Sharing yourself in virtual leadership
2017-02-10 Juha Hynynen
Whenever I nowadays ask managers in small, medium and large companies anywhere in the world about their most relevant daily leadership challenges, the virtual – or remote – leadership challenge always comes out as one of the top five mentions.
Pertec’s recent assessments amongst our global client base verify this finding: in our seven layer Intelligent Leadership™ framework, Leading Distributed Teams is systematically found as one of the most important but difficult areas of leadership of our times.
Surely we at Pertec have been addressing the above need in many of our leadership trainings during the past years: The fact that the teams to be led are distributed may be coped with, e.g., through coaching and shared leadership, using intelligent performance management practices, by frequent and systematic teleconferencing-enabled communication, using social media and other community-based platforms, and so on. We have many solutions we are happy to share with our customers.
Companies and entire societies are transferring to become micro and macro networks. Therefore, also our readiness to adapt to decentralization is getting better.
One aspect of virtual leadership which is often forgotten, however, within the myriad of systems and methods being set up for coping with the distributed nature of organizations and associated need for proper leadership is related to sharing oneself. Surely sharing one self is a core component in self leadership. It is also something that was recently brought up by Mårten Mickos in the series of AVP Masterclass interviews on entrepreneurial leadership hosted by Dr. Aino Tenhiälä at the Aalto University in Espoo.
The best leaders in the world whom the people wish to follow and are inspired by are partially that – in addition to having enough core leadership competences – because of the way they are and behave as human beings: What kind of car they drive, how they dress up, how they behave in the queuing line in the company cafeteria, the way they appear when happy or upset; the overall look and feel of the boss. The more you are able to humanize yourself as the leader towards your team members the more likely they are to support and follow you through good and bad times.
Ok – fair enough, you might say, but how do I then do that using phone or Skype? It does not actually have to be that difficult if you have a little bit of imagination, and willingness to step down from the ivory tower of formal leadership. You just have to figure out how to leave a permanent mark as a cool human being in your team members’ memories, and how to make them to want to communicate with you even if it is just a remote connection.
Mårten’s recipe was to sing a song. Yes, after every company-wide monthly business update conference call at MySQL he personally sang a new drinking song. Well, of course Mårten as a born Finnish-Swedish person had the luxury of knowing enough of different such songs but I believe it is a brilliant example of going out of one’s comfort zone for the purposes of establishing a true tribe with decentralized members but still with a common culture based on being humans and not just components in a company matrix.
How do you share yourself in your distributed organization? Should we try to find out ways together?
Juha Hynynen, Senior Partner, EVP International Operations
Whenever I nowadays ask managers in small, medium and large companies anywhere in the world about their most relevant daily leadership challenges, the virtual – or remote – leadership challenge always comes out as one of the top five mentions.
Pertec’s recent assessments amongst our global client base verify this finding: in our seven layer Intelligent Leadership™ framework, Leading Distributed Teams is systematically found as one of the most important but difficult areas of leadership of our times.
Surely we at Pertec have been addressing the above need in many of our leadership trainings during the past years: The fact that the teams to be led are distributed may be coped with, e.g., through coaching and shared leadership, using intelligent performance management practices, by frequent and systematic teleconferencing-enabled communication, using social media and other community-based platforms, and so on. We have many solutions we are happy to share with our customers.
Companies and entire societies are transferring to become micro and macro networks. Therefore, also our readiness to adapt to decentralization is getting better.
One aspect of virtual leadership which is often forgotten, however, within the myriad of systems and methods being set up for coping with the distributed nature of organizations and associated need for proper leadership is related to sharing oneself. Surely sharing one self is a core component in self leadership. It is also something that was recently brought up by Mårten Mickos in the series of AVP Masterclass interviews on entrepreneurial leadership hosted by Dr. Aino Tenhiälä at the Aalto University in Espoo.
The best leaders in the world whom the people wish to follow and are inspired by are partially that – in addition to having enough core leadership competences – because of the way they are and behave as human beings: What kind of car they drive, how they dress up, how they behave in the queuing line in the company cafeteria, the way they appear when happy or upset; the overall look and feel of the boss. The more you are able to humanize yourself as the leader towards your team members the more likely they are to support and follow you through good and bad times.
Ok – fair enough, you might say, but how do I then do that using phone or Skype? It does not actually have to be that difficult if you have a little bit of imagination, and willingness to step down from the ivory tower of formal leadership. You just have to figure out how to leave a permanent mark as a cool human being in your team members’ memories, and how to make them to want to communicate with you even if it is just a remote connection.
Mårten’s recipe was to sing a song. Yes, after every company-wide monthly business update conference call at MySQL he personally sang a new drinking song. Well, of course Mårten as a born Finnish-Swedish person had the luxury of knowing enough of different such songs but I believe it is a brilliant example of going out of one’s comfort zone for the purposes of establishing a true tribe with decentralized members but still with a common culture based on being humans and not just components in a company matrix.
How do you share yourself in your distributed organization? Should we try to find out ways together?
Juha Hynynen, Senior Partner, EVP International Operations