When Leaders Courageously Lead, All Remote Teams Are Great
Learn how to be recognized as a leader and bring out the best in a remote team.
When you become a leader, your inspiring actions set the bar and the remote team will adapt creating a virtuous cycle. Thus, productivity, creativity and team spirit will increase dramatically. Brutally said: become a leader and you will create more value for your clients with a consequent rise in revenue.
Why You Need To Become A Leader
Becoming a leader is not an option, it’s a necessary step to take to evolve toward an attractive remote culture that provides a sense of belonging and an open-minded remote team work.
When you courageously embrace the role of a leader, you help the whole team to align with respect to a common vision. Once the team experiences the benefits of committing to achieving something bigger than the daily tasks, what was a group of people becomes a well oiled and amazingly resilient system.
Every manager and CEO wants to have a well oiled and resilient team. It’s at the very base of success. You would be a fool to aim to anything less than a successful team. But how can you measure whether a remote team is successful?
The answer seems obvious: a remote team is successful when it constantly produces value for the clients it’s serving. More value means better solutions. A better solution means winning the competition. Being the winner means being the best on the market, attracting affectionate clients.
Thus, successful remote teams create more value and revenues. Everything seems simple, but it’s not. Whenever a team starts working on a new project, success in terms of value and revenues can only be measured months later. What you want, is a way to measure the success of a team on a daily basis to be sure that the long term success is achieved!
Then the question is: how do you measure success on a daily basis? You can think that performance is what you are looking for: if the remote team gets all the daily tasks done, it’s performing great and, consequently, it’s successful.
Performance, unfortunately, is a very tricky and unreliable parameter to take into account because people are different and a remote team is a complex system that has it’s own life. If a task isn’t completed today, it might be a good sign.
It might be the case that the remote team is constructively brainstorming on how to create more value. It’s devoting resources to understand and predict the long term value that the tasks of today will generate.
So, you still need to find a good parameter that can measure success on a daily basis. I have the solution for you: networks. In the words of Prof. Albert-László Barabási “Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success.”
That’s where courageous leaders position themselves. They understand the power of networks and they leverage it to let a remote team thrive, day in, day out.
How You Become A Leader
A leader is a person who knows how powerful a close-knit remote team can be and the amount of value and revenues the team can create in the long run.
I am going to explain you in detail how you can become a leader who embraces leadership by fully understanding the power of networks.
You want to create a resilient and close-knit remote team. You then need to look at it as a network. Without going too much into the details of the network theory, you are aiming to turning each of your remote team mates into a hub. The more hubs, the more resilient the network. That’s the job of a leader.
Turning a team mate into a hub means bringing out the best in that person. Each remote team mate needs to be a key contributor in his own unique way. That person will then be the referee point for the rest of the team whenever his expertise is needed.
Be careful not to get me wrong. I am not talking about going to that person and ask her to perform a task due to her specific skills. I am talking about asking her honest opinion and expert point of view about how to move further with the project when her area of expertise is involved.
This is how a courageous leader deals with her remote team. A few elements are thus required to dramatically improve leadership:
1. Active listening
2. Asking for feedback
3. Developing a common vision
4. Considering the other team mates as experts
5. Developing trust
Why It’s So Hard To Become a Leader
The transition from acting like a boss to becoming a leader is necessary, but not easy at all because becoming a leader implies learning to
- listen without judging
- accept other people for who they are
- show vulnerability and
- give up control.
All these actions require a high degree of awareness, communication skills and energy that is difficult to develop in an already very tiring life style. It’s difficult to be the one who takes the final decision and to be open to honest feedback that might look like harsh criticism.
Same reasoning with vulnerability (I talk about it extensively here) and giving up control. These two factors are strictly related, but it takes a huge effort to adopt a counterintuitive approach that sees making the first move in showing vulnerability as the best strategy to lead.
Accepting other people for who they are without judging, keeping your mind free from prejudices is also challenging. Nonetheless, it’s the only was to create a true dialogue that will boost trust and a sense of belonging.
Finally, a leader knows that he isn’t above the rest of the remote team, but he’s just a part of the team with well defined responsibilities. Furthermore, he can’t consider himself entitled to lead because his leadership holds as long as the team recognizes his capabilities as leader.
You Don’t Have To Do It Alone — You Have Me By Your Side
Force your leadership upon a remote team and you will tear the network apart, reducing a potential great team to mere task executors where creativity is banned and value struggles to rise, loosing the competition.
If you really want to learn how to lead, constantly create value and boost revenues, you need to roll up your sleeves and take the first step in understanding networks and how the whole team can benefit from being considered as a system.
You need to learn to communicate better, listen better and treat your team mates as experts.
It’s difficult, I know, but you are not alone. I can help you and the team to understand the dynamics involved and how to change them as fast as possible. The team will develop more creativity and proactivity, producing more value for the clients and dramatically improving the chances to be a winner in the market.
Book an assessment session with me right now — you can explain me your situation and I will tell you exactly how I can help you.
Originally published on alemontalto.com
