I delivered a talk earlier this year at a Women in Leadership summit. The topic I was asked to speak to was that of the opportunities and challenges of leading teams in an environment where those teams may be any mix of co-located, remote or distributed (hence hybrid). What follows is a summary of the talk I gave, though I have split part of it off into a separate post of "What is a Leader?".

It was 1995 when I used the internet for the first time. I was 17 and I'd just arrived at university. I was so excited at what I could imagine for the future of this technology. Equity of access to information. Barrier breaking opportunities for collaboration across the globe. All sorts of magical futures played themselves out before me.

And for most of my career, technology has played a constraining role, however today, our ability to execute is catching up with our imagination.

I just never expected a global pandemic to be a major milestone in that progress towards what I imagined at 17.

Prior to 2020, Zoom may have been a verb amongst my colleagues, but not more broadly. And prior to 2020, I spent a lot of time convincing people that they could, in fact, work in a distributed fashion with team members in multiple locations. And that having some team members work from home or embrace other flexible practices was doable — and desirable.

Now? At an organisational level, the conversation has moved on from when-hell-freezes-over / this-will-never-work to "okay, so how do we do this right?"

I have been incredibly lucky in my career to collect a huge variety of experiences, leading teams for over twenty years. For the last 15 years, those teams have been a combination of co-located, distributed, remote and flexible. I've lived and worked in multiple countries with very different cultural context. I've led hybrid teams as a programme and transformation leader, I've led hybrid teams as a managing director and I've led hybrid teams as a global executive focussed on organisation wide transformation spanning 17 countries — including going through an IPO. During a pandemic.

The first to highlight is that changes to how workforces are organised does not change our core purpose as leaders of teams, to combine collective and individual perspectives to maximise inclusivity, participation and productivity, in an ever changing context.

If you've been leading teams successfully in a traditionally co-located context, you already have the skills to "combine collective and individual perspectives to maximise inclusivity, participation and productivity" — it's the context that has shifted, and as a result you may need to learn new tactics or approaches to be successful.

The definition of co-located, remote, distributed, flexible and hybrid are probably self explanatory, but it's worth calling out a few points that are often overlooked.

  1. First, "hybrid" isn't really a thing in and of itself, but a term to describe any combination of these — a team that is mostly co-located with a handful of people working remotely is hybrid. A team that spans offices in six countries, but where no-one works remotely (which is now pretty uncommon) is not — it's just distributed. This might seem pedantic, but as a leader, you need to know what constitutes your team make-up and how to design collaboration strategies for that make-up.
  2. Flexibility, is first about the individual, then about the team. Obviously there is overlap, and intersection. And there is opportunity — more acceptance of different work locations means more options for more people. And there are clearly collective benefits to this. But it's important to understand the individual perspective when it comes to all aspects of flexibility. In terms of location, it's easy to get carried away by the flexible options increasingly available to us, but it's important to remember that not everyone can — or wants to — work from home. Some homes don't have the space, either physically or socially, for people to work effectively. For some people the workplace is a refuge from an unsafe home life. For others, the isolation of remote work can be damaging. As leaders, we have a responsibility to ensure individual needs are understood and that people are cared for, in our role is to combine collective and individual perspectives to maximise inclusivity, participation and productivity.
  3. There is no single perfect team design. I think we can all agree that the biggest challenge any of us — all of us — face is constant change, and as leaders, we not only need to navigate that constant change ourselves, but we have to help guide and support others as we do so. As such, the best design to get the most out of your team today, might not be the best design tomorrow.

From a large global shift that we all experience, like, you know, a global pandemic (or an economic crisis, a tech crisis …) to something a little closer to home — say the company you work for going through an IPO, to something really personal, like a life changing injury. Our job as leaders is to continuously monitor and adjust in order to meet the changing needs of individuals and teams. That's the job!

The shift in work location and pattern is just one of the results of the kind of change that we need to navigate as leaders.

So what are the practical things you can do to help yourself navigate successfully?

  • Knowing yourself as a leader
  • A team can't be great without trust