3 Missing Pieces to Lead Your Team in Harmony  (Hybrid Workforce Series, Part 3)

It’s easy to tell leaders to be more encouraging. More empathetic. More leader-ly. It’s easy to instruct with platitudes.

It’s much harder to drill down to discover what’s really missing in our leadership skillset. 

For most of us, the skills that got us to where we are today are immensely helpful but not fully adequate for successfully leading virtual or hybrid teams in the future. 

We started this series on the Hybrid Workforce by discussing first that the virtual workforce is here to stay and then shared the three keys you need to make the work from home revolution work for you, and today, we’re sharing three missing pieces you need to maximize your remote team. 

Missing Piece #1: A New Mindset For Your New Role 

It’s an odd analogy but the leader of a virtual team is first a conductor and then a coach. It’s a mind shift in how you identify your role moving forward and how you choose to activate your role, day-to-day. 

If you’ve listened to a beautiful live performance of an orchestra (remember those?) and ever wondered what a conductor’s role is -besides wearing the suit and waving the cool wand- there’s a lot happening behind that baton. 

A musical conductor’s job is much more strategic than simply keeping time, their role is to set the tempo, unify performers, listen critically, and shape the sound of the ensemble to guide the interpretation of the music.

It’s a lot like leading a virtual team. Similarly, a business leader’s role is to:

• Set the tempo by setting company goals, plus setting the pace of the energy to achieve those goals (shaping the tone, inspiring by intensity, guiding the outcome).

• Unify performers by attracting professional players and ensuring the team plays well together. If your team is equipped with the right equipment and skills, then they will create beautiful music, if not, they will create dissonance and disharmony. 

• Listen critically by being prescriptive and intentional but also, by listening to all departments, monitoring and measuring to discern whether the team is playing toward the right result.

• Guiding the outcome by coaching a team -whether a basketball team or an orchestra- through departmental and individualized coaching that serves the greater mission. 

The conductor analogy is insightful to consider because it helps you understand that your role is to cast a vision for the business as a whole and help all players play in concert with one another toward the ultimate objective.

It’s the difference between seeing your role as a coach only -simply cheering others on, hoping they hit their goals- or arranging, supporting, and coaching the team toward unity. And, whether your team is the Los Angeles Philharmonic or the Los Angeles Lakers, there are still a few more missing pieces. 

Missing Piece #2: Measuring Progress & Performance 

Managing a virtual team has led many of us to experiment with different strategies. 

For example, as a way to ensure everyone was working, I recently heard a leader mandate that each employee “publish on Slack, each morning, the three things you want to get done every day and in the evening, the progress you made on those tasks.” 

His heart was right, trying to help folks stay focused and give them an option to self-manage with accountability, but that tactic is micromanaging daily tasks, it’s monitoring activity versus measuring progress. 

When Leonard Bernstein was conducting, he wasn’t managing an oboe player, he was conducting the whole orchestra. He expected the oboe player - a professional- to show up and do her job. The missing piece wasn’t that the oboe player wasn’t prepared to play, it was that the oboe player wasn’t playing in tune with the entire arrangement or toward the intended outcome.

As leaders who set the overall direction for your company, one of the missing links for many of us is how we are measuring each employee’s performance and departmental performance against company goals.

In the promo business, we set goals by sales/revenue, since sales is both our economic engine and our scorecard. But big audacious sales goals and individual sales goals only impact two entities: the organization and the sales department. 

What about the rest of the orchestra (team)? Production. Support. Design/creative. Fulfillment/Kitting. Each department should be contributing to the organization’s overall success and you, as a leader, should have a practical way to measure and monitor that progress. 

An example: Some companies use smart goals. At commonsku, we use OKRs (which stands for objectives and key results). Each quarter, the company sets an overall goal to grow sales but behind that goal is where the magic happens: beneath that goal are 3-4 company-wide sub-goals that (once achieved) will drive the ultimate goal forward and achieve the intended outcome. Every department, whether it’s development, marketing, customer success, content, etc, sets subsequent departmental goals that roll up into the 3-4 key company goals, which then roll up in the #1 overall goal. 

That explanation sounds complicated and it does take some work, but so does playing first position in the London Symphony or playing point guard on the championship basketball team. 

With this method, you have alignment (harmony) of all the team members working toward one goal and with the right tools, you can monitor and measure that progress. 

With that in mind, what’s the missing piece for you? Do you have the right overall arrangement in place that allows everyone to play in concert? Do you have the right collaboration tools that ensure everyone is playing in unison? Are your goals applicable, visible, and transparent to all?   

What’s the missing piece that will make management less micro and more mindful?

Missing Piece #3: Intentional Communication

How can we humans, who talk all day long, get communication soooo wrong, so often?

Our industry, particularly, is prone to bad comms for a few good reasons: the relentless pace of the business due to deadlines makes each day’s work a sprint, and also, the complexity of the supply chain means problems frequently arise. So, we’re always chattering about something, but it’s usually transactional: putting out fires, seeking advice regarding clients, rushing to meet target dates. 

But through our constant chatter about all things we lose the substantive chats about the most important things, like our team’s well-being, our personal progress and development, and our goal alignment with the team as a whole. 

And since a virtual team leader doesn’t have hallways, breakroom chit-chat, or face-to-face opportunities that give you visual cues into how someone is doing, we must carve out space to make those opportunities happen. We must be both prescriptive about our time with our team and intentional, creating weekly space (monthly space, and quarterly space) to talk about the non-urgent but vitally important tasks that keep the entire orchestra playing. 

For some, their businesses are too large to do this with everyone but you can do this with your direct reports and by so doing, set the example for all, affecting culture from the top down.

It’s so much easier to slip into auto-pilot managing a virtual team and particularly dangerous for us in the business who talk with our team all day long but don’t communicate on the essentials. As leaders, we should always be more visible to our team in Slack and responsive through email, but we must  set aside time to engage our team with the high impact goals that keep us moving forward. 

Be sure you are setting time, whether you do it weekly, monthly, or quarterly to see how you are and your team are progressing, not just in the business but in life. 

A conductor guides, they never command. They not only assemble the best professionals to accomplish their goals, they build harmony by taking many different people with varied talents and conduct them toward the right outcome. 

Though they do not play an instrument, their power is in their ability to bring it all together in concert, beautifully.