Leadership in a remote world

I asked senior leaders about operating in this environment. I included several that had been doing this for years – figuring that they had already had the chance to refine their approach. The key theme is that leaders need to flex their style. To that I would add that Boards need to ensure that their CEO has the style to flex: that is where effective non-executives add real value.

What struck me about the responses was just how reflective these leaders are. They care about their people, want them to succeed, and seek feedback to drive their own development. Similarities in responses were reassuring – so perhaps this blog provides a checklist that other leaders can gain reassurance from.

 

Liam Brown, founder and Executive Chair of Elevate summed it all up with three tips for managing remotely:

          - ‘Ensure regular and meaningful contact that replicates the formal and informal contact that people in offices get.

          - Empower and trust the people you lead. Which means clear objectives too.

          - Being reflective as a leader – get feedback and act upon it.’

Catherine Kemnitz, SVP Legal & Operations for Axiom shared their remote working best practices refined over more than 20 years of supporting flexible lawyering. They are built around aligning expectations, emphasising communication, ensuring a consistent feedback loop, making the best of remote time, formulating a plan for managing dynamic workflows before flexibility becomes urgent. These are the perfect starting point for a GC thinking about how to lead their team remotely and they fit neatly with Brown’s tips.

The method and rhythm of communication is important too. David Whitmore, CEO of Slater + Gordon, highlights the need to vary this. Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams were quite exciting for many people for a few weeks, but quickly the reality dawns of increasing screen time. More than 25 years working in multi-national organisations built on distributed teams has taught Whitmore the importance of keeping meetings shorter than when face to face. He advocates mixing telephone and video, but also not forgetting the importance of physical meetings – this is not a home v office debate but a balancing of productivity, efficiency, quality, innovation and engagement.

Julia Salasky, founder and CEO of Legl (who provide digital tools for client on boarding, KYC and payment) stresses that there are plenty of tools that aid and vary communication. Using Slack for example can replicate some of the routine and social engagement that comes from physical offices. She says that lockdown has made her ‘more thoughtful about the frequency, content and tone of communication as the feedback loops are harder when you’re not in person.’ Firms that were tech enabled at the start of the pandemic were already using these tools and that will have facilitated their transition to remote working. Several of those I spoke to including Salasky and Brown use short recorded videos is a great way to reach all colleagues with regular messages – be that about the pandemic and the safety of your teams, or about firm performance and new business strategy. Being open and transparent is a key behaviour associated with great leaders – they build trust by treating their people as adults. Colleagues are talking about the pandemic and its impact on them, their families, their job and their business Leaders need to acknowledge and engage in all of that debate - bringing calm authority, composure and the intellectual heft to solve these problems. That needs multiple channels. Kemnitz also stresses empathy: ‘law firms and legal departments, partners and GCs, must be attuned to, and communicate an understanding of, the disruption impacting lawyers’ professional and personal lives.’

What about the people strategy? Several of the leaders I spoke to recognised that the shift to remote working means that their workforce needed different skills and behaviour. They have not just shifted where their teams work but how they work. What does this mean for training and development, for recruitment and for promotion? The very best leaders are already working on this. Training on home working – not just the IT and office set up, but the behaviours and skills that are needed to make it effective and fulfilling, have to be in place and several of my correspondents mentioned this.

How can leaders use this shift to support diversity in the workplace? Dana Denis-Smith has been thinking about this for years – it is Obelisk’s ten year anniversary this month and they are a remote-first business. Obelisk’s inspiration as a model was to find a way to utilise the talent left behind by traditional working practices delivering diversity and high performance. While increasing options for women in the legal market Denis-Smith makes clear that the art of leadership in her business is to ‘bring together people that you trust have the skills and judgement to get results.’ Salasky agrees, taking the early decision that this was ‘a permanent re-imagining of work, not as working from home but as remote-first working.’ She sees opportunities to increase diversity with a more flexible and dispersed model at the same time as being able to hunt out talent wherever it is. 

