at least part of the time, is a reality (Goldberg, 2023).
Coaching Leaders: Exploring What Makes a Leader Effective
The pros and cons of remote work continue to be debated. Each party has its own reasons or agenda to support their argument. Bypassing that and acknowledging remote and hybrid work as a reality allows us to examine the unique challenges and explore solutions. Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report studies the employee experience by examining how employees feel about their work and their lives. Of the seven insights they share, one examines the relationship between employee stress, engagement, and work location. Gallup found that engagement had 3.8 times as much influence on employee stress as work location. Simply put, how people experience work, their feelings of involvement or enthusiasm, matters more in reducing stress than where they are sitting. They go on to say, “Leaders need to ask if poor remote work performance or poor hybrid work performance is a location problem or a management problem. No location can *fix* poor management, and the office alone has no magic to create a great organizational culture” (p.11).
If we take the above statement as a starting point, exploring what makes a leader effective in managing remote workers is very similar to answering the question, “What makes a good leader?”. It makes sense that if you are a good leader in person, you are probably also a good leader in a virtual setting. The inverse also stands to reason. However, there are differences in working with and leading others remotely that put a spin on the strategies and skills discussed below. Countless books have explored what makes a good leader. A quick Google search results in thousands of articles. For the purposes of this article, I am picking those that show up most frequently in my searches, that align most closely with my coaching niche, and that, in my experience as a leader, make the biggest impact.
Trust
The ability to inspire trust comes up frequently in leadership literature. To me, it’s the foundation of leadership. However, trust is one of those words that tends to get thrown around a lot and can be quite loaded but gets a bit wispy when you ask what it means. In every workplace I’ve been to, I’ve heard the statement, “I just don’t trust [insert name or group]”. But when I tried to get clearer on what it was that created mistrust people couldn’t expand on it. Responses like, “It’s just a feeling I have” or “There’s just something about (that person)” were common. It then becomes important to define trust because if we aren’t sure what something is, it’s a moving target, we don’t know what to fix, and we likely won’t agree if it’s present (or not). Otherwise, we’re all just held hostage by the lack of a feeling that no one can really define.
Trust is the cornerstone of effective collaboration and allows groups of people to move toward a goal in a coordinated, strategic way. A clear and simple definition of workplace trust involves three components: sincerity, reliability, and competence. In other words, do I believe you mean what you say, are you consistent in your words and behavior, and can you do the job? Trust is a three-legged stool that, if missing a leg, will falter (Chawla, 2019). Notice what is not part of the trust. It doesn’t have anything to do with liking my co-worker or supervisor. We may think and communicate differently, we might have different levels of urgency, and we might solve problems differently…and that’s ok. As a leader, if I can focus on those three areas, I will build trust with the most direct reports. Trust is what we rely on when we make a mistake, acknowledge it, and ask for help. Trust will do a lot of the heavy lifting when we hit a rough patch and are less reliable than is typical. Trust allows people to follow you through tough decisions and to take risks.
What does trust look like when leading remote employees? It’s being engaged in virtual environments and resisting multi-tasking. Being present and as thoughtful about things as you would in person translates to care and sincerity. Make space for checking in and really listening. What are they doing? What is important to them? Where are they struggling? In terms of reliability, it’s showing up on time, holding people accountable in the same ways you did in person, meeting deadlines, and not repeatedly canceling or rescheduling meetings. Competence isn’t perfect. It’s not knowing all the answers. It is having a solid base of knowledge and continuing to learn and grow. It’s saying “I don’t know” when you don’t and then figuring it out. I worked with people who 6-9 months into virtual meetings still joked about not knowing how to use the platform. It made them look less competent and it made others trust them less.
Authenticity
Authenticity is next up because it’s woven into every other single thing you do. It’s who you are and how you show up. Infusing your work with authenticity, in a professional manner, allows people to know you and ultimately trust you. They get to see consistency in your personality, problem-solving, and temperament. When you put on a persona of what you think you are supposed to be it isn’t real; and people pick up on that quickly. I once worked with a woman who had a reputation for being cold and remote. We were talking one day, and she revealed she had worked really hard to be seen as a professional. I asked her what she meant, and she said being serious, limiting pleasantries in email or face-to-face communication, and staying focused on issues in meetings. It hit me like a ton of bricks. All those things contributed to her direct reports thinking she didn’t care about them as people. And the worst part was she had molded herself this way. It wasn’t who she truly was. She wasn’t being authentic to herself, and not only was it not translating to those she supervised, but she was also unhappy.
