And all of a sudden, you’re leading a digital team.
For most leaders, that’s a massive change…a change no one prepared them for.
In our new era of border closures, social distancing, self-isolation, quarantine, pandemics and lockdowns, how do you lead a team you can’t see or talk to in person?
That’s a question thousands of leaders are asking themselves.
I’ve been leading a remote team now for over five years (we’re distributed across North America and all work from home), and I’ve been doing remote work of various kinds for twenty years.
Welcome to the digital future. It just got here a lot sooner than any of us thought, and it’s probably here for longer than any of us thought.
And please know, at the bottom of this email, I have a free download that shows you the top five tools we use as a team to work remotely. So If you’re asking what apps and online platforms do you use?.. we have that available for you at the end.
In the meantime, here are my top 7 rules for leading a digital team.
RULE 1: DEFAULT TO VIDEO What you probably like most (and in some cases, least) about the office is people.
Emails, texts, Slack and phone calls aren’t quite the same.
The solution? Default to video meetings. We use Zoom (see the download at the end for more), but you can use anything from FaceTime to Skype to Google Meetings.
In a culture that just got rapidly lonelier, eyeball-to-eyeball contact is increasingly valuable.
Bottom line: when you see someone, you interact differently. You connect. You catch all the nuances of human communication.
People want to know you care about them. Few things communicate that as well as giving them your full, face-to-face attention.
RULE 2. NEVER HANDLE CONFLICT OVER EMAIL/WRITTEN COMMUNICATION So what happens when there is conflict…as there will be when humans work together.
How about we start here? Don’t try to solve it by email.
Nothing good happens when you’re angry and you’ve got a keyboard in your hand. Stop typing, start talking. Face to face. Human to human.
Here’s why that’s a good rule.
First, human communication involves subtleties lost in emails, texts, and other written communication.
Second, it’s way too easy to roll your eyes, mock or emotionally shut down on someone when you’re not actually talking to them.
As soon as the hint of conflict arises, set up a video meeting.
If you can’t do a video call for whatever reason, pick up the phone.
Usually, the problem is solved beautifully in minutes.
Or if it escalates, at least you know exactly what you’re dealing with.
RULE 3. CREATE A WORKFLOW TRIAGE SYSTEM Think about the office you used to work in…even when everyone was together, you still lived by email, app or text in today’s office.
That’s got a list of challenges in and of itself. The worst was probably all the taps on your office door or walk-ups to your desk with colleagues asking if they could have five minutes of your time, which was never five minutes.
The virtual office has its own version of that: 1000 random texts, emails, Slacks, phone calls and DMs a day.
Here’s ours:
Most things: weekly one on ones (video call) Big things: weekly team meeting (video call) Important, can’t-wait-for-the-next-meeting communication: Slack Urgent questions: Text Important and complicated urgent questions: Phone call or quick video call Email: ONLY for interaction with outside clients (people not on your direct team) Please note most offices REVERSE this, which is why you get nothing done.
It’s also why you hate your inbox and the reply-alls. Everyone defaults to leadership by email. It’s a disaster for all involved.
Breakdown the system a little further.
Most questions that interrupt your workday are not urgent. So don’t treat them like they are.
Save all your questions on a list and bring it to your weekly meetings.
90% of everything you deal with on your team can be dealt with using the first three methods (meetings and Slack).
90% of the interruptions happen because people use the bottom three methods.
So just tell people to save their questions. When people save their questions for later, everyone saves time.
Train the people around you to save as many questions as humanly possible until your weekly meeting or bi-weekly meeting with them.
Three things will happen by the time your Thursday meeting rolls around:
The question or issue will have disappeared. What felt urgent on Tuesday was actually completely unimportant or got resolved by other means. Everybody wins.
Often, in a three-minute conversation during your weekly on a Thursday, you can resolve what might have taken 10 back-and-forth emails between Monday and Wednesday. Time and agony spared.
