Leaders increasingly need to lead their team also remotely

The world of work took an unexpected turn in early 2020. So did the world of leadership.

During the pandemic, many leaders found themselves suddenly separated from their teams, forced to interact solely screen-to-screen, in video calls and chat channels, rather than face-to-face, in office hallways and coffee rooms. This challenging new dynamic is something leaders must continue to adapt to, because it’s not going away: an Owl Labs report from last year indicates that, even post-pandemic, most European companies plan to continue operating on some form of hybrid model, meaning a mix of on-site and remote work.1

In this regard, I feel privileged to have already spent considerable time in this future scenario: for most of the past ten years, I led Blinkist’s Berlin-based content team remotely from Helsinki.

Here, I wish to share some of the lessons I’ve learned in order to help others on their journey.

Written communication is a vital skill for remote leaders

Regardless of whether a leader is primarily on site or remote, one of their most important responsibilities is to foster an environment of trust and psychological safety. Without it, people will be on their guard, and everything slows down. You’ll need to address insecurities. Discussions will drag on. Decisions that would normally take hours will take weeks.

So how can a leader foster a trusting, safe environment, even when they’re not physically in the same office?

In my experience, a leader’s greatest impact is not in the grand moments of leadership, like unveiling inspiring visions or leading cheers for completed objectives.

No, it is in the hundreds of small, daily interactions we have with our teams.

And, without a doubt, remote leaders have fewer avenues for these interactions. In the office, there are many chances for touchpoints with the team, from lunch meetings and elevator bump-ins to chats in the hallway and quick catch-ups over coffee. “Hey, do you have a second? Let's talk.”

But as a remote leader, most of these opportunities disappear. What you’re left with are basically two categories of interaction:

• virtual meetings and calls
• all manner of written communication, such as emails, instant messages, or comments in documents

Like it or not, these media will host the vast majority of situations where you as a leader can influence your team, for better or for worse. It is here—in calls and comments, emails and Slack messages—that remote leadership truly lives and breathes, and it is here that we must endeavor to improve.

In this article, I will focus particularly on the area of written communication. As a card-carrying introvert, it’s the medium closest to my heart. I aim to provide you with concrete habits that will help you step up your game in this regard, no matter what your role.

Written communication comes with benefits, but also pitfalls

Written communication is a crucial skill in knowledge work today, whether you’re remote or in the office. But in a remote setting, its importance is heightened all the more, because you’re deprived of many other avenues of interaction. Conversations that would otherwise happen over lunch, coffee or at someone’s desk now take place over email or in Slack channels or MS Teams conversations.

Statistics show that, even before the pandemic, you probably sent some kind of written message to a team member at least 50-100 times a day.2

And this number has surely only increased since then.

So it’s clear that even a small improvement in your written communication will have its impact amplified through the sheer volume of messages you write. How you feel about this fact likely depends on your feelings about writing in general.

As a medium, it has some definite benefits:

• It works asynchronously, so each person can take the time they need to process information and formulate (hopefully) coherent replies. As an obsessive message fine-tuner, I appreciate this greatly.
• In most cases, you also automatically document what was communicated, which is useful for later referral and looping others in. (If you can find it again in the ever-growing jungle of messages and comments, that is.)
• You can include images, audio, video, and link sources to enrich and clarify your message.

But writing comes with definite disadvantages, too, the greatest of which is that written messages lack enriching features like facial expressions, gestures, and intonation. All too often, messages are misunderstood, often stoking unnecessary conflict and friction, which can erode trust and collaboration within the team.

Psychologist and author Daniel Goleman studied how this phenomenon unfolds over email, and what he found was scary: Each email you write tends to get interpreted as one notch more hostile than you intended. So if you send a positive message, the recipient will perceive it as neutral. If you send a neutral one, it will seem negative. And since the same dynamic applies when the other person responds to you, things can easily escalate, even though both parties are merely responding tit for tat.

So, considering you’ll have countless written interactions each week, how can you do your best to negate the danger of misunderstanding?

Due to the sheer volume of these interactions, a one-off improvement is not going to suffice. You need to form new habits around your written communication that will work time after time.

You need to be more aware of how your message will be received

The first habit to get into is to simply pause before pressing “send” and reflect on a few things:

Remember Goleman’s finding: the written word increases perceived negativity. So take a moment to consider the tone you want to strike, and then make a conscious effort to make your message a bit more positive and upbeat. Remember, this tonal adjustment is necessary just to compensate for the perceived-negativity phenomenon.

A second thing to check for is whether you’re requesting something in the message. If yes, be sure to give some context for your request: Why are you asking for this? Context helps the other person feel like they are a collaborator, working on this with you, not just a faceless favor-dispensing machine. What’s more, there’s evidence to suggest that giving a reason, any reason, increases the chances that the other person will say yes. (More on this in the sidebox.)

Finally, avoid irony in written communication, since there’s a high risk it will be misunderstood without the accompanying intonations and facial cues. As a leader, you should especially avoid any tongue-in-cheek references to being dissatisfied with someone’s performance, like: “Oh, how disappointing. I’m going to have to have a chat with HR about you.” Such messages can inadvertently provoke anxiety in the recipient, and, in general, unnecessary references to the power dynamic can come off as crude and distancing.

