Team Anywhere Leadership Podcast

The rules have changed. What used to work for you as an employee, as a manager, or as an organization isn't going to work anymore. 

Today on the podcast we have Vice President of User Experience at RingCentral, Michael Peachey. Michael has been at the forefront of Human Centered Design, especially looking at how teams collaborate from anywhere. In this episode, we explore the rules that change and your new responsibilities as an organization, a team leader, a team member.

If you're remote, or if you're on a hybrid team in the office, you need to go out of your way to connect to your team. It's always been an obligation, but it's now more crucial for you to take on that responsibility so that you can thrive as you Team Anywhere. As teams continue to evolve, follow these simple rules to help you succeed as a hybrid team.

New Rules for Successful Hybrid Teams

• Fully Appreciate & Design Around Reality
• Focus MORE on Strengthening Relationships
  • As a Leader:
    A leader’s main focus is getting their team members to perform at their best. And to get the most out of your people, you need to connect.  If someone is not connecting, leaders need to reach out. 
  • As a Team:
    In a hybrid meeting, particularly a larger one, assign a specific person on the team in the office who is responsible for making sure the remote people are engaged. This person has the authority to interrupt and advocate for the remote employees. This keeps remote attendees connected, engaged and participating. 
  • As a Team member:
    In today’s work environment, most people don’t get work done all by themselves. Most of us have to work with other people. Folks don’t necessarily love attending meetings, but well-run meetings increase engagement, collaboration, and communication. 
  • As a team member, you need to recognize that you need connection for social and emotional nurturing. Work relationships are important. The people you work with are an important part of your social and emotional systems. 
• Foster a Remote-First Culture
• Create and Follow a Strong Hybrid Meeting Etiquette

See the full summary here.

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Have you created the perfect hybrid work schedule yet? On today's episode, we interview Sam Palazzolo, Founder and Managing Director at Tip of the Spear Ventures and we learn how leaders need to be focusing more on what has worked and not worked in the past rather than their hybrid work schedules. 

When leaders focus on the right things, it allows space for innovation on their hybrid team. Focusing on over communication, creating a collaborative vision, increasing clarity and continuing to seek new perspectives on your business, will help you continue to lead your hybrid teams from anywhere. 

Over Communicating (Seriously, Keep Doing That!)

Over communicating is a habit many companies chose to pick up in the pandemic. Without having their employees in the office full time, companies felt a greater need to over-communicate with their staff. This is a habit that needs to continue. Ironically, there is a false assumption that extra communication worked with teams because the pandemic required an influx of communication. But the truth is that over communication is an underrated habit that companies and leaders need to demonstrate in all environments--pandemic or not. 

In terms of communication, team members need to see what Sam calls the “face of the business.” Leaders at all levels are the face of the business and they need to continue to be aware of their leadership presence. Leaders with the right amount of presence will communicate crucial details to their teams as the communication flows through the organization. 

Creating a Collaborative Vision Versus a Top-Down Vision

If your people are your most valuable asset, what are you actually doing to make them successful? It’s one thing to have an executive team attend a retreat and come back with a shared vision. But, it's another thing to transform vision into reality. In order to make a vision actually work, leaders need to have conversations about their vision with employees at all levels of the organization to reality test that vision.

A huge source of frustration occurs when team members hear a leader share a big picture vision that seems impossible to actually achieve. Conversations around your vision should be collaborative, encouraging perspectives and details from those on the front line. 

Building Clarity Around What is Working, and What Isn’t Working

The leaders most often needed in times of crisis are very clear on where the organization is supposed to go.  For leaders, the challenge today lies in asking themselves the question, “Is what we did in the past, the right thing to do in the future?” The answer to this depends on a lot of variables. Having these conversations with your team and seeking their feedback is going to help you get the information that you need.

Get Perspective from a Higher Altitude to Expand Your Vision

Leaders are going to be challenged to view the landscape of the business from a higher altitude to expand their vision. At this higher altitude, leaders should look to expand their vision both internally and externally within the company. An expanded vision gives greater clarity to the day to day business.

Leverage Masterminds

Every leader doesn’t have the answers all the time. As leaders, it can feel lonely at the top and it can feel like you have no one to turn to. Meeting on a regular basis with other business owners or leaders to share your challenges and opportunities can add a level of accountability.

