Trust Yourself before Trusting Employees
We all know that being a business leader in the VUCA world of 2016 and beyond is a difficult and challenging job. Over the past few weeks I have been working with a number of organizations in different industries in the area of Business Leadership skill development and one theme that continues to be a significant challenge for all of them is managing a diverse and virtual workforce. It is a complex business leadership challenge because of many factors involved including, but not limited to, time zones, language, matrixed organizations, multiple reporting structures, communication skills, mergers & acquisitions, and spin-offs.
The primary issues shared by leaders managing virtual teams is they are having a difficult time “knowing what their people are really doing”.
“I have two people in Europe, one person in Brazil, five people in China, and a product team in the US. It seems like the only thing that I can do to hold them accountable is to check on their timesheets to make sure they show up on time. I have no way to trust that they are showing up for work or being productive.”
It is hard to believe, but all too often leaders are defining success of managing virtual teams by their ability to measure if their people are showing up on time and doing some work. This is an unfortunate leadership mistake and there is a much better way; trust yourself before you trust your employees.
Trust Yourself
When I refer to the concept of “trust yourself,” I specifically mean trust yourself to have the Business Acumen and Business Leadership skills and tools to set priorities, goals, and objectives, measure success, and manage performance through coaching and feedback.
If you don’t have those skills, then you can’t ever be truly effective as a leader of virtual teams. You will be caught in a vicious cycle of blame and frustration with your teams and there is a good chance that you won’t be successful from a business perspective. Here are the 5 most critical skills you need to develop to trust yourself to be able to lead and measure the success of virtual teams.
Understand business strategy
In order to be a successful leader and help your teams execute the overall strategy, you need to know the strategy. You need to understand your value proposition and the elements of your strategy and how to lead to it.
How to create alignment and lead strategic execution
After you have a strong understanding of the strategy and your value proposition, you have to use that information to align your team to execute the strategy. This can be the hardest part of leadership. It’s difficult because creating alignment is helping your team to prioritize time, effort and resources. The suggestion here is to make realistic goals and objectives and use them to create alignment.
Provide business coaching and feedback
As you manage the goals and objectives that set priorities and create alignment, it is important to address issues as soon as they come up; don’t wait until a twice-a-year performance review. Provide immediate coaching and feedback that is specific, positive, and provides for changed behavior.
Really understand different cultures, styles, and personalities
Great leaders understand people are different. Do everything possible to really understand cultures, styles, and personalities. Adapt your style to create synergies to get the work done. It takes a lot of effort, but there is a big payoff.
Be able to lead change
The final skill that you can develop in yourself to build trust is the ability to lead change. Change is a predictable process that follows patterns. Learn how to set expectations and lead people through the valley of despair by unlearning old behaviors learning new ones.
Please feel free to reach out if you would like any information on how to build any or all of these skills.
