Leading a Virtual Team-How to Lead Your Team Remotely

With the Covid-19 crisis of 2020, many companies have had to adjust to managing remote teams on the fly. For the first 15 years that The Leaders Institute ® existed, we operated entirely remotely. In fact, we went through the opposite of what companies in early 2020 went through. We had to adjust our company culture from going from a virtual company to an office environment.

Of course, we had a couple of years to master the change. So, when the virus epidemic hit, and we had to start working remotely, we had a distinct advantage over our competitors. Here are a few tips about leading a virtual team that you can use based on our experience. Perhaps you can get a jump on your competition as well!

Create a Critical Communication Guide Before Going Remote.

Since we started as a virtual team, we never sat down to create a critical communication guide. Instead, we created it as we went along based on the mistakes and challenges that we experienced. (I don’t suggest that you do this, by the way. It is a very costly way to create a virtual team.)

The guide doesn’t have to be comprehensive or detailed, but you should put it in writing. This document is basically just a way for you, as the leader, to outline your expectations of how the team will communicate. For instance, we have internal projects that four or five people may be working on. Each of those team members needs to know the protocols for how to let the other team members know when the project is ready for input from another team member.

For example, we have recently been working remotely on creating and releasing online mini-courses. The team consists of four people — Me, the videographer, the website person, and the copywriter. The website person can’t really do a lot until the copy is written and the video is completely edited. So, it is important for each of these team members to keep her in the loop on their timetables.

Prior to having the guide in place, team members would jump from project to project not realizing that coworkers were waiting for them to complete a task. The more incidents like this occur, the high the frustration level will be.

A Few Items Include in Your Communication Guide that Can Help Avoid Miscommunication.