• by Jim Solomon and Bruce LaRue, Ph.D. •

• Is your organization prepared to work offsite, from home, or with an increase in telework?  Do you have contingency plans for this, and have you practiced them?

• Have you created a culture of trust and innovation so when a crisis hits, your team continues to perform at their peak?

• Is your organization prepared for VUCA threats, ready to adapt and thrive, while others panic and decline?

These are the questions leaders are asking today as we face the current health concern associated with the COVID-19 virus.

The world truly as turned VUCA over the past couple of weeks and this does change everything. VUCA, an acronym for “Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous,” means that our previous notions of predictability and control no longer apply. As we have seen, small changes in a VUCA world can generate effects that intensify in unpredictable ways over space and time.  Even the smallest of ripple effects amplify unpredictably at dizzying speeds. Increased ambiguity makes it difficult, if not impossible, to project future outcomes based on past trends.  Leaders who have developed a culture of trust and innovation find, especially during times of crisis, that their organization will thrive when others fail.

More than ever, we all need to learn how to adapt and thrive in a VUCA world. Clearly, this includes having a resiliency plan to prepare ourselves, our families, and our organizations for the VUCA challenges ahead.  How are your plans and are they rehearsed and refined regularly? How are your newest team members trained and incorporated into these?

When faced with VUCA threats, organizations and the people within them, often become victims of their own successes, trapped within what we call the prison of the known. That is, leaders in these organizations often mistakenly assume that what made them successful in the past is also their formula for the future.  Integrator Leaders encourage their workers at all levels to bring innovation to their work, are open to listening to new ways, and encourage collaboration between team members, creating a sense of innovation so during times of a VUCA threat, they prosper when others fail.

Organizations are increasingly composed of individuals and teams that are geographically dispersed. Integrator Leaders adapt their leadership approach to ensure their distributed workforce can achieve superior results.  The best-distributed teams have a clear understanding of their leader’s vision and intent, self-organize, and adapt behind mission priorities.  This allows them to satisfy customer’s routine or special requirements, sustaining a high level of customer satisfaction.

Always treat your distributed workers just as if they were sitting in the office with you, making them an integral part of the team.  Your goal is to create a cohesive team that can collaborate across space, time, and organization boundaries to align behind mission priorities while requiring less direct supervision.

Principles of Virtual Leadership

Based on our decades of research and experience with virtual teams, we have found the same principles that are important for leading an on-site team are even more critical for leading a virtual team. These include the following:

Trust: Leaders must create a climate of mutual trust between themselves and those they lead virtually, including a climate of trust between team members. Trust becomes firmly grounded within a team that upholds strong values.

Vision: The leader must create a clear and compelling vision for their organization. It is this compass heading that helps the team members prioritize and align their efforts in support of the mission.

Communication: Regular communication between the leader and all virtual-team members is essential. It is equally important for team members to communicate between themselves without the leader’s involvement. This ensures that the team is self-organized and self-correcting behind mission priorities.

Accountability: All members of the team must be held accountable for outcomes, not merely their inputs. That is, while everyone must be held to the same high standard of individual performance, they must also be held accountable for the outcome they achieve.

Feedback: Timely, actionable feedback is critical when managing a team in the virtual world. This allows immediate course correction if a team member is underperforming, helping them to make necessary changes to improve their performance.

Recognition: As meaningful as it is to recognize performance face-to-face, with virtual teams this is often impossible. The key is to provide timely recognition, specific and sincere, for individual and team performance. This is even more important when your team is distributed, operating remotely during a crisis scenario.  Leaders should continually look for good, since we all know that problems occur naturally on their own. Consider a posting on an internal blog or team email. Everyone then has a permanent record of an accomplishment they can refer to at any time. A follow-up with a formal award is also important, but this digital method of rapidly showing recognition is well-received today.

Keep Your Team Together While They Are Apart

It’s important that leaders keep a sense of togetherness within their teams, even when the teams are dispersed.  One of our practices, reported to be highly successful by many of our clients, is the Virtual Standup Meeting. This is a process for promoting self-organization, dialogue, and alignment in your team.  The goal here is to get your geographically dispersed team to engage with each other regularly, as though they worked in the same office.

To get them to do so, we suggest that you use this form of a telephone meeting.  Schedule a team call and intentionally place time constraints that inhibit dialogue on the call, while promoting more team engagement prior to and following the call. This also helps to develop team discipline by having everyone summarize key points ahead of time in a concise headline form.

Schedule a call for all team members, those on-site and geographically dispersed. Ask that on-site participants dial in for this call from their desk to even the playing field for all team members.  Ensure that everyone participates—make it mandatory. Prepare a meeting agenda and ask that each team member provide their concise input to a specific topic, task, or project. Send this agenda with your proposed discussion topics out a day or more in advance to give everyone a chance to prepare for the meeting. Tell the team your time constraint for the meeting, keeping it quite brief.  Emphasize that you will begin and finish up exactly on time, whether or not everyone has completed their remarks. This will underscore your desired outcome — a more engaged team that becomes less dependent on you over time.

Begin the meeting by briefly reviewing the purpose and ground rules for the meeting. Ask each person to provide their input concisely. No one is permitted to say that they merely agree with the person before them. After each person provides their input, simply say “thank you” and call on the next person. Don’t permit discussion. Schedule another time for more dialogue on a specific topic or make it a point to follow up later with a call to specific individuals.

