How To Lead a Remote Team

How To Lead a Remote Team

Sean: I want to get some pointers from you with as much as you could recall, and I’m going to rewind it a little bit because I want to know when you tried it out and not a lot of companies, not a lot of people were trying out remote work way back then. You’re way ahead of your time. How did you adjust your leadership? And we always say that you got to they’ve got to feel your presence. You’ve got to be in office. You’ve got to show them that you’re there. Your hands on you lead by example. How did your leadership transition from being there in the office, them seeing you physically face to face, you’re talking with them to now being fully remote? And I guess this question is relevant up to today because a lot of leaders are still trying to struggle, go through the haystack, trying to figure out how am I going to adapt my leadership now with my team.

Rob: Yeah, actually, to be honest, for quite a while, I don’t think I’ve focused on leadership. I don’t think I’ve focused on how do I inspire my team. And it’s only more recently that I realized that this is really the key thing that I need to do because we have a bigger company, we have 130 people. And my influence now is really how do I inspire people? How do I make this a mission for everyone? How do I get everyone connected to the direction that we’re going? This is a critical thing. So in the beginning when we were small, I wasn’t really doing it. I was basically probably a bit more hands-on manager just saying, okay, let’s do this, let’s do this. I wasn’t really inspiring. I wasn’t really leading as much. And now I’ve also got some very senior people around the world, and those senior people demand me to be leaders, to be a leader, because they are basically telling me, well, you need to be more inspiring. You need to be leading from the front and really be that leader. And so that’s opened my mind up to it. It’s challenging sometimes if you’re more introverted, right? I think a lot of people think leaders should be this really like rah, rah, rah, rah, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. And I think that’s okay. That’s kind of fun in a way, and it’s great if leaders can do that. But I know that there are a lot of introverted leaders, too, and I think they’re good. Like they’re very effective. And that’s that kind of servant leadership where you’re making sure that your team comes first, like, how can I serve you? How can I make sure that you’re happy and being sometimes the rah-rah-rah leaders, it could be a negative if you’re just always in the spotlight and you’re not highlighting your team. So I’m now trying to lift up my team, trying to highlight them, trying to be more in the background rather than just saying what people should do or trying to try to inspire more. And another aspect honestly about leadership is you have to have the right people on your team in the first place, the people that are self-motivated. Because if you’re trying to lead people that are not necessarily motivated or want to be there, it doesn’t work as well.