Leading in a Hybrid World

Leaders are operating in an increasingly complex hybrid environment. Some are managing multiple goals and priorities on many teams in different time zones. With increased demands to meet business objectives, it’s hard to find the right balance of trust and control with some team members you’ll never engage with face-to-face.

Take your team beyond technology by learning the specific leadership skills outlined in the programs for Leading in a Hybrid World. Developing hybrid leadership strategies, clarifying responsibilities, effective delegation, and optimizing performance are just a few of the topics covered. These are essential programs for new or existing leaders and managers of organizations, boards, teams, and communities.

Twice the Work… Half the Time: Strategically Delegating from a Distance

It’s common for virtual leaders to think “If I can’t see my employees, how do I know if they are doing the work”? Many lack the confidence to develop their team members by giving them the authority and autonomy needed to flourish in their virtual roles. This erodes trust and inevitably leads to burnout for leaders who try to do it all. This interactive program will give you real world practice in delegating from a distance.

Participants will learn how to:

  • Overcome common limiting beliefs about delegation.
  • Recognize common delegation pitfalls and how to avoid them.
  • Apply strategies to match the right person to the right task.
  • Assign the right amount of authority and autonomy.
  • Describe the 3-step Delegation for Success process.
  • Practice and apply the delegation process.

Let go of control and feel confident that the right things are getting done in a timely manner. Effectively delegate with clearly articulated expectations. Empower your team and provide sufficient support to help them grow your business.

Mastering Hybrid Leadership

Hybrid team leadership is a relatively new experience for most organizations. In fact, 65% of experienced leaders have preventable failures in their first attempts at hybrid teamwork. That percentage is even higher for new managers. If poor leadership behaviours go unchecked, they become entrenched and grow over time. These are highly preventable failures that negatively impact the entire organization.

In this session participants will learn to:

  • Discuss the 4 types of hybrid leaders.
  • Describe strategies to implement the six key skill sets of a hybrid leader.
  • Rank your leadership skill set.
  • Create norms of behavior to foster team connection.
  • Apply what  you have learned to a case study.

You will be better equipped, more resilient, and confident in mitigating issues. Expose the silent threats that pose potential pitfalls. Build on effective hybrid leadership strategies that will benefit you, your team, and the company.

Optimizing Performance

Is your team working optimally, or just working? Sometimes things are getting done, but engagement is elusive. When that happens, cohesion and creativity plummet.

Add the mask of technology and it’s an immense challenge to manage and optimize performance. Evaluations, performance reviews, or friction points all become less comfortable and harder to gauge.

You need ways to build and sustain engagement. You need strategies to build team creativity and responsiveness. You don’t need to be bogged down in micromanaging.

In this session, we will guide you in optimizing the performance of your people, not simply managing the metrics of performance.

In this session, you will learn how to:

  • Discuss challenges to tracking performance from a distance and brainstorm solutions to overcome these challenges.
  • Build trust through sharing credit, recognizing quick wins, and reading the virtual room.
  • Provide feedback to improve your team members’ performance.
  • Prepare strategies to recognize and reward performance while improving morale and retention.

Feel more confident about optimizing your hybrid teams’ performance at a distance. Use this wealth of practical knowledge, skills, and tips to help you and your team deliver on business objectives and achieve higher goals.

Emotional KPIs

How do you measure your team’s performance? For many leaders and teams, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a core indicator of success but they stress output and not optimization or emotions.

Measuring through output ensures tasks are accomplished, but is that enough? Is creativity and innovation the norm, or is engagement being eclipsed by overwhelmed team members? Would you know how to tell early enough to act? While bottlenecks are easy to spot, burnout is not, especially from a distance.

In this session you will learn to:

  • Assess and monitor behaviors of your team.
  • Assess how your team is performing.
  • Explore when corrective feedback is necessary.
  • Develop emotional intelligence in a remote environment.
  • Create a personal action plan.

With rapid technology shifts, continuous improvement programs, and pressure to respond to market demands with agility, today’s leaders must manage a blinding rate of change. Proven organizational change models provide a framework but may not provide a pathway to successful change that sticks for virtual teams.

In this session, we’ll delve into some pitfalls of virtual change and discuss strategies to manage change in a constantly evolving virtual world:

In this  session the participants will learn to:

  • Demonstrate how to put people first by pre-empting stress and working through pushback
  • Describe strategies to keep your team motivated, positive, and resilient.
  • Identify strategies to navigate through change
  • Show how to make change stick and reinforce the gains
  • Identify and empower emergent leaders, influencers, and change agents on your team
  • Identify effective communication and feedback loops
Leading Hybrid Teams Through Conflict

The hybrid nature of teams can make conflict management even more challenging than face-to-face team conflict. According to Lindred Greer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “Conflict in virtual teams is more likely to have a negative impact on performance and is more likely to escalate.

In this session, we will explore the three types of conflict, and strategies to manage them in a hybrid setting.

In this session the participants will learn to:

  • Delineate functional and dysfunctional conflict
  • Identify unhealthy patterns like false consensus and power-plays
  • Demonstrate ways passive-aggressive and provocation can spread via technology
  • Identify ways to reduce conflict contagion
  • Describe strategies to avoid alienation and isolation
  • Show how to leverage conflict to boost creativity & engagement