Chapter 2 How We Got to Long-Distance Leadership

Rule 2: Accept the fact that leading remotely requires you to lead differently.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

—Henry the IV, Part2 by William Shakespeare

Being a leader has never been a simple task. The struggle to be effective, to achieve your (and your organization’s) goals, and help the people you lead reach their destination is constant. It’s a challenge, and you’ve accepted, so get on with it.

Patty is one of those leaders. She’s worked with the same team for three years, with everyone in the same location, and a big part of everyone’s social activity revolves around work. Two years ago, people were allowed to work from home if necessary—snowstorms, sick kids—but now half the team is out of the office at least three days a week. There is no plan, no standardized processes, and her training has always involved face-to-face communication over everything else. Also, she’s not terribly fond of technology and relies too much on email. As a result, she’s holding off communicating until everyone’s all together, but that is leaving some people out of the loop or with information that isn’t timely. It’s frustrating, and she has asked us, “How did this happen?”

It’s easy to discount the challenges of the way the workplace works today, especially the impact of distance and technology-enabled communication, and just focus on what has always made leaders effective. After all, Genghis Khan ruled half the known world and never held a single WebEx meeting. The sun never set on Queen Victoria’s British Empire, yet there’s no recorded instance of a single conference call. It’s not like others haven’t done it before us, and there is no reason we can’t do it more effectively, productively, and with less stress. Discounting or diminishing the problems doesn’t change the fact that there’s been a fundamental change both in the way people work together and how leaders are expected to communicate. As Patty has noticed, and her company has yet to address, this change has had a profound impact on leadership behavior, attitudes, and results.

When Genghis had to communicate an order, there were real live people in front of him, professional clerks who carefully wrote down his words and then passed those commands on down the line. When you need to communicate change order to your project team, how often do you stare out at a sea of empty desks (or the strangers in the Starbucks where you are working) tapping out instructions on your phone, wondering if the team will understand and heed the directive?

It may have always been lonely at the top, but now we’re literally, physically, by ourselves much of the time. When Queen Victoria grumbled, “We are not amused,” the person she was scolding stood in front of her and knew she meant it. They couldn’t slough it off with an “LOL” and a shrug emoji.

In fact, the world of work has changed a lot in the last quarter century or so. Here are some of the ways it used to be:

The number of managers, team leaders, and others who sent their own written correspondence was very low. Above a certain level in most organizations, letters and documents were created by assistants, clerks, or other trained professionals. At the very least, such communication was checked by someone else before going out into the world. You didn’t (and couldn’t) simply hit “send” or “reply all.”

Email didn’t exist for most people. Some of us can remember our first email accounts. We couldn’t access them except by computer (usually at work), and there was no guarantee that your intended audience had access to that tool either. Now it’s probably the number one form of business communication (and the most complained about).

Most business communication that wasn’t face-to-face was done on the telephone. Less than fifteen years ago, the percentage of time people spent talking on the telephone outweighed the time spent reading and writing email significantly. Now the time spent on those activities has reversed, and the trend continues.

Most team leaders, supervisors, and managers had the people they worked with in a single location, or within easy physical reach. Only leaders at the regional level and above in large companies had to worry about managing people remotely. Leadership development and training assumed a lot of face-to-face contact. That may not match your reality today, and most leaders say they haven’t received sufficient (or any) training in the real dynamics of leading remote and hybrid teams.

And there is more that has changed over that twenty-five years .

Today, according to the Project Management Institute, 90 percent of project teams have at least one member (usually more) who aren’t co-located with the rest of the team.

An increasing number of project teams and task forces are made up of people who don’t report to the same manager. The leaders of these matrixed teams must influence and lead people without being their boss or having traditional reporting relationships.

Today, nearly 80 percent of white-collar supervisors have at least one direct report who works in a different location—at least part-time. This includes everyone from colleagues on the other side of the world to a team member who has decided to work from home one day because of the weather. Either way, they aren’t sitting within arm’s reach of you or each other.

Social media and electronic communication have changed how information (or disinformation) spreads, and how quickly. It used to be that responding to a request took at least enough time to dip the quill in ink and handwrite a response, drop it in an envelope, and ship it across the ocean. Or the person communicated with you directly.

The important thing about all these numbers is that it drives home how much things have changed in terms of how we do our jobs. There are two major repercussions for leaders as a result:

The communication methods that enabled us to succeed (if we’ve been around for a while) have changed. You may be terrific in a face-to-face meeting . but how many of those will you have today? Maybe you’re a great listener, but if Bob in Dallas only communicates with you through email, that strength is negated, and it begs the question whether the two of you are really working as effectively as you could and should.

The notion of a leader’s sense of isolation is no longer simply emotional. You’re not only lonely because you have the sole responsibility for decisions, or the weight of authority, or feel responsible if people lose their jobs—you’re often actually physically alone.

First, you need to cut yourself some slack. After all, if you’ve been doing this job for a long time, the things you’re expected to do and the tools you’re expected to use have changed considerably in a short period of time. If you’re new to the role of leader, chances are the people who mentor and teach you aren’t familiar with working the same way you do. This is still largely uncharted territory.

Before, when you made a decision, asked a question, or gave direction, you looked in the other person’s face, or at least heard their voice. You could tell if you were understood or if they agreed with what you were saying. You had real-time feedback so you could coach, answer questions, or change course quickly. If you needed answers, you got them immediately. You even occasionally got a smile or a “thank you” that made you feel good. These are just some of the real emotional rewards that can come with being an effective leader.

But now, some of the rewards may be missing. Like Patty, it feels as if you’re working in the dark, unsure what’s happening, operating largely on faith (even when you don’t have much), and doing it all in ways we and our predecessors have never done before.

One of our clients put it this way: “Managing has always felt like herding cats. But now I’m trying to herd cats by email.”

Before we get caught up in how things are different and how much things have changed, let’s take a breath. The truth is that while there have been significant changes to the way we lead, the act of leadership itself hasn’t really changed all that much.

This is a first-order change, not a second. What’s the difference? A first-order change means we need to do the same things but in a different way. We need to do something faster, smarter, using different tools, but the task at hand is fundamentally the same. A second-order change implies what we’re doing doesn’t work at all, and we need to do something completely different.

Here’s an example. Let’s say one of your team members is chronically late to work. There are plenty of ways you can help them address this problem: they can leave home fifteen minutes earlier, change their route to work, or even agree to stay fifteen minutes later each day so they’re putting in the same amount of work. Those are all first-order changes.

If those solutions don’t work, you might work to accommodate their needs, or suggest they find a new job. That’s a second-order change: how you’re doing things isn’t working, so you need to change what you do.

Being a Long-Distance Leader may feel radically different from how you’ve worked in the past. Maybe you were more comfortable when you shared an office space with your coworkers or got to see them face-to-face more often than you do now. Those changes may be creating emotional stress that impacts your productivity and how effective you can be.

What you do may not be the problem, but how you do it may well be. In the next section, we’ll share a model that helps illustrate that fact.