How to lead high-performing remote and hybrid teams

High-performing remote and hybrid teams – how to succeed as a leader

The rise in hybrid work forced a significant shift in the traditional workplace model.

While employees now have the flexibility and freedom to work from the comfort of their own homes, managers and leaders must discover new ways to improve and maintain productivity, battle employee burnout, manage collaboration between team members and prevent any conflict from arising.

But remote and hybrid teams can still exceed expectations when managed correctly-in fact, remote work productivity was stable or increased when working remotely from home. The managers who could build their high-performing teams remotely have similar strategies – emphasize communication, foster collaboration, recognize and navigate conflict, and ensure every employee is engaged.

Continue reading to learn the five steps to building a high-performing team.

1. Communicate with motives in mind

Teams & leaders who recognize each other’s motives can adapt their communication styles for more effective interactions.

According to a recent survey, the trait that high-performing teams utilize most to outperform average teams is effective communication. How we communicate is fundamentally connected to our core values and motives, and organizations that share effectively are 4.5x more likely to retain the best employees. Teams communicate better when members understand their intrinsic motives and how they relate to others.

People are primarily motivated by one or a combination of people, performance, and process.

This means managers need to step away from the one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, they should try recognizing what makes each team member unique – are they driven to help others? Do they prefer direct conversations, or do they enjoy short conversations? Do they tend to ask for more information when given a task or problem to solve? Leaders can adapt their communication styles beforehand to craft messages that resonate with each team member when motives are recognized.

This strategy can also be applied to the other half of communication – listening. Managers should practice listening with the intent to truly understand the other person rather than to confirm their current view or wait for the opportunity to speak. Leaders of high-performing teams look beyond the communication style of the messenger to find the true intention and motive behind the words.

2. Use strengths for better collaboration

Team members have multiple strengths to choose from when it comes to more effective collaboration – and sometimes that means stretching to use some strengths that don’t come as naturally as others.

Collaboration with teammates now takes up more than 80% or more of employees’ time, and are also on double the amount of teams they were five years ago4. When collaboration is done right, businesses can see a 21% increase in profitability due to highly connected teams. But collaboration isn’t something that can be achieved by throwing teams together hoping they’ll “make it work,” and that applies doubly for virtual teams. When opposing ideas and work styles clash, it’s just that much easier to hide behind a screen until the storm passes, slowing progress and hindering brainstorming efforts.

This may bring a lot of pressure to managers and team leaders to find new and innovative ways to keep their employees collaborative and engaged. But before introducing yet another digital collaboration tool or scheduling your third virtual team meeting of the week, take a look at how your team is using their strengths to enhance collaboration and not just personal performance.

First, let’s expand our view of strengths. We’re not referring to competency or talents, but the behaviors we use to help us get our best work done. We all have strengths we’re more comfortable using than others, but sometimes those strengths aren’t the best suited for every situation. Put another way, our strengths may suit us well, but they don’t always strengthen our interactions or outcomes. We must become mindful of how our strength behaviors affect the people we work with. When we force our top strengths, we may be doing our teams more harm than good. Thankfully, every team member has the power to adopt the strengths they need to overcome any situation – even if they aren’t as comfortable using them. For example, someone who is naturally cautious may need to prioritize being quick-to-act in times of crisis or pressing deadlines. On the contrary, someone who is quick-to-act may need to rely more on their analytical strengths when assessing potential outcomes of a situation or project.

When collaborating with team members, understand where your own and other’s individual strengths will play a crucial role in the success of the project. Use your top strengths to your advantage- but know when they should take a back seat to prioritize others.

3. Ensure that everyone is valued, seen, and heard

Not only does innovation increase when team members are encouraged to share individual perspectives, but employees that feel included are more likely to remain engaged with their work.

As leaders, it’s important to know what mattersto everyone on our team, including their views, values, and the things that energize them. It’s all about making each individual feel welcome and valued because of their differences, not tolerated despite them.

When people feel included, they commit to the project, the team, and the organization. When they’re committed, they go above and beyond what’s required in their KPIs. They’ll make more effort, voice more ideas, and innovate more. They end the workday feeling energized, not drained, and discouraged.

To foster team inclusivity on remote teams, leaders should begin with their own selfawareness. If you’re often the most senior person in the room, ask yourself whether you habitually do some of the following things:

Speak more than you listen
Talk over someone or cut them off
Move on to another subject or make a comment that dismisses what the person has said
Pronounce your idea before you ask for contributions from others

To break these communication habits and promote inclusion in the workplace, practice opening your mind to new contributions instead of listening to confirm what you already know. Prioritize helping others feel like they belong with one-on-one meetings, encouraging feedback, and creating an environment of psychological safety where it’s okay for everyone to be who they are, disagree, and say they don’t understand.

4. Turn conflict into healthy opposition

Recognizing the first stages of conflict can help leaders navigate the conversation towards healthy opposition.

Many leaders know that conflict in the workplace is uncomfortable, expensive, and counterproductive. However, conflict is inevitable.

But conflict doesn’t have to be negative – in fact, opposition often drives innovation and better understanding and respect amongst teammates. There’s a fine line between conflict and opposition, but there’s an enormous chasm between their outcomes. When there’s too much conflict – engagement and productivity can suffer. Without enough healthy opposition to see all sides of an issue – innovation is nowhere to be found. The teams that understand how to manage the tension between the two outperform the rest.

People experience conflict when it feels like something important to them isn’t right. The way they respond is an attempt to make it right. Each of us experience conflict in three stages:

Accommodate the other person
Assert or prevail over the obstacles
Analyze and slow things down

The order depends on personality. If the first strategy doesn’t work, people will try the second strategy and the third as their last resort. We call this a conflict sequence. When leaders learn to recognize their colleagues’ conflict sequences, they’ll know when to start steering the conversation away from conflict towards healthy opposition, keeping both parties in stage one conflict and in a better position to collaborate on a solution.

5. Increase engagement through motivation

When leaders can pinpoint the reasons behind their team member’s actions, they can increase engagement by connecting work tasks to each employee’s motives.

As a leader, if you can make work a source of energy instead of a drain, you win. Research has shown that high employee engagement improves organizational performance through higher customer satisfaction, productivity, operational efficiency, profitability, lower absenteeism, and reduced turnover.

Most strategies that leaders use to improve employee engagement often make one critical mistake: they assume that the entire workforce will be motivated in the same way. But people are individuals, with different reasons for coming to work every day. If engagement is flagging, you may not be tapping into those reasons: their motives.

People don’t give a top performance at work because of a ping pong table or free lunch on Fridays. When we try to make work more palatable with these perks, the unspoken assumption is that work inherently isn’t palatable. But work can be more than palatable: it can provide energy and purpose. People seeking purpose in their careers often receive the advice, “Do what you love.” A better piece of advice would be, “Find meaning in what you do.” It’s possible to find meaning in any task if you can see how the task fulfills your motives.

There’s a myth that leaders need to create employee engagement. Instead, we need to unleash the engagement that’s already there by ensuring every employee is connecting their motive to the work they do. To truly improve employee engagement, focus on establishing relationships with individual employees and empowering them to bring their purpose and motives to work every day.

Strengthen work relationships and team performance

If you want to shape teams that exceed all expectations, you have to start with the very thing that holds them together – their relationships. With each interaction, relationships are either built up or broken down. Managers and teams with Relationship Intelligence can skillfully adjust their approach with every colleague in any circumstance, giving you the makings of an unstoppable organization.

The SDI Platform provides visibility into what matters to a person and the best way to interact with them, at scale. So teams can build strong, intelligent relationships that deliver results.