Leadership blind spot: how to support your remote and hybrid people

Controversial opinion: leaders who think or convince themselves into believing that supporting RTO (return to office) policies is the right thing to do are less likely to truly understand and support their teams.

I joined IBM half a lifetime (literally!) ago, after an intensive, in person/on site experience at a dot com startup which succumbed to the IT bubble bursting. Ever since then I have only held geographically distributed, cross cultural, and often cross-functional roles. 

A two year consulting engagement I had with a customer also involved my running mini-projects with stakeholders in six different countries with distinct cultures, languages, and approaches to problem solving. So by the time I became a People Manager in 2021, not only was I well versed in remotely supporting colleagues, upline, and clients, it had become my way of working. 

With the trend in many companies bringing people back to the office, I am firmly on the side of honouring the remote option for most* employees, especially as a leader. Why?

• I've written about this at length before: trust underpins success. Leaders need to earn their teams' collective trust to be effective. This is difficult to do, and easily lost. Earning trust is about the quality of (two way) communication and consistency of actions matching words. It is not possible to build or maintain trust simply by being physically present in the same building or even spending concentrated periods of time together.
• The corollary to the aboveis that team should be trusted first by leaders. People tend to live up to expectations, or down to lowered ones. Even humans in their mid-20s are grownups (even if they don't feel like they are!) and deserve to be treated as trustworthy individuals who can manage their own workload and time.
• It is objectively easier to manage one's time and be productive when working remotely. No commute (nor the expense or energy drain from said commute), proximity to family members who need support and other amenities, and the aforementioned trust placed in team members by upline combined result in improved productivity.
• I strongly believe that professionals should be assessed by the quality of their output and not by whether they are willing to sacrifice their time and sap their energy to appear at the water cooler or are in their element in after work events. 

Of course, how they work with others affects a leader's perceptions of their overall worth and few roles can be performed well in complete isolation socially (more's the pity, I used to believe).

As a dyed-in-the-wool introvert, I am naturally inclined to both favour 1:1 interactions and to listen actively. These are strengths that permit me to get to know the people I support via regular touchpoints regardless of whether they're in person meetups or via videoconferencing. Knowing your team makes it easier to support them in ways that they need and in ways that they want. 

*The extroverts - who were in the minority in most teams I have worked with - were miserable during Covid-19 lockdowns, so for their mental well-being I support at least a hybrid model when it makes sense to. If your stakeholders or most of your team mates are remote to you, however, we end up with this scenario anyway (due credit goes to Rob Cottingham for the below cartoon):