I have been leading teams of people working remotely for some time now. In fact, it does not differ from the typical on-site leadership in a profound way but it does have several subtle nuances and things worth knowing in order to do it effectively. Although every day brings something new to learn, in this article I am going to share a few thoughts that may help someone someday. So take them and let the force be with you!

Go visual

According to the popular theory, vast of communication between peers is passed non-verbally, with other means than raw words. This is especially noticeable at all kinds of business meetings: from the operational, team-scoped ones up to the high level conferences of senior management. We use all kinds of communication tools like the tone of our voice, our body language or even more subtle ones like pointing at things during talking about them which provides a huge shortcut in ensuring that our listener captures the subject of an utterance.

Clearly, most of these instruments become unavailable in the remote/telecommuting environment.

In order to compensate this shortfall, it is sometimes necessary to make use of all the other available options. Sharing your screen either live (during a call) or by recording or capturing it is one of the basics. Instead of explaining something you are just seeing on your desktop with raw words, it can surely be more efficient to do it with the explicitly marked context. If you do it a lot, it might also be a nice idea to try out a graphic tablet. The power of hand drawing when explaining a complex concept is clearly visible in numerous tutorials on the web (e.g. on Khan academy). Not only does it save words, but also it helps visualize the concepts.

Turn to leader-leader model

In a remote/telecommuting environment there is little place for direct control and micro management. Although the latter is almost always the worst one can do anyway (apart from a handful of morbid situations), the gap in the methods of control can significantly impair a management process in the traditional leadership model (leader-follower).

It has been recently observed that implementing another solution - leader-leader model -gives quite interesting results. In many cases (even as rigid as the military) the new way of work increased the total performance of teams, engagement of individual members and agility of their actions (see the article). This approach, by decentralizing control, has particular value when the means of control are limited which makes it a natural framework for distributed teams. Focus on measuring performance of the ultimate goal and always take individual, personal goals into account when identifying under-performance.

Be asynchronous

One of the main features of the remote/telecommuting work is that the team is often distributed across multiple time-zones. Even if it's not the case, this kind of working environment allows people to adjust working hours to their personal productivity cycle during the day. It means that the team members may rarely be online at the same time which makes scheduling a conference much harder. Certainly, it's good to have a face to face conversation or a group conference when needed (e.g. for brainstorming or when carrying out a complex discussion) from time to time but for simple, operational conversation it is probably much more efficient to use an asynchronous channels like forums, issue trackers or just basic mail threads. This way, everyone can take as much time to think about the response as they need and do it in one's own time. This, in turn, enhances the quality of the conversation and reduces the time wasted on not needed or too long conversations (or just sitting in a meeting where everyone is talking about a topic not relevant to you). In other words, well implemented asynchronous strategy of communication can greatly improve utilization of time within the team.

Manouvre between reactive and proactive (aka predictive) styles

One of the dimensions of a leadership style is the reactive-proactive axis. The reactive end relates to focusing on troubleshooting and resolution of issues that arise throughout a project. Proactive, on the other hand, means the leader constantly predicts what issues may arise in the future and prevent them beforehand. Although the latter might seem as the only right way to go, it operates on predictions which are not certain. It means that if you predicted a lot of troubles and started multiple mitigating actions but, in fact, none of the issues materialized (not because of the mitigation but because the predictions just happened to be invalid), you could cause a lot of confusion and waste a lot of your team's time. However, staying in the reactive zone means that many issues are not going to be prevented which is usually cheaper than fixing an already spilled milk (especially when there are dependencies from the buggy results).

Thus, even though it is definitely not easy, you should strive to be elastic in terms of being proactive/reactive and try to "predict how hard should you be predicting". Let's call it a second derivative of prediction (nerd joke alert ;). If there is a lot of uncertainty in the project and the prediction activities (estimation, meetings, discussions and so on) consume a significant part of the team's time, it might be reasonable to bend towards the reactive end of the axis. In other cases, proactive approach should probably be the default option.

The elasticity in terms of being reactive/proactive is particularly important in the remote/telecommuting environment due to the fact that the communication process is usually less verbose and a lot of issues may not be captured in the traditional fashion (like coffee breaks, atmosphere in the team, etc). It means that leading in such setting often requires much faster changes from proactive to reactive and back again.

(if you have managed to get all the way up here, there's a gift for you: this is Tristan de Cunha - one of the most remote islands in the world)