Speaker 1: I know better than to talk about things that I don't know much about. But I do know that a lot is changing because of the coronavirus. Companies like Google, Apple, you name the big company, they've gone to some remote work policy all in an effort to keep their employees safe. And small to medium-sized businesses are following suit as well. They're taking a similar approach, getting their employees to no longer come into the office that they pay so much money for and to keep them safe by going home. Here's the problem. Many leaders that are in positions of leadership have never led a remote team. And leading a remote team can be very challenging. Now let's note I said leading a remote team not managing a remote team because those are very different things. And when I talk about leadership I'm going to define it for you to make sure we're on the same page. Someone whose actions inspire, empower, and serve in order to elevate others over an extended period of time. That is what leaders do. And if you're going to go inspire someone, breathe life into them, if you're going to go empower them, let them make their own decisions, and then you're going to go serve them, flip that pyramid upside down remotely. It gets really hard because you don't get the day-to-day interaction that you normally would in an office. Now if you've been leading a team for a while remotely, you know about some of these unique challenges that come with leading a team this way. But if you've only ever led a team in a workplace and now you're going to lead them remotely, let's get clear on some of the typical challenges that you're going to face right now. The first thing is there's a real uncertainty and fear around this virus, this coronavirus. It's a natural thing because fear is the mental battle that goes on between our ears. It's the emotional battle. And each of us, you included and your team, experience that battle in different ways and with different intensity levels because of the things going on in our world. So if you're going to go lead a team right now remotely, we have to understand your people are probably experiencing some real uncertainty and some real fear, both about the disease and their job. And part of your responsibility in leading them remotely is to make sure we're clear on the fear that they're facing and how to overcome it. The second big issue that comes with leading remote teams, if you've never done it before, is some kind of technology issues. If you've never led a team via Zoom or only an email or only via Slack, technology can start to cause issues and not help. So make sure you're equipped with the technology that you're going to use to best lead your team in a remote environment. The third challenge that comes with leading teams in a remote work environment like this is there's less work. Companies are more uncertain than they were a month ago. So the projects might not be the same. The workload might not be the same. And so your team has to now adapt to not only just thinking that I'm at home and this is a vacation, but what can we do proactively to find more opportunity for our job or for our organization as a whole. So these are some of the challenges that you're going to face leading a remote team. So what do you do about it? I mean, we all want to know, John, this is great. We want to go lead our people and not manage them. And these are some really big problems. But what can you do to overcome them? Because that's what we're all about here in helping you become a more effective leader. So there's some best practices that I want to go over with you in our observation of what the best leaders do that lead remote teams. The first is they really embrace flexibility. There was a fantastic study done by Deloitte and it looked at over a thousand people in the workplace. And what they found was that 94% of respondents said what they desired was more flexibility in their job, both in working remotely and controlling the amount of time that they work. Well, this is forced on you leading a team right now. We have to embrace flexibility. It's our only option. We're now leading a remote team. So instead of feeling like my team has to be chained to their remote desk like you might have been in the office, now we have to say one of the benefits of leading working at home is that you have the flexibility to pick up your kids, take them to school, go work out, go for a walk, eat dinner with your family. So instead of it feeling like a nine to five, you as a leading of leading a team in a remote setting has to really embrace the flexibility that working from home provides. Your people will appreciate that more than you know. The second thing, real best practice here, is to address the struggles. Because if people have never worked from home, they're probably unaware of some of the hurdles or struggles that they're going to face when all of a sudden working from their living room. So part of your responsibility is to make people and team members aware of the typical struggles. There was a great study done and what they found was that 20% of the struggle came from not having collaboration or communication with a team member. The second biggest area was loneliness. People just they crave some interaction so when you're by yourself all day, it gets a little lonely. Not being able to unplug, just feeling like that phone's always on, that computer's always on. I no longer have that place I go to work and now everything's at home. And the last big struggle is distractions. I mean kids, tv, you name it, dogs in the background. All the things that you might think exist that distraction at home that you don't have in the workplace. So part of your responsibility is to make your team both aware of the struggles that they might face working from home, but also to create systems to help them overcome it before it becomes a really big issue. The third big best practice is to really provide clarity, specifically around the priorities that your team is focused on. There's a system that we teach in Building the Best, the book, it's called GPI system. And what GPI stands for for leaders is goals, priorities, initiatives. What it means is, can we have a clear goal about what our team's trying to achieve? Then can we go identify the key priorities, the things that are more important than others for our team, so then they can get their daily initiatives or their to-do lists to be in alignment with those priorities. Oftentimes in environments like this and when people are working from home, we lose sight of the priorities that the team is working on, we just start working in our little bubble. That can really hurt a remote team leader's production for the for the group as a whole. So part of your responsibility is to provide some real clarity around the priorities that currently exist. One caveat, priorities can change and the current environment can force priorities to change quickly. So if they have to change, you've got to get that information to your team quickly so then they can work on the right things every single day to make your current goals become a reality. The fourth best practice of effectively leading a remote team is to maintain communication. Specifically, we have to over-communicate because remember the big biggest struggles for for working at home is collaboration and communication and loneliness. So if anything, we need to over-communicate with remote teams more than anything else. There's a few ways for you to do that and the best way is to have a weekly team scheduled meeting on everyone's calendar that everybody is required to attend and participate. Those are the very best ways I know for how to effectively lead a remote team and I hope this will help you lead in this very difficult environment.