remote leadership

In a remote working environment we need to rethink leadership. Leaders no longer have full visibility of their teams and their interactions, their role is to provide clarity of purpose, competency, and care for their people. Measuring on outputs is no longer viable, we need to shift our focus to measuring outcomes.

leading remote organisations

Join a remote:af guides training course to learn how to create high performance remote leadership teams.

what is remote leadership?

Alignment: Before we can ask out teams to work in alignment with bounded autonomy, our leaders need role model high performance.

Clarity: Out teams need a clear understanding of how their work contributes to customers and strategy and clear performance guidance.

Competency: We need to ensure that our teams have access to all the tools, skills and experience required to create customer value.

Care: We need to empathise with our team members' individual circumstances and build high trust environments.

alignment

The remote:af leadership team launch helps leaders role-model high performance, building a team agreement that makes decision delegation, consensus building and behaviours explicit whilst also building deeper relationships between leadership team members.

With greater alignment between leaders, cascading effective decision making frameworks and escalation policies that ensure that remote teams clearly understand the boundaries in which they operate becomes far easier.

Supported by:
- remote:af governance
- decision design
‍- all hands planning
- remote:af leadership team launch

clarity

remote:af teams are most effective when they can independently deliver value to customers and have high autonomy, but crucial to working in this fashion is clarity of purpose.

Through bi-directional mechanisms for strategic planning leaders connect their teams' work to both customer needs and strategic objectives, and make dependencies between teams clear and transparent. remote:af leaders work with their teams to build clear decision making frameworks and escalation policies to ensure that teams clearly understand the boundaries in which they operate.

Supported by:
- remote:af strategy design
- remote:af strategic planning
- enterprise and team of teams virtual obeya

competence

‍remote:af leaders ensure that their remote teams are funded; that they have the right tools and equipment to be productive, comfortable and safe; that they have the skills and experience necessary to execute; and, that they have access to expertise and professional development pathways where needed.

Supported by:
- remote:af team of teams launch
- remote:af team launch

care

remote:af teams require an environment of openness and trust where people feel “safe” to present information (whether positive or negative) through formal or informal hierarchy and power distances.

Leaders need to demonstrate empathy for a set of individual circumstances that are far less controlled than in the office environment and create an environment where people feel genuinely cared for despite their distance. The lack of physical proximity mandates over-communication with greater clarity. In remote working, siloes can become chasms and positional authority arguably carries greater weight of responsibility.

Supported by:
- remote:af leadership team launch
- remote:af team of teams launch
- remote:af team launch