Why Leadership is important to your Remote Teams’ Success : Are leaders really needed in remote teams? Apart from helping to keep the team together, there are several other roles leaders play towards the success of remote teams. In this article, we will be focusing on several reasons why leadership is important to your remote teams’ success.
We also recommend that you try out Elaine Broe and her Leadership Collaboratory tools to help you successfully lead that team. But before then, let’s see what this article has in store for you, read on.
Importance of leadership for Remote teams
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Leadership Ensures Transparency
The inability of team members to maintain transparency is one of the biggest cons of remote teams. This is the primary reason behind the lack of enthusiasm, trust, and low morale of team members. If no one is directing or monitoring the way they work, remote teams tend to slack and allow the work to suffer.
To help curb these, the presence of leadership is vital. Also, they make team members conscious of their actions and be accountable for them.
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Communication
Remote team members tend to feel a disconnection from the team when they lack proper and sustained communication among themselves. It’s a leader’s responsibility to create a strong communication link between members of the team. The togetherness that effective communication fosters is a big contributor to the success of your remote team.
To help meet these needs, leaders are responsible for scheduling and initiating online group meetings. They also relay information to members absent from meeting or appoint someone to do so. Thankfully several social media platforms allow you to conduct meetings with several persons at the same time. Some of the commonly used platforms are telegram, Whatsapp, and Zoom.
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Teamwork
The growth of any remote team majorly depends on togetherness on the members’ side. A good way to do this is by engaging members in fun activities, and you need leaders to organize that too. Thankfully, we have several virtual activities to help with that.
Virtual activities you can choose from include developing a story together, playing trivia games online, giving a tour of your home on a video call, etc. Ultimately, these activities provide team members with platforms to know each other more personally, thereby reducing the feeling of isolation. Once you have these in place, it becomes easier for teams to collaborate much more easily.
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Goal Setting
A very effective means of achieving any task is by setting timely and realistic goals. A team without measurable goals is very likely to be at a standstill for long periods. Team leaders are responsible for setting the goals and objectives of the team. The goals should also make remote members know what is expected of them to enhance the team’s productivity.
Even as important as teamwork is, the team will perish without the presence of leaders to paint the big picture. Therefore, leaders are required to schedule virtual meetings where the team is updated on the progress of the team.
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Role Delegation
It’s of immeasurable importance to delegate roles to team members, and the leadership is responsible for this. Leaders should do regular online meetings to get feedback and relay useful information regarding the current work plan to checkmate this. For more specific instructions, we advise leaders to make a direct video call with the team member concerned.
In a team where members just get a task and go about doing it on their own terms, low productivity is common. An active leadership should be in a position to delegate roles to its members and follow through to its completion. When this is done with specific time allocations, the team experiences dramatic upward spikes in its productivity curve.
There should also be a scheme that allows members to ask for assistance if their pile of tasks is overwhelming. Equally, there should also be provision for less occupied team members to ask for tasks. This allows for the even distribution of tasks among team members and increased productivity.
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Tools Identification and Provision
Different projects that teams undergo require specific tools that members have to use during the project’s duration. Leaders providing these tools help their remote teams to boost efficiency and productivity. Also, knowing the right tools to use is effective in helping teams to terminate silos and adapt to improving work settings.
In selecting tools for your team, it is wise to analyze existent processes to ascertain that you can choose a solution with familiar aspects. For example, software tools used for management that automates your tasks all possess third-party interrogations plus time-tracking features. Therefore, choosing a tool that has features that your team members already know will help them understand the new software faster.
Conclusion
Belonging to a team that comprises people from different climes comes with a plethora of challenges. This necessitates the presence of active leadership to help manage and dictate operations. The truth is that finding a group of people with the right mix of skills and not having the leaders regulate their conduct is useless. So use the information we have discussed above to understand why leadership is important for successful remote teams.
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