You have a great team — they’re smart and have great intentions — but you took a hit in 2020 from covid, and you have audacious goals to meet for this year. You need your team to be performing at its peak, and quickly. The problem is, you’re now operating under a completely new remote work paradigm, and the cracks are showing. You’re not alone in your concern about the impact “working from home” (WFH) is going to have on your organization and how you and your team lead. In a survey of 160 CEOs, more than half said their top concern is “working well remotely.”
Focus on Your Leadership Team First
Your concern probably starts with your newest, frontline staff, but the place to put focused attention first is your executive leadership team. How they work together and then lead the organization in the WFH paradigm will be decisive in whether you ultimately achieve your goals. The need for a high-functioning, cohesive team is always critical and it’s even more important to focus on in the WFH environment. There’s different opinions of how long this will last or if we’ll ever go back to work as it used to. Either way, how you invest in getting your leadership team aligned will determine if you come through this season stronger or weaker.
The 3 Keys to a Cohesive Leadership Team
To have a cohesive leadership team you must have high levels of trust, be masterful at conflict and transparent accountability. When it comes to WFH or better said, in this case, remote leadership, these are extremely challenging:
Trust
No characteristic of your leadership team is more important than trust. The type of trust that is especially needed is where each member of the team feels safe to be open, honest and direct and also feels safe receiving that openness, honesty and directness in return. WFH creates a natural barrier to this. There can be a feeling to get down to business on phone or Zoom calls and not waste time or for you and team members to put on a front of clarity and confidence. Your team members resist the need to say “something isn’t clear” or “I don’t get it.” This results in much going unspoken or is assumed. When that’s the case, trust breaks down.
Conflict
Conflict is productive, unfiltered debate on important issues and healthy conflict is predicated on the previous characteristic, trust. Conflict without trust typically becomes destructive to the team. In my experience, the root of most conflict is insufficient communication around issues or unspoken expectations. In the WFH world, it’s even more important for leaders to mine for conflict and insist on debate and argument; however, in this environment rather than leaning in here, leaders are walking away when there is ambiguity and there isn’t agreement. These all occur even in the best of circumstances and WFH exacerbates them even further.
Accountability
Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, defines accountability as “the willingness to remind one another when they are not living up to the performance standards of the group.” Most teams are already working with unclear or unspoken expectations of performance and behavior standards for the team. CEOs I’ve worked with have said things to me like, “these are highly compensated professionals with years of experience, they should know how to behave and perform.” Accountability is typically the weakest one of these three on teams because let’s be honest – it’s hard and leaders tend to skip it or water it down. In a WFH environment, even more expectations go unsaid or remain unclear.
A lack of trust, mastery of conflict and transparent accountability has a massive impact on productivity, speed to market and revenue and it might feel like a huge amount of work to get there; however, the good news is the answer is simple.
The number one most important shift you can make to strengthen and accelerate your remote leadership team: Stop having expectations, start creating agreements.
There are two options for how you can approach work with your remote leadership team, you can have expectations of how everyone will behave, perform, and handle conflict, or you can create agreements. Expectations live in your head, whereas agreements live between the members of the team in a conversation. You naturally show up to work with high expectations — you expect to be treated well, that your team are professionals and will know what to do, that the team will meet commitments. Let’s be honest, in a WFH environment, you talk less. No more stops at the coffee machine or pop-ins to someone’s office or cube. And because you talk less, you operate more on expectations.
The problem with expectations is there’s only two possibilities for the outcomes, and neither is good.
The first is that you are disappointed that the expectation was not met, the second is that it’s kind of neutral — they met the expectation, so what? Expectations make team members defensive, closed off and ready to rebel. This closed down feeling is the last thing you need in a remote setting. When in-person these feelings can sometimes be identified and worked through quickly. In a WFH environment, these feelings of defensiveness and resentment are further masked and fragments trust.