During this time, leaders can gather input from their peers and formulate an action plan. During the next mastermind, leaders can share implemented ideas, results, and next steps. If you want to be really successful with a hybrid team, bring in outside perspectives on your company. 

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In today’s episode we interview Phil Simon, author of Reimagining Collaboration: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and the Post-COVID World of Work. While many leaders are focused on how to go back to the office, Phil cautions that instead of focusing on when or how to go back, we should instead focus on how best to collaborate. 

It is possible to collaborate in a hybrid environment effectively and efficiently, but it will require curiosity and experimentation. Leaders will focus on culture and priorities first, and then choose their collaboration tools to design the best ways of working. The winners in the future will build engagement and grow profits through maximizing collaboration to Team Anywhere.

What is Hybrid collaboration?

Success begins with a common understanding of terms. What do we mean by collaborating on a hybrid team? Is it the same as productivity? Having these kinds of conversations with your teams is going to open up opportunities to see new perspectives and expectations as to collaboration.

Collaboration vs. Productivity

Collaboration and productivity are not the same. An independent team member can work alone and be very productive. Alternatively, several team members can collaborate poorly and thus hinder productivity. Consequently, it is important to clearly define both concepts--what does collaboration look like for us? What does productivity look like? Let’s make both happen. 

In terms of Collaboration, We’re Never Going Back

Before the COVID pandemic, collaboration was different. There was much more synchronous and in-person collaboration. The pandemic taught leaders and teams that remote work and collaboration was possible. Many employees have liked the ability to work from home and they want to continue their remote work. After a year and a half of learning to collaborate remotely - many teams and companies have realized that there really won’t be going back to the way collaboration was before the pandemic. 

Create Curiosity when there’s a Resistance To Change

When it comes to making changes to how you collaborate, there’s bound to be resistance to change. Sometimes it's a team or team member, and sometimes it's the leader. It can be hard for team members to speak up and encourage their leaders to leverage, purchase, and actively learn collaboration tools. Fortunately, when most leaders realize the benefits of company-wide collaboration tools, they can’t believe they didn’t embrace the change earlier. 

We Need to Reimagine Collaboration and Teamwork in a Different Way

Much thought is needed to re-imagine collaboration and teamwork as we move into an increased hybrid environment. Leaders are asking questions, such as, “How do you evaluate employees?” “How do you look at workflow in terms of collaboration?” “What part of the performance review measures collaboration?” If collaboration is important, it should be connected to performance check-ins and used to support an entire high performance culture 

Collaboration isn't just about tools; rather, it should be the infrastructure of our emerging work world. It is the glue for business processes, organizational culture, hiring, change management, and engagement. 

Click here for the full summary.

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Today's leadership in the virtual and hybrid world requires a new leadership mindset. Leaders must be flexible and willing to work with ambiguity. It's very much about collaboration and the process of inquiry. On today's podcast, we interview Laila Tarraf, Chief People Officer of Allbirds and learn about her journey and her powerful new leadership book, Strong Like Water™  How I Found the Courage to Lead with Love in Business and in Life

Laila Tarraf will show you how to open your heart and step into the type of leadership that is required in today's chaotic world where no one has the map of what the future brings. Laila encourages leaders to strike a balance between using their heads and their hearts, a place where Laila believes the magic happens. In this episode, you'll hear Laila’s incredible story where connecting to her heart allowed her to strengthen her leadership.

Leadership Mindset Shifts

• From “Just keep Going” to “Stop, Process, & Feel”
• From Having Your “Edge” to Being “Soft” is a Strength 
• From Leadership is an “Outside-in Job” to an “Inside-out Job” 
• From “Be Unrealistically Hard On Yourself” to “Love Yourself”
• From “Have All the Answers & Do It On Your Own” to “Tribe Mentality”
• From “Leading Blindly” to “Principled Leadership”

To learn more about the details behind these leadership mindset shifts, see the full summary here and listen to the podcast. 

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The tempo in our return to office plans should be much slower than it was when the pandemic started and everyone went home to work. When the pandemic started, the pace of getting employees to work from home was like running. It was a crisis. Now, a year and a half later, the crisis is still showing uncertainty. As employees begin to move back to the office, great leaders know that the way back isn’t to run. Leaders need to set a tempo that’s more like walking.