Brown and Whitmore also stressed the importance of finding new ways to get to know their teams in a remote world. Obviously, this is going to be important for new recruits, but if your meetings are now taking you virtually into people’s homes the best leaders recognise that they need to embrace that. Whitmore highlighted the tendency for meetings to be more focused – a good thing for many but we need to maintain and grow our connections if we expect to be to lead effectively. How can we tailor our style if we do not understand the differences in our people?

Taking the time to ask about family members – ‘who is at home with you today’ or ‘have you managed to get out for a walk today’ replicates the informal element of office life and acknowledges the challenges for most home workers. Regular pulse surveys tailored to specific issues are also important.

Brown is well known among his global team for being open, sharing posts about his children’s birthdays or holidays for example as well as about the economic situation and business performance. He is expert at creating links between the personal and the business, showcasing values and behaviours. Our staff replicate what we do rather than what we say, so it is important to find new remote channels to demonstrate a commitment to the firm’s values and behaviours. That cannot be done by your HR team – what leaders do each day matters so much more than what organisations say matters and in a remote environment that needs imagination. Kemnitz simply says ‘Be transparent. Full stop.’

Being in the same physical location allows for very close supervision. Such a sudden shift to remote working puts real pressure on that. What are the risks of errors, poor compliance and missed actions where that supervision is remote? William Robins, COO at Keystone Law talks about the renewed importance of planning and allocating tasks. He has a catch up with his team in a fixed slot each day, and supplements that with 1:1 discussion as needed – most days. More firms are looking at digital collaboration tools that enable this sort of planning, task allocation and supervision. Denis-Smith reminds us that where remote working is new or forced, we ‘need to spend extra time making sure everyone understands their objectives and has a framework for feeding back.’

Robins talks about the culture they have in a dispersed law firm – it is already part of their DNA. While Salasky has seen Legl grow significantly through lockdown as more firms seek to digitise client on boarding, compliance checks and payment it is no surprise that she says the firms that thrive will be those that digitise processes.

Digitisation is crucial across the sector in responding to the growth of remote working. My new role as a Faculty Adviser with the Digital Legal Exchange, a non-profit seeking to support GCs as they rethink their processes and digitise their functions, gives me access to even more experts than the fabulous ones that I already have as clients. My emerging sense is that digitisation may be the opportunity that the best leaders seize.

Digital and remote working might go together but how we work at home matters. Robins top tip is to get a good office chair – and make sure your desk is set up as well as it can be. This is no joke. Nick Bloom, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research used a breakthrough random control trial to test productivity between office and home workers. This recognised that a proper home-office set up without the distraction of children to supervise, was vital to the higher productivity that can be achieved by home workers. Leaders need to be clear that a long-term shift to home working is not simply a transfer of cost to the staff. Bloom notes that “We are home working alongside our kids, in unsuitable spaces, with no choice and no in-office days. This will create a productivity disaster for firms.” He advocates ‘social company’ as the crucial ingredient missing from most home working. Recognising the importance of good mental health and taking steps to ensure that mental health first aiders know how to support colleagues remotely is as important as the technology and home office set-up.

Consistently these senior leaders talk about the importance of feedback. Joyce Thorne, VP for People at Elevate made a strong case for fully structured and formal 360 degree feedback tools. Her experience with remote teams gathered over many years has taught her that for 360 feedback to work you have to get the culture right. She said that ‘the CEO has to set a tone that shows the organisation is built upon and values feedback mechanisms; people across the organisation have to feel secure to give useful and robust feedback; senior people have to be humble enough to welcome feedback and be willing to act on it.’ Whitmore reminds us that feedback can also provide the reassurance that we are getting things right - senior leaders need to do more of what works and feedback helps identify that.

These are all things that Michael Coates and myself highlighted in a blog on 360-degree feedback tools back in 2019. We stressed something that Joyce also mentioned as important: formal 360-degree feedback needs to be linked to development rather than appraisal. Too many law firms have got this wrong – and that may be why they struggle to get the culture right around their effective deployment. Protostar has now launched the new 360 feedback tools being developed when that blog was written and can help firms deploy them in a way that supports the changing pressures for leaders in these very unusual times.