In a remote work context, it’s more challenging to communicate authenticity. It takes more energy to be in virtual meetings and things don’t always land the same. Some people aren’t as comfortable speaking up. Consider designing “camera off” meetings to reduce Zoom fatigue and give people a chance to “turn off”. A Harvard Business Review article discusses choosing the medium that best matches your level of authenticity. If you must communicate something inauthentically, something you don’t agree with, or where there is misalignment due to events in your private life influencing your tone, use the phone. Be cautious in using email with inauthentic communication because email indicates inauthenticity on its own; people believe it’s used to mask inauthenticity (Brodsky, 2022).
Goal Setting
Everyone should be working toward goals that contribute to the team, division, and company. Understanding your contribution leads to purpose. Individualized goals and expectations build investment which leads to retention. One of the most common pieces of feedback given when people leave jobs is they feel there isn’t an opportunity for growth or promotion (Johnson, 2022). Setting goals also allows you to look for and communicate the potential you see in someone. A nudge or prompt of what you notice can open a window for someone to become more aware, take pride in, and further grow a talent.
The most important thing about goal setting is to communicate about it regularly. This is the same for in-person and remote work. Setting a goal and then not discussing it again until whatever timeline prompts a review isn’t helpful and does nothing to promote development. Build goal check-ins into your 1:1 meetings. Invest in virtual learning and support networking (Ryba, 2020). Reinforce a culture of learning and provide prompts for them to reflect on their progress and actively engage in the conversation. How do they feel about their development? Where are they getting stuck? What’s the gap between where they are now and where they want to be?
Giving Feedback
If you are good at giving feedback in person, moving to remote probably isn’t a difficult transition. If you struggled in person, well…you’ll still struggle. Don’t despair; everyone can be better at this! The biggest barrier to giving and receiving feedback is our own discomfort and our fear of the other person’s discomfort and response.
The key to giving constructive feedback is to just do it. It’s easy to avoid. But timing is key; you don’t want to wait until you have a laundry list of examples the person barely remembers. The first time you have this conversation with someone is typically the hardest. There is no foundation you’ve built that can help guide expectations. One thing that can help is to give the other person a heads-up and invite them to the conversation. This removes the element of surprise and natural defensiveness that accompanies feedback we aren’t expecting. It also allows for insight and sets up an environment where you can partner with your employees on solutions. Be specific and be neutral. It’s frustrating to be given vague feedback and not know how to change because you don’t understand the problem. It’s also hard to maintain your own emotions if it feels like the person providing the feedback is highly charged. Like goal setting, it’s important to follow up. Set that expectation and ask the employee to add it to their agenda. You’re providing some control and prompting ownership this way.
There are many common leadership skills that can be challenging to effectively adjust to a remote work setting. However, when I’m coaching leaders who are struggling to lead virtual employees, these are the ones that come up most frequently. When using a blended approach while coaching on these issues, it’s helpful to have strategies to introduce and then focus on how the client might implement that strategy, how they feel about it, concerns or barriers they may experience, and steps they can take to hold themselves accountable in using these new skills. In reflecting on the topics presented in this paper, many of them are likely playing out in a coaching session – you want to build trust, be authentic, set goals, and seek feedback. In that way, the coaching session becomes a microcosm of what that leader is working to do with their team members and provides a great opportunity for parallel process and discovery.
References
Brodsky, A. (2023, February 6). Communicating authentically in a virtual world. Harvard Business Review.
Chawla, R. (2019). Focusing on trust: A prerequisite for creating results. PDF.
Gallup, Inc. (2023, June 30). State of the global workplace report. Gallup.com.
Goldberg, E. (2023, March 30). Do we know how many people are working from home? The New York Times.
Johnson, J. (2022, October 5). Top reasons why employees quit. https://www.uschamber.com/co/.
Ryba, K. (2022, July 13). Professional development for remote workers: Top tips and strategies. Employee Success Software.