Your organization has removed all communication walls. Take advantage of being able to hear it all. Listen without judging by being dataful and human in how you go about it.
Checklist when being Boss While Remote (BWR)
How To Listen Datafully As A Human
- Remember it’s not about you. Repeat this to yourself. Keep in mind that humans have emotions so you’ll want to do a lot of listening.
- Listen deeply and ask questions that let you understand better. Yale has a guide for how to conduct a user interview properly. You should think of leadership as a form of user research — because your people are literally the customers to your product (i.e. you as a leader).
- Listen broadly by gathering a statistically relevant number of samples. An opinion from one unhappy or happy person should not drive you to a conclusion. Try to avoid asking questions that are leading — use this guide from Haverford.
- Leverage the right tooling to support your need to balance between using synchronous time versus asynchronous time. If you are spending too much time working synchronously while remote, you’ll know it immediately with your feeling utterly exhausted.
- Be compassionate and present while you hear every single detail about your team member’s personal life situation. It matters to them more than anything else: way, way, way more than the work at hand. So it should absolutely matter to you. Read about compassion from the 14th Dalai Lama’s blog and you’re going to feel much better for it.
- Keep a log of all the people you’re connecting with while remote to measure your effectiveness. Be sure that you’re not spending too much time with just your leaders — otherwise you’re not taking advantage of the moment. At the same time, don’t attempt to solve the problems of every person within your org who already has a boss. Encourage them to work with their boss while respecting the trust that’s been extended to you — so keep what’s said in confidence unless it’s a matter that needs to get reported to HR (in which case you should make that explicit while communicating at all levels of your organization). You can learn more about the “heterarchy” and how it’s a phenomenon that’s long been predicted to take hold. That moment is right now.
Mind the Experience
Tip #1
Dress the part.
You make the effort to look good in the office. So you’ll need to make the same effort while on video. Learn from Gen Z.
Mind the Experience
Tip #2
Define the rules.
The majority of your folks do not know how to behave or collaborate while remote. Lay down new rules. It’s okay to fail.
2020 CX Report Appendix Now Available
The CX Report gathers trends related to how business now happens in the computational era. Its publication date has been moved out to May 2020 but the special appendix on remote and distributed work is now available.
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Leading While Remote 