After eighteen months of working at home, of endless video meetings and isolation from clients and colleagues, how are your team doing?

I’m assuming you have a team.

Whether you’re the leader of a team, a department or a division, whether you own the company or you’re part of a network of Associates, I’m guessing there are people who look to you for guidance and direction. Maybe not all the time, but certainly when the going gets tough.

I keep hearing the phrase ‘remote leadership’. Meaning, I assume, leadership from a distance, rather than the kind of distant, don’t-speak-unless-you’re-spoken-to kind of leadership that nobody wants or admits to.

Remote leadership is about providing direction and guidance to people you can’t be with face-to-face. Is it different from any other kind of leadership? Not really, it just requires a different kind of awareness and a bit of creativity.

Of course, there are lots of business leaders for whom managing a remote team is nothing new. Reliance on video conferencing, email and the occasional phone call is familiar territory for many and isn’t seen as a problem. Or it wasn’t.

Why is it a problem now? Because your team members are facing a different set of problems:

Any one of them might be:

• Fed up with working at home
• Worried about job security
• Tired of interacting via screens instead of in person
• Exhausted by uncertainty
• Needing an opportunity to get out of the house
• Frightened of returning to the office
• Suffering with ‘long COVID’
• Looking for another job
• Anxious about the future
• Feeling under-valued or under-utilised
• Out of touch with what’s going on in the business

Need I go on?

How would you know if even one of these were true about one of your people? In an environment where you only see them on screen for a part of the day, would you know if they were putting on a brave face during a meeting and then subsiding into desperation or distress once the camera goes off?

In the office, you can get a much more complete sense of a person, even if you’re not directly interacting with them all day. On screen, it’s much harder.

I’m flagging this up in case you’ve been under so much pressure to figure out when and how to return to the office that you haven’t been paying as much attention to your people as they might need.

Just because you can’t go for a walk around the office, doesn’t mean you can’t keep an eye on people. You just have to get a bit more creative about how you do it…

Please feel free to share your top tips for remote leadership below.

I moved house in April. My new home is a ‘new build’ and I’ve enjoyed the fact that no-one has lived here before me and I can create everything to my own taste and style. Inevitably, my first few months have be focused on the interior of the house, getting everything unpacked, disposing of items I no longer need and organising functional storage.

Last weekend, as I was cutting the grass – which is almost the only gardening I’ve been doing – it occurred to me that although I’d decided that the garden was a job for 2022, I have an opportunity right now to plant Spring bulbs and to enjoy a display of crocuses, daffodils and hyacinths in the early part of the year.

The front of the house has a small garden, mainly planted with evergreen shrubs by the builder. For some inexplicable reason, there is a very small patch of lawn (currently looking dry, sparse and slightly forlorn) on one side of the frontage. When I say small, I mean it’s less than a square metre. Possibly half that.

Musing on Spring bulbs, I realised that this would actually be the perfect place for a display of crocuses. Maybe with a border of hyacinths…

Plant now and I’ll have some lovely Spring colour in five or six months’ time. If I make the effort.

Which got me thinking about delayed gratification:

“Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure of life by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.”

M.Scott Peck
(Author of ‘The Road Less Travelled’)

Delayed gratification isn’t fashionable. We live in a world that encourages us to embrace the motto of ‘I want it all and I want it now’. Patient dedication to a long term outcome is under-valued by those who have never experienced it. And by some that have.

Okay, so maybe this isn’t a great example. Planting a few bulbs is hardly painful. I’m sure many keen gardeners will regard that as pleasurable. I do too. The challenge is allocating time to choose and buy the bulbs and then a time to plant them, when my schedule is already looking quite full.  It would be easy to put it off and put it off and miss the opportunity.

I know myself well enough to know that now I’ve had the thought, I’ll find some time. I’ll probably order the bulbs from an online supplier, taking the time to choose what I want during an evening when I’m finished with work for the day. Once the bulbs are delivered, I’ll be keen to make sure they don’t go to waste, so an hour that might have otherwise been spent relaxing will become a gardening hour.

For me, as long as I get started on something, I know I’m likely to complete it. I also know that if I didn’t act on that particular bright idea, I’d regret it every day in the Spring that I walked past that forlorn patch of grass.

How do I know this? Long experience!

I have had my times in the past when I’ve sold myself on the idea that I was too busy to do something and then regretted it later. There have been times when the immediate demands of the day or week have drawn my attention away from the long term view.

Often, when something isn’t working out the way I’d like, I can look back and see the actions I could have taken. Action which, had I taken them, might have altered the current situation significantly.

So, if you’ve made it this far through my ramblings about my garden, here’s something to muse on:

What can you do now, to ensure that 2022 turns out the way you want it?