Will your people trust you?

In a world of increasingly complex jobs carried out across borders and in numerous languages, you cannot expect your teams and employees to sit next to you - or even in your time zone. Nor can you expect to lead them by pulling rank and giving instructions, as Robert Rupp highlighted in the article New leaders don't produce followers. But fellow thinkers

So what will you do ?

To successfully exercise leadership across remote sites, I believe you have to apply your leadership through positive influence rather than asserting yourself through rank. Efficiently influencing colleagues and employees is a complex undertaking under normal circumstances, and when you’re not able to share a physical space, it is outright difficult. It is time-consuming to do too, and even more time-consuming if you get things wrong.

Teams in companies working internationally and teams working with IT in particular are becoming more and more dispersed. You may have to manage one or more teams working off-shore doing e.g. service operation or IT development. You may have a handful of colleagues assigned to you, spread across multiple geographies and time zones. That’s our reality at ConnectMinds. Or your team may just be located on different floors in the same building. All of these setups require some level of remote leadership. Best practice has traditionally been to bring teams physically together when a non-trivial problem really needs attention or when deadlines are very tight. This approach is mostly based on empirical evidence. You rarely hear someone request a remote team rather than a local one when having to crunch their most important difficulties.

My personal experience from years in management consulting is that when you need to constructively influence clients during sales and operation, your ability to influence relies on four main ingredients: Logic, Passion, Ethics and Selflessness. Leading teams of “fellow thinkers” is a lot like management consulting in that way.

Only one of these four ingredients, logic, works well remotely. Emails and written procedures backed by solid and clear logic travel short and long distances equally well. Passion is by far the hardest ingredient to convey without being close to your audience. Some actors are able to do it on film; a few writers succeed in conveying passion through the pages. Leadership exercised remotely, yours too, will invariably come across as less passionate than in a face-to-face scenario with physical presence. The two remaining important ingredients which you can hope to apply, ethics and selflessness, are closely related to the hard currency of trust. Trust that is entirely tied to ‘you’ personally as a leader is a very expensive asset to build and maintain at scale. Easier to to build is a shared trust in a common Purpose or a common cause. It does not have to be fanatic or turn into heroism, although both can help, but it has to be a purpose larger than any one individual.

You may have encountered leaders for whom profit was enough of a motive for you to build trust in their leadership. For them ethics will typically be reduced to consistency or even replaced by ruthlessness. And selflessness may be expressed simply through sharing (some of) the profits with the team.

For most modern leaders, their sense of purpose will be more complex and is likely to involve a desire to somehow make the world a better place. Consistency is indeed an important tool in ethical leadership, but it is not enough in itself to satisfy followers. The focus of your company or your department should not merely be on the greatness of the brand (although that helps too) or on the share price. When the sun sets on any given day, something should be changing as a result of the activities; a noticeable impact, making it worthwhile coming back tomorrow. If the only thing that brings your team back the next day is the paycheck, your (remote) leadership reign is likely to be short and mediocre.

All of the four ingredients take time to build. The two trust-based ones more so than the rest. Yet, hard-earned trust can be lost instantly; a single mistaken action can be enough to destroy it. As a modern leader you have to invest time and resources in building and maintaining trust. The initial, ‘upfront’ investment a remote leader has to make is often a significant one. Trust is built over time. Basic factors like eye contact and body language are very important components in building trust for many, and in some cases it will take forever without face-to-face access. Once earned, trust needs to be maintained through consistent actions and commitment to ethics and purpose. None of this is free, but it does help protect your initial investment.

Delivering successful remote leadership requires hard work, but it is entirely possible if your people trust you.

Will your people trust you?

Read more from our leadership series