How Teleworking Can Make You a Better Manager
The strength of your management relationship with each of your team members depends on the quality of your interactions one another. The cumulative impact of these interactions is the difference between a healthy, effective relationship—characterized by mutual trust and open communication—and a dysfunctional one. Unfortunately, developing the skills to conduct successful interactions takes time and practice.
The current teleworking environment is your opportunity to improve your ability to navigate these interactions—and to be a better manager. There are generally fewer meetings and far less people stopping by your office. At a distance, you can more easily control the timing and volume of your engagement. By making your interactions more intentional, you increase your ability to conduct them to be both more productive in the near term and better able to foster strong working relationships. Each intentional interaction has three elements: preparation, engagement and reflection.
Prepare. It’s very hard to have a successful interaction if you aren’t clear about what success even looks like. An agenda is a good first step, but if you want the interaction to strengthen the relationship, more nuanced preparation is required. At first this will take significant time, but with practice it becomes much quicker. Carve out some time for yourself at least an hour before each interaction and ask yourself these questions:
What are your objectives?
What is the substance of the interaction? Usually, these will be the items on an agenda.
For each item on your agenda, what is the interaction intended to accomplish? Are you receiving an update, providing feedback, reviewing a decision, having a discussion?
How could the interaction advance the longer term success of the team member and of your relationship? To identify the opportunities, you’ll need to have an understanding of both the relationship’s existing dynamics and how these might improve.
What obstacles do you anticipate?
What has happened in similar situations? The intent here is to identify patterns of behavior—the team member shuts down, deflects responsibility to others, needs time to process new information.
How are you contributing to these dynamics?
How can you best address these dynamics? What will you do differently? What will be encouraging your team member to do differently? Treat these as experiments—whether or not your efforts are successful, there’s much to learn.
Is your team member prepared to have a successful interaction?
Do they know what will be discussed?
Have you let them know what questions you’re planning to ask, particularly if they might require research or advance thought?
Are you planning to tell them something that will surprise them? What can you do to mitigate any likely negative impacts?
How can you best connect their growth goals to this interaction?
How will you model the behaviors and attitudes that you’d like to reinforce?
At first, these steps will feel awkward, but eventually you’ll be able to run through these in just a few minutes. As you become a stronger manager, you’ll find fewer obstacles and you’ll have better tools for how to address these.
Engage. Being prepared ahead of time will equip you to be more intentional during the interaction itself. Engage with clarity, curiosity and kindness. Ironically, this may be easier at a distance. Because remote communication is slightly more difficult, you should find yourself concentrating harder than you might otherwise. The physical distance may also support a healthy amount of emotional distance that will enable you to process what’s happening more analytically, enabling you to engage more effectively.
Be Clear. The better prepared you are, the easier it will be to say what you want to say. Also critical is that your team member understands what you want them too. Whenever you have reason to doubt that that this is happening or if there’s a pattern of misunderstanding, ask questions.
Be Curious. Are you understanding your team member? Are you making assumptions? Listen carefully and ask questions. Choosing to be curious opens you up to learning, models how you’d like your team member to approach new information, and increases the chances that the interaction will be successful.
Be Kind. This is also a choice. There are lots of reasons that your team member may be struggling in one way or another. Now, more than ever, is the right time to be empathetic. Keep your work expectations in perspective and assume that your team member is doing the best that they can—until they prove otherwise.
Reflect. In the perpetual motion machine that is most of our normal work days, it’s easy to neglect this essential phase of improving interactions. Ideally, reflection will occur in two different moments:
Immediately after the interaction. Make a few notes on what happened, what went well and what didn’t. Ask yourself thes questions:
What did you hope to accomplish? Did you?
How good was your preparation?
What did you learn?
What mistakes did you make?
Would it be helpful to memorialize for yourself? for your team member?
What follow-up needs to occur?
How will you apply this to your next interaction?
Don’t actually DO anything. One advantage to remote working is that there should be less urgency to take immediate action. Give yourself the time to process.
With some distance. Wait at least an hour or two and then reconsider the same questions. Compare your immediate reaction and the delay to see what you can learn about your own processing.
Preparation, engagement and reflection form a loop. The cycle repeats continually, with reflections informing preparations for the next interaction.
Even the best managers need time to develop the skills to conduct successful interactions that serve as building blocks to stronger relationships. Like most other skills, the more you practice, the better you get and the less time and energy you need to invest. If you can, take advantage of the time and distance afforded to you by teleworking, and start practicing.