What We've Learned about Long-Distance Leaders

Rule 1: Think about leadership first, location second.

You cannot manage men into battle. You manage things; you lead people.

— Admiral Grace Hopper

Eric is a solid manager and has had a traditional team in place for five years. Lately, he's been dealing with people working from home several days a week. On the surface everything's fine, but as he told us, he spends too much time worrying about what he doesn't know, or what might be happening, rather than the work itself. He second-guesses himself more than ever and feels less confident in his decisions. As he said, "So far so good, but for how long?" There are a lot of people like Eric.

If you're reading this, you agree with us that doing "okay" or "not terrible" isn't nearly good enough. Leadership is aspirational; no one who picked up this book wants to be merely average or normal. You want to be an excellent leader and, if possible, to achieve that with far less stress than you're experiencing now.

When we started looking at the day-to-day challenges faced by Long-Distance Leaders, we had a pretty good idea of what we'd find — after all, we've worked with dozens of organizations and thousands of people over the last few years. Still, we wanted to quantify what's happening in the world and check our assumptions with measurable data. That led to our Remote Leadership Survey.

In 2017, we conducted a voluntary survey of more than 225 managers who have at least part of their team working remotely. Admittedly, this is a small sample size, but the results bear out what we're hearing every day. If we were looking for shocking results or data that came out of left field, we didn't find it.

What we did discover is that the challenges for remote leaders very closely mirror those for managers in any situation, and that the majority of leaders report that things are ... okay. Not perfect — things could always be better — but certainly not the-place-is-about-to-collapse awful either. There are also signs that as part-time teleworking increases and more companies change to a remote labor force, the cracks we did find will only grow.

The survey highlights challenges that arise because of the distance between people and the use of technology to bridge those gaps. As you'll see in a moment, that makes perfect sense, and it confirms that what we are experiencing with our clients isn't unusual. The data points out what needs to be done to prepare leaders for a new way to work and to help develop the skills required to do the job well.

Here is what we learned.

Demographics

* The managers crossed every possible industry and discipline. Government and sales accounted for 11 to 12 percent each, and even with seven categories, 46 percent of respondents were "other." This is an important point — leading remotely is a fact of life not limited to specific industries or disciplines.

* The size of teams is changing. Of the respondents surveyed, more than half had teams of ten people or more, 25 percent led two to five people, and 21 percent led six to ten people (figure 2). This is slightly more than the average of direct reports under the same roof and may indicate a new trend toward broader spans of control, which only exacerbates the challenges of leading remotely.

* "Remote teams" doesn't mean everyone's working elsewhere. We often think of remote teams as either wholly remote (everyone is scattered to the winds) or co-located. In fact, over 70 percent of leaders said they had a "hybrid" team, with a 50-50 split between teams with full-time and part-time remote employees. The other 30 percent had a completely or mostly remote team (figure 3). This is by far the fastest growing segment of the workforce. Failure to address this now means more stress down the road.

* Other demographic data. Respondents were 60 percent male, 40 percent female, and they were an experienced bunch: 34 percent were aged forty to forty-nine and 37 percent were fifty to fifty-nine. A surprising 19 percent were over sixty. This makes sense since 78 percent of them had been managers for eight years or more. This confirms an important point: time as a leader doesn't seem to make the transition to long-distance leadership any easier.

What's Going On out There?

We reached a group of experienced managers, across multiple industries. Yet when we asked, "How's it going?" the answers were strangely in accord. Here are some examples:

* Over half say they "get the job done," and an additional 28 percent say their team is "highly productive."

* When asked, "Where do the productivity challenges lie?" 10 percent say the problems are with remote members, 4 percent say they are with the "home team," and 69 percent say there's no pattern to it or it's hard to identify the roots of the problems.

* Trust runs a little below productivity, and while most managers say the level of trust is okay (both between themselves and individuals, and between the various members of the team), there are more problems reported here than anywhere else on the survey. The largest part of our respondents say that trust levels aren't awful, but it's a gap worth working on.

The Biggest Worries

Finally, we asked specific questions about challenges these leaders face. We presented four common questions remote leaders often ask themselves and The feedback we received is shown in...