If you are unable to meet some of your colleagues in person, you can try out the following tips, which were proposed by Kevin Eikenberry in his book Remarkable Leadership-Unleashing Your Leadership Potential One Skill at a Time and shared with us by the management-issues.com website.
Key behaviours for virtual leadership
- Actionable meetings: For a virtual team, there is nothing more important than effective and productive meetings. So become accustomed to scheduling short meetings with clear-cut agendas. Also try to keep everyone engaged throughout the course of a meeting.
- Clear expectations: To enable everyone to be productive, you must reduce the number of incorrect assumptions that could be made by others. Since you are having conversations less regularly with remote employees, focus on making completely clear what everyone is meant to be doing and what is expected of each person.
- Focus on results: You will probably have fewer opportunities for giving feedback to remote colleagues. Focus on the most important area, which is results. It is not important what colleagues are doing at any given moment during their time at work, nor when they actually do their work, just so long as the results are there to be seen.
- Invest in business relations: If there is a vast distance between you, this may be difficult. Therefore, it is even more important that you find some time to build relationships with your colleagues. And also encourage your staff to strengthen their relationships with one another.
- Make sure there is trust: Place trust in your colleagues and then expect the best from them. Clear expectations combined with frequent and honest communication will make it work. Assure your distant colleagues that you trust them. And be patient: some things simply take more time when people are not in close proximity. But still keep looking for ways to make processes faster and smoother.
Book
Kevin Eikenberry: Remarkable Leadership-Unleashing Your Leadership Potential One Skill at a Time; Jossey-Bass, 2007, 288 pp.
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