Agreements on the other hand are creative, respectful. We build an agreement with another person in a conversation and isn’t it much more fun to live up to an agreement than to walk around carrying someone else’s expectation. People love to keep agreements they participated in designing and creating.
If you continue to operate out of expectations, you risk losing your best people
Operating out of expectation leads to immense frustration for both parties, which leads to resentment and inevitably, your best people will leave. If there’s lack of alignment at the top, it will inevitably lead to a lack of cohesion throughout the organization. It’s similar to a family dynamic. If the parents function based upon unspoken or unclear expectations of one another, they won’t be very aligned and the rest of the family will feel that and be the same way.
Expectations stifle your team’s cohesion and your company’s capacity for exponential growth.
If your team is not cohesive, it positions you at a serious competitive disadvantage. The best way to get them cohesive is to operate from agreements and not expectations. For example, imagine two teams:
Team one has made a commitment to operate based on clear agreements with one another, who will do what and by when, what actions will be taken, how will decisions be made, and there are open discussions on these types of things to get to specific agreement. Even when team members see things differently or disagree, they always end conversations with agreements and not expectations of what occurred or what the other person is thinking. And when agreements are not kept, the team has an agreement to have open conversations to either reset the original agreement or make a new one all for the collective good of the team and the organization.
Team two is one where the members are highly accomplished people and expect a certain standard of behavior and accountability from one another. They think making clear and specific agreements is somewhat beneath them and that everyone will be a professional and do what they need to do. Even when they feel being explicit about what another team member will do, they are guarded and typically don’t say anything as they don’t want to offend the other person. They hold back in difficult conversations and are resistant to make clear commitments as they want to cover their backs. They also hesitate to be explicit about how they will behave with one another. Again, this is due to those types of conversations being beneath professionals of their experience and calibre.
What kind of advantages would the first team have over the second?
- Quick resolution of interpersonal issues that might typically hold back cross team and department collaboration on important projects and where there is interdependence to get things done on each other’s behalf.
- No “us versus them” mentality because your team members are in lock-step agreement and had the courage to disagree to get to that agreement. The reduction is wasted time in meetings and discussion is massive. Not to mention the savings in your time in not getting involved to mediate.
- Dates around commitments to one another and inter-department are almost never missed.
Are Expectations a Problem in Your Company? Find Out:
Here are some tell-tale signs you might be suffering from the curse of expectations, similar to what you say in the example of team two above.
- Decision Paralysis. Your team can’t make decisions because no one wants to step on one another’s toes or overstep a boundary, and thereby decisions aren’t made or take longer than needed to be made than necessary.
- Interpersonal Problems. Team members are unable to have open conversations with one another on issues that arise between them interpersonally or between their departments. They bring the issues to you again and again in hopes you’ll intervene and mediate a resolution or solve the issue outright.
- Things aren’t getting done. Come to meetings and actions discussed in the last meeting aren’t done – You sit in meetings and the same action items show up again and again and/or you hear phrases like, “we’ll do our best,” “we’ll try,” or “It’s on our priority list.” Everything seems to open ended and non specific until it hits a crisis point.
- No Forward Movement. You get to the end of the week and say something like, “I was involved in everything but feel like I accomplished nothing.”
A Three-Step Solution to Creating a Culture of Agreements.
- Accept personal responsibility for the current situation with the team operating based upon unclear or unspoken expectations and for not fully living up to and championing an environment of creating agreements.
- Make a commitment and determination from this point forward to model and uphold the practice of making agreements in the executive leadership room.
- Show the team this video
- Discuss the definition of what an agreement is and how you will start implementing using them on the executive team.
- Recommended step: Check in at the end of each team meeting and ask the question: What did we discuss that requires a clear agreement? Or review the agreements made. Follow this up in the next meeting to review the agreements.
This is a huge body of work and very hard to do alone, but it’s crucial if you want to accelerate your team in the remote work world. If you’re interested in getting help implementing this in your business, click here to contact me.