A third option is that the issue truly couldn’t wait, and so you dealt with it when it had to be dealt with. To deal with urgent and important matters on an urgent basis is actually fine. Usually, though that’s a tiny number of issues, so time saved anyway on all the pesky things that didn’t matter.
If you’ve got a relationship on your team that can’t wait a week, or there are just too many issues, then do a daily 5-15 minute check-in, either in person, by phone or video call. You’ll solve so much and it will cut your email traffic by a massive amount.
So much of what is urgent on Tuesday doesn’t matter at all by Thursday. So wait till Thursday. Everybody wins.
RULE 4: SILENCE YOUR CONSTANTLY BUZZING DEVICES Sure, you get interrupted by other people. But how often do you get distracted by what you allow to push through on your phone?
Years ago I shut off almost all notifications on my phone and my devices except for text messages and the handful of people I favourite.
Do you really need to know instantly when someone likes your Instagram pic or when there’s a breaking news update? Of course you don’t. Ditto with emails. Why leave email notifications on when you can jump into your inbox once or twice a day and deal with what needs to be dealt with then?
According to the New York Times, the average office workers get interrupted every 11 minutes. And it takes 25 minutes to return to focused work after each interruption.
No wonder you don’t get any work done. The math doesn’t even add up.
You can eliminate self-distraction by shutting down all but text messages on your phone.
And train your team to only text you when it’s super-urgent.
Focused leaders are always better leaders. It’s as simple as that.
RULE 5: MAKE A PLAN FOR THE KIDS AND FAMILY One of the biggest challenges for staff is creating quiet space in the house to do work. That’s hard enough in normal circumstances, but especially difficult, if not almost impossible, when the daycares and schools closed down.
Try nonetheless. You’ll be way more effective, productive and the whole family will be saner.
If getting in-home care isn’t possible, you may have to think about doing work in spurts of quiet focus.
Even if you have a closed-door home office, carving out a few hours where the kids aren’t climbing all over can be tricky. Here are some quick hacks:
Get in-home care if you can. If that’s not possible, spell off with a spouse for a few hours at a time, get a close (safe) family member to care for them. Or see point 6.
Close your door. Sometimes you may even need to put a note on the door that says “Please do not disturb until 11 a.m.” Hopefully your family can read.
Work outside or in the basement or on a porch (weather permitting) or anywhere where you won’t be disturbed.
If all else fails, put in headphones. Even if you can’t work to music, simply having earbuds in is a social cue for people to leave you alone and helps with focus.
Sell your kids and become a monk (kidding…)
For most leaders, the quieter the space, the higher the productivity. So as best you can, create quiet space.
RULE 6: WORK BEFORE EVERYONE ELSE IS UP If you have some flex on when you do your work, flex that muscle. If you can, try starting an hour or two early, especially if the kids aren’t up.
Time-shifting is a perfectly acceptable practice.
As I’ve outlined before, Work patterns are a lot like traffic patterns: at 5 a.m. you have the road to yourself. At 8 a.m., it could take you three times as long to travel the same distance.
Get an undistracted start on the day and you’ll be so much further ahead.
You’ve got the work lane all to yourself, which means you can work uninterrupted. You can think uninterrupted and actually accomplish all your most important tasks completely distraction-free.
You can likely even leave early.
If you work when everyone else is working, you will always struggle with productivity.
RULE 7: DON’T FIGHT YOUR LAGGING ENERGY All of us have times in the day where our energy lags. So what do you usually do when you could almost fall asleep at your desk or just stare blankly at the wall for an hour?
Most of us try to push through it, right? And sometimes you have to.
But what about those other times?
Well, what if you didn’t? What if you cooperated with your energy levels instead of fought them?
Instead of blinking mindlessly at your screen for another 30 minutes, get up. Stretch. Take a nap. Go for a walk. Grab a coffee.
Or maybe…call it a day.
Bottom line? High impact leaders don’t fight their low energy levels, they cooperate with them.
Stop fighting your energy. Start cooperating with it.
This blog was written by Carey Nieuwhof. You can see the original post by going to https://careynieuwhof.com/my-top-7-rules-for-leading-a-digital-team.