In my post about Knowing Yourself as a Leader, I write about the importance of deliberate trust as a foundational aspect of how I lead and who I choose to be as a leader.

I choose to deliberately trust at the outset. I assume competence and I assume integrity, at least until I see evidence to the contrary. I tell people that I do this and I live it as much as possible — I am human after all.

Not everyone chooses to trust. And people who don't know each other, rarely trust each other. If you are working from multiple locations, it is highly likely that you may also be working across multiple timezones, and potentially multiple cultures and languages.

Of course being co-located, doesn't preclude working across multiple cultures or perspectives either!

Whether human or logistic in nature, these are all barriers to trust.

Even without these added complexities, it's very easy for teams that are not co-located to default to transactional relationships, where every interaction is because one person needs or wants something from the other.

Transactional interactions don't build trust. Or at least they don't build trust quickly.

It's the incidental stuff that builds trust. When colocated, these are the chats in the tearoom, team lunches, shared experiences and observations.

But when you're not spending this time together, how do you get beyond transactional to trusted?

Honestly, you have to plan it. You need to schedule time to do it.

If you're hybrid and local, make sure you have at least one day when as much of your team can co-locate as possible. Don't use this in person time for transactional meetings.

If members of your team are working staggered hours, work out the common hours and prioritise them for high value interactions.

The status meetings and the like — they translate pretty well from in person to online/remote — because they are somewhat transactional. But because you spend less time with people overall, I suggest you aim for shorter, more frequent meetings over longer, less frequent ones.

This reduces the risk of issues being raised late, or of key information being shared after it's needed.

Or turn some transactional meetings into discussion threads or emails. One of the teams I was leading most recently, was globally distributed, with very little timezone overlap for everyone. Instead of a weekly status meeting, we kicked off each week with an update email thread, that was everyone's Monday morning ritual from whatever timezone they happened to be in — people would share a quick summary of what they'd been working on, what was on their agenda for the coming week, and any problems or rumours of problems they were navigating. This created a shared context at the start of the week that kicked of a continuous conversation all week.

I've been working 100% remotely since March 2020. My teams are a mix of co-located, distributed and remote, though I'm not co-located with any of them. At least 50% of the time in my calendar is made up of 1on1 or small group discussions. These meetings often don't have a specific agenda — though I did learn that it's important to set context … it turns out when you get a random meeting request from your managing director, a lot of people assume they're in trouble.

So these 1on1 meetings focus around questions like:

How are you doing? What are you working on? Do you have any questions about what we're trying to do here? What's in your way? How is working from home going for you? Irrespective of your work goals, what do you most want to get out of the next six months? How can I help? Do you have any feedback for me?

I'm assuming that if you are in a role where you are leading people, that you like leading people. That you like being in a position where you can help people get the best out of themselves and those around them.

And it's not just the relationship between you and your team members — the complexity of a team is not measured by the number of team members, but in the number and nature of relationships.

I steal the pairing ladder concept from pair programming and schedule 30 mins once or twice a week for team members to get to know each other — each session the pairs rotate.

And you can plan social stuff online — weekly trivia sessions, or lunch and learns.

And yes, this will take more time than you will ever imagine, but it's both necessary and fulfilling.