Keys to virtual leadership

It’s all about fostering cohesion and commitment

Leadership is foundational to the success of organisations. However, in a world where the COVID pandemic continues to force organisations into remote work mode, the ability to apply virtual leadership skills is more important than ever. While standard leadership skills remain important, virtual leadership requires a unique set go skills that fosters openness, communication, trust and cohesion.

In this article, Keather Snyder, then director of the Federal Market at AchieveGlobal, suggests the two keys of successful virtual leadership are group cohesion and individual commitment.

To foster cohesion it’s vital virtual leaders:

• Monitor group relationships and anticipate potential obstacles to connectedness;
• Ensure technology is available and functioning to facilitate collaboration;
• Find ways to include social interactions, and;
• Encourage group members to collaborate by referring them to another group member with the appropriate skills.

Fostering individual commitment? Well, that’s a topic all on its own, but in this context it’s all about motivation. When working remotely, your team members don’t have external motivating factors such as the physical presence of other members or a manager. So, you need to unlock their internal motivation. The Snyder article provides three drivers of motivation you can apply to your remote team:

1. Competence. Ensure members feel valued for their skills, knowledge, and experience.
2. Relatedness. Encourage members to collaborate—they still want to feel they’re working as part of the larger team.
3. Autonomy. Provide members with clear business goals, a set of guidelines to operate within, and then freedom to manage themselves within those parameters.

The other key to motivation is communicating a clear, common vision. The difficulty with this is you’ll be doing so without the usual face-to-face communication cues. Using multiples channels of communication to convey the message will help in maximising its effectiveness.

Virtual leadership often requires a heavier focus on goals and objectives. For the virtual leader this means:

• Setting achievable goals and deadlines with input from the team, and;
• Keeping your team informed about progress and being clear about any required changes.

Leading virtually also means you’ll need to be more intentional about providing and seeking feedback. You don’t have the ability to rely on general observation and meetings to facilitate feedback, so you need to ask regularly for it and provide your team with quality feedback, which in turn helps with building trust and cohesiveness within your team.

While leading a team from a distance is a big adjustment, remote working is here to stay in one form or another. If you can lead your team to a place of cohesiveness and commitment, you’ll find members who are just as productive, creative, engaged and, especially, resilient.

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