If you yourself are triggered by a message, use this simple exercise to resolve the situation constructively

By now, you’ve learned about the importance of being mindful of the other person’s feelings when sending a message. But what about situations where you yourself receive a message that triggers a strong emotional response, like anxiety, worry, or anger?

A normal human knee-jerk reaction is to do something to make the feeling go away. And typically, that something is to shoot off a quick response that gives the other person a piece of your mind.

Don’t do that. Due to your emotional turmoil, your message would most likely be an overreaction, and would probably go against your own self-interest. What’s more, unlike in a face-to-face interaction, the other person won’t see from your expression that they hit a nerve; for them, your hostile response will come seemingly out of the blue.

The best remedy I’ve found for this is making a habit of using the “Kindest response possible” technique from the book Search Inside Yourself4, by Chade-Meng Tan, the Google engineer turned mindfulness guru.

Here’s how it works: when you feel yourself triggered by a message, draft an answer with just one goal—to make it the kindest, nicest response imaginable, even if you’re actually seething inside. Just imagine that this is the best version of you responding, a version who has nothing but understanding and compassion for this other person. Most importantly, do this knowing that it’s only an exercise; you don’t need to send the draft and can absolutely still write that furious message later if you want.

But, in my experience, after reading through the kind message that I’ve drafted, I often find that it’s pretty good. And when I’ve sent it, not only has it always constructively moved the conversation forward. It’s also helped me calm down.

That’s why an important rule is to never send messages when you feel strongly emotional. And lest I come off as some kind of super-zen-monk type, I should say I don’t always manage to stick to this rule myself, but the struggle is a worthy one.

And it’s never too late to employ the “Kindest response possible” habit, even if the conversation has already become heated. If you combine this habit with enough self-awareness to apologize when you’ve made a mistake or said something hurtful, you will find that conflicts, if resolved in a constructive way, can actually strengthen your bond with team members.

Emojis should be a tool for every 21st century remote leader

As someone old enough to have gotten most of his life advice from MacGyver and The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I admit that, for many years, I didn’t really understand what emojis were for. Initially, I saw them as a fad that didn’t really belong in the workplace, a bunch of silly symbols for a younger generation.

But as I’ve grown more accustomed to them over the years, I‘ve come to believe that they are, in fact, the most significant development in typographical expression since the advent of the alphabet. (At least in the Western context.)

Think about it: with just a few symbols you can, with decent precision, convey the emotional tone you want. In this way, emojis can bridge the gap that so often plagues written communication—the lost emotional subtext conveyed in live interactions through facial expressions, tone of voice, and gestures.

To see their effect, consider the image below, and imagine you’ve received these messages from your lead.

You may notice that they’re a little matter of fact and blunt. Perhaps the other person is displeased or irritated in some way?

But now observe what happens when I employ one of the most versatile emojis I know: the sweat smile.

The tone instantly becomes more playful, shedding the previous accusatory coldness. And these messages are considerably more likely to elicit a good response and simultaneously signal to the other person that you care about this relationship.

My main message here is that emojis are too valuable not to be part of the communication toolbox of a 21st-century hybrid leader.

So if you haven’t yet, I recommend at least trying them out for a while to see if you can’t build a habit. They can really transform the tone in your team’s written communications, for example in your shared Slack channel. Please see the Emojis 101 sidebox to help you get started.

And if you’re already in the habit of using them, take a moment to review some of the messages that you and your team members have written lately. Reflect on the ways that they are similar or different. How would you describe the emoji culture in your team?

Sometimes this exercise reveals that when it comes to using emojis to clarify the emotional tone of a message, team members are more considerate than their leader. For example, a team member may have sent a carefully and kindly crafted question, replete with emojis to ensure their good intentions come across, but the lead responds with a brutally ambiguous and possibly passive-aggressive “OK.” Or even worse: “ok” or “Ok.”

If that’s the case, ask yourself whether this is due to the power imbalance? In other words, do team members need to worry more about inadvertently offending the boss than the boss does about offending them? And if that’s the case, is that really a dynamic you as a lead wish to perpetuate, considering that, in either case, the misunderstanding is detrimental to the team?

Good written communication habits help foster psychological safety and high performance

In this guide, I’ve emphasized the importance of the emotional subtext of written communication. This can sometimes evoke an objection: “Is this really that important? Don’t we all have real problems to deal with at work? Surely grown-up professionals can get over it if messages are a bit curt?”

And to that I say: yes, everyone can usually get over it.

But every time a team member receives a curt or blunt message, they need to stop and process why it made them feel anxious or bruised, rationalizing to themselves why it’s not so serious. To indulge in a metaphor: just like over time, raindrops can etch deep canyons in the earth, so too can small, unpleasant experiences gradually carve chasms of resentment in your team. This is most definitely not the impact any leader wants to have.

Instead, you want to build a sense of psychological safety, where people feel comfortable challenging each other and can focus on excelling at their work. You don’t want anyone dwelling on unnecessary and unhelpful friction that arose from avoidable misunderstandings.