In this episode, Rob LoCascio, CEO of live person, shares with us that the greatest leaders today must be the type that set a walking pace, provide certainty and clarity, and remain authentic - even in the most challenging times. 

This is the time for leaders to acknowledge that no one knows what the future holds. The best way forward is for leaders to share the truth about what they do know, rather than pretending they have everything figured out. Instead, leaders must listen to their employees to find out what their employees need in order to Team Anywhere.

Leaders Should Give Themselves a Break

Leaders can be very hard on themselves. They have had to navigate immense amounts of uncertainty without having much control over it. As humans, we tend to get angry when we feel we are losing control. The pandemic has caused leaders to feel frustrated, angry, and helpless as they try to navigate the return to office plans moving forward. The lack of ability to control the situation can be aggravating and defeating. We all get it, and we all feel it.

But at the end of the day, leaders have to give themselves a break and realize that they are doing their best. Every company is dealing with the same issues and no one has the right answer right now. Give yourself a break and focus on accepting that there are things occurring right now that you can’t control. 

Walk - Don’t Run

Our natural tendency is to run, when right now, we need to walk. It is extremely important that leaders slow down and listen to what their employees are thinking, saying, or not saying. This advice is similar to the concept from the book, The First 90 Days. Inside this book, the author, Michael Watkins, recommends that new leaders spend the first 90 days at a new company just listening and not making any changes. By taking the time now to slow down and really listen to your employees--without rushing to make changes or decisions--you can get a lot of valuable information that is going to be needed when it is time to solidify a plan.

To learn more crisis leadership strategies like the tips below, see the full summary.

Be Authentically Empathetic

Make a Safe Environment For Employees

Schedule Diligently

Be Extremely Clear

Apologizing Gives You The Power to Move Forward

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There is nothing worse than that sinking feeling when you start to see camera after camera turn off inside your virtual meeting. Leaders know this feeling all too well as they have struggled over the past year and a half with keeping the engagement of their meeting participants. When it comes to keeping people engaged, competition is tough. Major industries spend billions of dollars to fight for people’s attention and engagement and inside your meeting; it’s you versus them. 

When it comes to leading virtual meetings that people will actually love, you have to up your game. You have to be able to build the skills to make and keep the meeting personally engaging, and keep your participants active. In this podcast, Ivan Wanis Ruiz, founder of Public Speaking Lab, shares seven tips that will help you lead meetings that people will actually love. The great news about leading these types of meetings is that it isn't complex. These are tactical tips that you can use right away in your next meeting. 

1. Have one meeting to establish the rules of the meetings.
 
Have a meeting that gets your team to create and agree on a set of rules or norms for everyone to follow in the future meetings. Creating verbal and written social norms helps meeting participants know what to expect from others, how to behave themselves, and how to courageously declare breakdowns when that set of norms isn’t being met.
 
2. Create Visual Engagement that Engages Your Participants’ Attention.

Your participants are used to watching engaging media on their screens ranging from thrilling movies to TikTok. They are used to the visuals on their screens constantly changing. Because of this, it’s important to re-engage your participants often. 

One way to do this is to toggle your camera between the PowerPoint you are presenting and you, or depending on what tools you are using, push certain buttons to make the screen go black or white. In Microsoft Teams, you can use the “B” button to make the screen go black, or the “W” button to make it go white. To illustrate, you can show a slide of a question that you want to ask your audience, and then make the screen go blank to give people the visual space to think about their answers creatively. 

Another tactic is to make people do things. Ask your attendees to put something in the chat or ask them to share an emoji to react to something that was said. Ask them to take a big breath and stretch for a minute. Keeping your audience engaged by keeping them moving can help you create a meeting where they feel heard and are adding real-time value.
 
3. Give Everyone The Opportunity to Speak with The HIPPO Rule

A HIPPO is the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. Typically, at the end of the meeting the idea that always wins is the HIPPO. This does not make for an engaging meeting, and does not make the attendees feel like their voice matters. So how can you make everyone feel like their voice matters? Create a rule inside your meetings that the HIPPO always speaks last. As the HIPPO, ask a question and listen to feedback from every attendee in the meeting before sharing your opinion. Give people credit and recognition for the ideas that they shared, and determine how you are going to reach a decision inside the meeting. Not all decisions need to be made by the HIPPO.
 
