Executive Coaching for Remote Leaders
In today's virtual landscape, traditional leadership skills alone aren't enough. Being an effective remote leader requires unique communication and leadership abilities tailored to the challenges of managing remote teams.
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As an ICF Certified Leadership Coach, I specialize in helping leaders navigate these challenges. Drawing from my experience leading global community building at MasterClass for a remote member community of 1M+ and an internal team of 300, I understand firsthand that conventional leadership and team-building techniques often fall short in a fully virtual environment. When the pandemic hit and we went fully remote, I spearheaded the transition to virtual communication strategies and community-building methods, discovering what truly works to create highly engaged, communicative, and connected virtual teams.
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Leveraging my insights as a remote community leader and my coaching expertise, I will help you enhance virtual communication, foster a strong team culture, and develop effective strategies for virtual collaboration.
5 WAYS TO BE A MORE EFFECTIVE REMOTE LEADER
Leading a Virtual Team Presents Unique Challenges. Here are Proven Strategies to Navigate them.
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Remote work has transformed the landscape of modern business, offering flexibility and opportunities like never before. However, leading a remote team presents unique challenges that require a different set of skills and strategies. As a remote leader, it's crucial to adapt your leadership style to ensure that your team remains engaged, motivated, and productive. Here are five effective ways to improve your leadership as a remote leader.
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1. Adjust Your Communication Skills to a Virtual Landscape
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In a remote setting, clear, concise, and consistent communication is key to successful leadership. It's more important than ever to set clear expectations and goals proactively, before misunderstandings occur. I strongly recommend in the beginning of the week, having a team-wide check-in to set clear goals and expectations for the week, so the team is clear on what priorities need to be worked on individually, and as a team.
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Zoom fatigue is real, so being concise, efficient, and leaving with clear action items is imperative for maximizing time spent on Zoom, and minimizing the amount of meetings that need to be attended. Create a clear meeting template to structure your agenda, so everyone in your team knows what to expect going in, and what next steps are going out. For example of an agenda might look like: goal of why we're here, key points to address, action items to leave with. It's simple, yet effective to avoid the classic "well that was a waste of time" feeling as your team leaves the meeting (yep, we've all been there).
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Concise and clear communication is the place to start, but there are tons of other communication techniques that will up-level your communication skills as a virtual leader, to name a few: improving your storytelling skills to convey information in a more engaging way, naming individuals in Zoom meetings to increase team engagement and morale, and adjusting your written communication to be more concise and direct.
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2. Build a Strong Team Culture - Yes, you can do it virtually!​
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The million dollar question: how do you build community in a virtual environment? Creating a strong, cohesive team culture is more important than ever in a remote environment, where team members may feel isolated. As a leader, it takes more intentionality than in an in-person working environment. Think of yourself as not only the team leader, but the team community-builder. This small mindset shift will change how you approach and lead team conversations, changing the tone from transactional to community-focused.
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One thing that's incredibly important to building strong virtual culture is making sure your team is in lock step working towards the same goal, and shares the same core team values. Remind your team regularly (I recommend every week in your weekly kickoff meeting) what you goal is! Overkill? Nope. In addition, work with your team to come up with shared team values that the team lives by every week. In your team meetings, everyone can share how they living by one of the team values for that week. There are lots of creative ideas here you can play with!
Finally, create team-building activities that your team ACTUALLY wants to be at (aka, no more Zoom happy hours!). Make it interactive in, by sending them real in-person items that they can look forward to receiving for the team-building activity. For example, a watercolor painting kit for the whole team to paint together, or box of ingredients for the team to cook a lunch together. Do it during working hours so your team doesn't resent being glued to their computer into their personal time. And if members of your team live in geographically overlapping areas, have them meet up for pod co-working days! Nothing like IRL.
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3. Become a Technology Tools Wiz
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The amount of technology out there to foster positive remote leadership and team-building is endless. Seriously, there are hundreds out there! Become savvy in how to use technology effectively to engage in new, fun, effective ways with your team. Here are a few of my faves:
Gather - Gather is a virtual space platform that mimics the experience of a physical office. It provides a customizable virtual office environment where team members can interact as avatars, walk up to each other's desks, and have spontaneous conversations. Gather is great for informal interactions, social events, and team-building activities, helping to recreate the casual, serendipitous encounters of an in-person office setting.
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Zoom Polls - If you're already using Zoom to lead meetings, make it jazzy! Zoom Polls allow hosts to create single-choice or multiple-choice questions to ask participants during a meeting or webinar. This feature is useful for gathering real-time feedback, gauging opinions, conducting quizzes, or making decisions collectively.
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Zoom Whiteboards - The Zoom Whiteboard feature provides a digital canvas for collaboration, allowing participants to draw, annotate, and share ideas visually in real-time. This tool is beneficial for brainstorming sessions, teaching, and visual presentations.
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4. Empower and Trust Your Team
In other words: do not micro-manage! I repeat, do not micro-manage. Think of yourself as a scaffold: you support them with clear and concise direction, and then let them stand on their own. Give them the support they need to succeed, and then let them fly and do what they were hired to do!​
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One of the biggest mistakes I see with remote leaders is micro-managing their team since they can't "see" what they're doing. This is a sure shot way to lose trust, deflate morale, and make your team feel disempowered to do their best work. Trust that you have a team full of experts, and they are going to do their work best when they feel trusted and empowered to do so.​
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5. Pay Extra Attention to Personal Development
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The best way to keep your team (and yourself!) motivated is to support them to feel like they are working towards something they care about - which often, is improving themself! Set up regular development check-ins to learn where your team wants to go in their career, and what they can be doing now to works towards that. You could foster their growth by empowering them to take on projects that will allow them to grow where they want, or provide a development stipend to enroll in a course that will enhance their skills.
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Virtual or not, knowing that your team leader is invested in your success will keep your team motivated and driven to do they best work, and want to grow with the company.
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Remote leader ready?
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My hope is that these techniques and tips, which I've seen work powerfully well for my clients, will help you in your effort to be an impactful remote leader. If you are ready to really commit to taking your remote leadership to the next level, I am here to support you!