Exactly at your end time, politely thank the team and end the call. If necessary, repeat this exercise two or three times in the same manner, always with a new topic. Ideally, after the first or second call, the team will realize that time is short, and they could benefit by discussing these topics between themselves in advance. If this occurs, congratulations! If it does not, prior to the third call, explain to the team that you want them to discuss the topic between themselves prior to the call so that they can build off each other’s ideas and their collective input can be more aligned and focused. By continuing this practice, the result will be a more cross-functionally aligned and cohesive team – one that operates with a strong sense of togetherness.

Leaving the Virtual Room

On the next call, the Integrator Leader needs to leave the room. That is, rather than ending the call, the leader should exit the call after initiating the meeting. Gather your team on the call and prepare them to discuss current priority initiatives, best practices, or share problem areas with their peers. Set the tone and expectations and provide the space (virtual call), and have the team engage in how to solve problems. Once the discussion is underway, let the team know that you will be signing off the call temporarily, and give them a designated time you will reengage with them.

Remind your team that we are each good at something, but no one is good at everything. Therefore, just like you are seeking their input, they must share between themselves to develop effective solutions. Let them know you expect each member of the team to communicate with one another regularly. Ask them to go to each other when they come across a problem, and if they encounter a challenge, they are unable to solve or that requires additional resources, come to you collectively bringing potential alternatives and solutions.

While you are out of the virtual room, your team should share challenges, best practices, and observations. Keeping within the vision and the boundaries provided, they should discuss what they need from each other to accomplish the mission. They should learn from each other, building trust and confidence while growing less dependent on you.

When you return to the call, ask for their input on the topic at hand. The best way to further engage with your team is by using the principles and techniques provided in “Seeing What Isn’t There – A Leaders Guide for Creating Change in a Complex World”, LaRue and Solomon, Deeds Publishing, Atlanta, 2019.  The ideal we are constantly working toward is to engage virtually with your team just as if you were in the same room with them. Remember that regardless of how sophisticated the technology you use, in the end, this is only a medium for what otherwise remains a process of human social engagement.

Guiding the Ship from the Virtual Helm

Techniques like the Virtual Standup Meeting allow you as an Integrator Leader to guide the ship from the virtual helm while keeping your finger on the pulse of your organization. You should expect and encourage your team to go to each other first for answers before coming to you. Recognize team members for their individual contributions while helping them to see how their ideas fit into the view from the canopy proactively identifying what they need from one another to fulfill their mission.

Remember, knowledge workers are specialists who know more and more about less and less. Therefore, their individual ideas, while likely to have merit, must be integrated into a cohesive approach in support of the mission. Rather than attempting to “manage” the organization, the Integrator Leader focuses on creating the conditions for people to self-organize behind the mission within the boundaries of their intent.

Asynchronous Digital Collaboration

Asynchronous collaboration tools, known as groupware, work well for teams that must collaborate over space and time for an extended period. If your organization is creating a new product or service, deploying a new initiative, or simply needs to collaborate more effectively over space and time, these tools can be invaluable.

These tools can be as simple as a threaded discussion list or an internal blog, and as advanced as online communities of practice or Action Teams that engage together over extended periods of time. A key benefit of groupware is that all online conversations are captured and can be arranged in ways that allow for more in-depth reflection, discussion, and dialogue among the leader and team members, and between team members themselves. An enduring record is generated, including all shared discussion threads, documents, and resources. In addition, people can think through their contributions before posting, and even less assertive individuals can step up and be heard and engaged.

While there are scores of digital video and web-based collaboration platforms to choose from, many of our clients around the world operate where high-speed connectivity is not always available. Cybersecurity concerns may also preclude the use of some popular collaboration platforms. We encourage you to do your research and use the appropriate collaboration platform for your purposes.

Virtual Feedback and Leader Development

When leading in a virtual environment we must create ways to make up for the lack of routine face-to-face interaction. As an Integrator Leader, and especially as a leader of a virtual team, you can’t over-communicate. Keep in mind that a key part of communicating is listening.  Regularly reach out to your team members one on one, considering the value of a voice or video teleconference in addition to digital messaging.  We, therefore, recommend that you habitually solicit your team for input on your performance and ideas. One way of doing this is to use 360 multi-source feedback surveys where the leader receives input from peers, direct reports, superiors, and other stakeholders. Organizational culture surveys can also be useful tools to obtain an overall barometer on the organization from the perspective of employees and external stakeholders.

Virtual Leadership – Make it Routine

Leading and working virtually has its benefits in the freedom and flexibility it affords both the employee and the employer during routine conditions but becomes vital during a VUCA threat. Ensure that your organization’s resiliency plan addresses all essential functions of your company so that it can continue in the face of natural or man-made disasters where people cannot or should not commute to work.

A potential downside of working virtually is the lack of facetime with colleagues and leaders in the organization that can lead to a sense of invisibility, where employees working virtually could be left out of decision-making or passed over for promotion. Don’t hesitate to bring your own boss to selected virtual meetings to showcase your team members by letting them present, discuss, and engage with the senior leaders of the organization.  These steps will help deepen trust and move your team from compliance to commitment.  Practice virtual leadership regularly to make it routine.

Learn more from our team at Chambers Bay Institute and our latest book “Seeing What isn’t There – A Leader’s Guide to Creating Change in a Complex World”

www.chambersbayinstitute.com