For details on the following seven tips see the full summary

4. Do BreakOut Rooms Differently
5. Encourage Conversations Outside Meetings
6. Ease in the Newbies With One-on-One Meetings
7. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask Your Attendees to Turn Cameras Off

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The pandemic has demonstrated that people are more capable of change than they ever imagined. Today, workers are changing their priorities given their new post-pandemic perspectives, and leaders and companies are looking for solutions to manage their hybrid teams. 

In today’s episode, Michael Seaver, author, speaker and founder of Seaver Consulting, encourages us to use this time for teams and employees to come together to build more authentic and sustainable solutions. Right now is not the time to pretend we have the solutions, but for us to focus on and embrace what we don’t know. Now is the time for leaders and teams to focus on their uniqueness, resiliency, and core values to successfully team anywhere.

The Outcome of the Pandemic
The pandemic gave everyone space to assess if they are living their most authentic lives. The outcome of this is we’re seeing The Great Resignation, more people quitting their jobs than ever recorded in history. So what is causing this and what are leaders doing about it? Keep reading as we explore the employee and leadership perspectives that are leading up to this, as companies are trying new ways to retain their valued employees and manage hybrid teams. 

New Personal Perspectives
The pandemic taught us that we are far more capable of change than we believed. With this change, we all stretched our ability to adapt to change, to stay resilient and to begin to create new habits. Virtually overnight, we went from working in an office, commuting 30+ minutes to get to work, and now all of a sudden we're doing many things from our own home ranging from homeschooling to work and exercise. We were no longer getting in a car or subway, and spending hours commuting to and from work. Commuting time limits time with family, hobbies, and relaxation.  Through the pandemic, nearly all non-essential workers experienced work without that dreaded commute. 

Though many people don’t have a choice, others questioned their commutes and their very jobs. Now workers across the nation are questioning this. Is the commute worth it? Could I get another job and be closer to home? Even if it pays less, is it worth it?  

Now people are weighing the pros and cons of working from home, in the office, or in a hybrid arrangement. As they weigh these outcomes, they are questioning if their work is aligning with their most authentic selves. With this in mind, whichever way someone decides, they should remember that we all are way more capable of adapting to change and dealing with the unknown than they were 12 months ago. 

New Leadership Perspectives

If leaders repeated the behaviors that might have existed in 2019, they have not learned or grown very much from this world-wide upset. What has occurred over the past year and a half has created a transformational change in every industry and leadership role.  As we experience the biggest worker transition in history, leaders across the nation are trying to keep up with creating companies, cultures, teams and atmospheres that will attract and retain top talent. 

Solutions that Work: Ask the Right Questions and Listen Closely

One firm Michael works with made changes in the way their leadership assesses outcomes by making the transition from billable hours to becoming a results driven company. This is a big shift to make mentally and culturally inside an organization.

 
Click here for the full summary. 

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DISCLAIMER: This episode is not sponsored by Mentimeter, we just love the product and know that more leaders can use this to raise engagement in their meetings whether they are virtual, in person or hybrid. 

Are we moving from the world of Zoom Fatigue to a world of Zoom Segregation as we move to hybrid work? Are there solutions out there to equalize and engage remote and in-office workers? Yes, we believe there is. In today’s episode, we interview Oscar Svernlöv, the community content creator at Mentimeter and he shows us how to stay ahead of the curve with a great equalizer for hybrid teams. 

What’s Wrong With Virtual Meetings?
Virtual meeting attendees are burned out. They’re tired of Zoom meetings. They need more engagement. One of the problems with virtual meetings is that as humans, we’re wired to interact with our screens as passive participants - but the objective of meetings is to get participation and feedback from your audience. So, more often than we hope, we end up leading meetings with the intention of seeking input and feedback only to wind up with nothing. 

The Solution to Virtual Meeting Engagement

What if you could take the issue of your meeting participants looking at their phones and turn it into a productive & purposeful conversation that includes seeking feedback from them using their phones? 

That is where Mentimeter comes into play. With Mentimeter, you can create a presentation, much like PowerPoint, but called “Mentimeters” where you can actively seek participation and engagement at much higher levels than you would inside Powerpoint. 

Instead of having a passive audience watch a presentation, you bring the audience into your presentation so that they can vote on topics, share their ideas and answers to questions, and react using emojis and comments to your entire presentation. 

