Leading and collaborating in remote, hybrid and diverse teams

Content summary

Remote and hybrid teams pose lots of leadership and collaboration challenges. As a lead, you may be concerned about team members losing touch when they go through critical phases of work that need a lot of alignment or support from others. As an individual contributor, it may be tough to get all the feedback and inputs you need from your collaborators, which you might have sourced in a half-sentence over lunch or a quick chat in the hallway between meetings, and now you are looking at a clogged agenda and are not sure whether and how to reach out to your colleagues.

Challenge accepted! According to a recent Gallup study, even one meaningful strengths-based conversation can start to foster high performance relationships. And we won’t stop there. Instead, we’ll learn how a modern team can grow stronger together by addressing challenges of remote and diverse setups.

In remote or hybrid work settings with diverse and cross-functional teams, fostering relationships with all team members needs a more conscious approach. Meetings have to be facilitated more artfully to include all team members with their contributions. Self-leadership becomes more important, and it requires initiative to source all information and context needed to complete tasks, but it’s equally important to provide information storage and sharing setups that work for all collaborators from anywhere. Eventually, for the team it becomes vital to understand each other’s work styles and needs - for which questions members can be approached and asked to contribute, and when and how this is most conducive to each other’s productivity.

The common setup of being in one office did not by itself supply this scaffolding, but it made it seemingly easier to approach each other – and now with remote collaboration, we have to spell things out more clearly. This is a chance to grow as a team, contributor and leader.

In this course, you’ll learn tools and setups honed in a decade of leading remote, hybrid and diverse research, innovation and product teams who constantly deliver high performance and bond to work better together across Europe, Asia and the US.