Organizations today are flatter and team-based with hybrid or remote work the norm in many industries. A new generation of workers is expecting greater meaning and purpose in their work and greater work-life balance. And many people have high expectations of transparent, ethical leadership where trust and psychological safety are front and center. This desire is amplified in hybrid and remote workplaces where even mildly toxic behavior can lead to low trust and high anxiety that all too quickly impacts performance and wellbeing. For those people, a team without trust isn’t a team.
The Right Stuff for a Hybrid-Remote World
- Their personalities, work style preferences, and comfort with technology make them well suited for a remote or hybrid team.
- They’re empathetic toward their teammates no matter the distance or differences in culture, regardless of whether they’ve ever met in person.
- They understand the importance of trust and psychological safety and are comfortable with constant feedback.
What makes leading a hybrid or remote team challenging is that bad behavior gets amplified, and it only takes one person to diminish trust and foster dysfunction across a team or organization.
A few years ago I was working with a large IT company as they were setting up a country sales-and-service organization for a new product line. One of the more experienced people with an excellent track record as an individual contributor was promoted to the country leader and for the first couple of months, everything appeared to be working smoothly. Then the division leadership team started hearing rumblings that the new leader was bullying people across both the country and regional groups as he relentlessly drove to meet his sales numbers. As turnover jumped and performance dropped the stress led to even more abrasive and intimidating behavior. Within six months, it became clear that this promotion was a mistake.
This team leader was driven to perform in his new role but didn’t understand the importance of building trust and creating a psychologically safe team culture as the means of delivering that performance. His toxic behavior rapidly began to poison the organization. It took replacing him with a leader who had the emotional maturity and relationship skills, along with business acumen and team-building capabilities to restore balance and begin rebuilding trust.
The Three Behaviors
Leading a hybrid or remote team is hard. Understanding behaviors that trigger the brains’ reward system and create trust and psychological safety helps managers influence people to develop a team mindset, deliver better performance through greater collaboration, and experience improved wellbeing. There are three behaviors that every manager can adopt to create and sustain trust and psychological safety on their team:First, is proactively seeing and closing gaps between people’s expectations versus their actual experiences with important relationships – teammates, themselves (the team leader), and other teams on whom they depend. Experience – expectation gaps trigger a stress response and the release of hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Closing gaps quickly as a team triggers the release of trust-enhancing reward neurochemicals like dopamine and oxytocin.
The second behavior is using the language of positive change. Rather than pushing and commanding you build trust by using a collaborative, goal-oriented style of communication with open-ended questions, affirmation, and reflective listening that helps people pull themselves towards change versus being pushed. Helping people be open to diverse perspectives and overcome resistance to change builds trust and is essential to team success and people’s wellbeing.
The third is empowering feedback. Traditional manager to team member feedback is important for helping people to excel but it often fails to do what we intended. You can empower feedback through sharing and seeking. Sharing means managers openly discussing feedback, criticisms, and suggestions about their own performance with their team. Seeking is encouraging people to proactively seek feedback from others. Share and seek give people confidence while creating trust and psychological safety.
Trust in Your Team
All teams face challenges. Leading a hybrid or remote team and inspiring people to do their best and be their best takes team leadership to another level. Those three behaviors – seeing expectation gaps, speaking the language of change, and empowering feedback – trigger the brain’s reward system and develop team trust and psychological safety. They address relationship issues early, enabling teamwork to progress with less monitoring, greater resource efficiency, and less duplication of effort.
The reality for hybrid and remote teams is that they face greater complexity and uncertainty as they strive to overcome the barriers of time, distance, communications, and cultures. When people work remotely, issues or toxic behaviors are amplified and trust can be easily diminished. By proactively adopting behaviors that create and sustain trust and psychological safety you will enable your hybrid and remote teams to thrive.