Bridging the Remote & In-Office Communication Gap
Mentimeter bridges the gap between your remote workers and in-office workers because it gives them a united platform to contribute to the same conversation.  In turn, this helps your remote workers feel more connected and involved and not left out of conversations that would otherwise be occurring only in the office.

How Mentimeter Works
Once you create your presentation inside Mentimeter.com, you can create slides using the following interactive presentation types:

• Multiple Choice
• Word Cloud
• Open Ended Answers
• Ranking
• Q&A
• Quiz Competition
• Type Answer

Why is Meeting Engagement So Important?

Employees have a fundamental need to feel involved and engaged. But think about the meetings where the participants are just watching the screen, slowly losing their attention, and then before you know it, you’ve lost their attention all together. Mentimeter was born out of this frustration before there was a large focus on virtual meetings. 

This shows that engagement itself has been the one of the keys to Zoom fatigue and now we need our teams to contribute more. 

Oscar’s team has done A/B Testing comparing Mentimeter Presentations to PowerPoint Presentations while scanning the brains of participants. They discovered that when participants watched Mentimeter presentations, the engaged section of their brains were activated-- proving that Mentimeter scientifically improves engagement. 

3 Ideas for Leaders to Leverage Mentimeter

• Keep track of Pulse Surveys
• Get 100% Anonymous Participation During Brainstorms
• Get Instant Reactions During Your Meetings

Read the full summary here.

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When was the last time you had an Emmy Award winning broadcast journalist coach you on how to look great on camera? On today's episode, Karin Reed, co-author of Suddenly Virtual: Making Remote Meetings Work, shares her wisdom on how to be effective, look great, sound great, and create great participation and engagement during your hybrid and virtual meetings.

Today, many leaders are not thinking about how they show up on the other side of the camera. These leaders are doing a great disservice to themselves and their teams because they are primarily going to have to lead through various virtual lenses for now and into the future. If leaders want to maximize how they communicate, connect and show up with their teams, the only way to do that is by following these simple steps.

1.  Get Back to the Basics
Very few leaders actually follow best practices when it comes to leading virtual meetings. Before the pandemic, most meetings were bad in person; as these bad meetings moved virtually, they became virtually unbearable. When it comes to getting back to the basics, Joe Allen says common sense is often uncommon practice. 

2. Attend to Participation
As a leader, remember the potential pitfalls in participation that can occur in hybrid and virtual meetings. That pitfall is the lack of participation. We are wired to be passive bystanders when it comes to anything with a screen. We have been conditioned to sit at screens as we watch TV, but in virtual and hybrid meetings, we want our attendees to act.

3. Favor Remote Attendees First
Far too often, remote meeting attendees feel as if they get left out of meetings. When they don’t get asked for their thoughts, feelings, ideas and opinions, they decide to tune-out or leave the meeting. This makes them feel unheard, questioning why they were in that meeting in the first place. As the leader, acknowledging the remote attendees right away, shows you value them from the beginning. 

4. Consider How You Lead Through the Lens
How you show up through the lens will impact your results with your team. We’ve been leading virtual meetings for over 15 months and still leaders and C-suite executives are making critical mistakes that hinder their messages. Poor lighting, audio and camera placement throws off your message. 

5. To Make Eye Contact, Look at the Camera, Not the Screen
There is nothing more important in a meeting than eye contact, and most of us are doing this incorrectly. The camera is the conduit to your conversation, so if you want to speak with impact, it is critical that you learn to make virtual “eye contact” close to how it would be in person. Looking into the camera lens as we speak goes against every natural impulse that we have. We think the right thing to do is to look at our attendees, but looking at their picture on the screen means you’re not making eye contact. 

6. Be MORE Human
When everyone worked remotely last year, most of us for the first time, we lost a lot of humanity in our meetings. Leaders would jump right into an agenda, if there was one. There was no opportunity for casual, small talk, which is a critical element in building strong relationships and culture. From a business, leadership and individual perspective, establishing connection with people is the most critical element of creating strong business results. 

7. Leverage 5 Minute One-on-One’s
Many leaders often feel like they don’t have time to meet with each person one-on-one on a regular basis, especially if their teams are larger.  Schedule these small, short meetings or open office hours for small group or one-on-one conversations.

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