Course Title: Leading Virtually: Vulnerability and Presence when Working from Home
Description: The ability to lead virtually is more important than ever.
The global economy means many organizations are collaborating with clients and colleagues across the world—and the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many on-site teams to transition to work-from-home positions.
In these challenging times, leaders have to maintain a careful balancing act—balancing vulnerability and presence, authority and empathy—to truly connect with remote employees and keep their businesses moving in the right direction.
This course collects timely, relevant advice for leading virtual teams and projects. Authors Simon Sinek and Charlene Li—and comedian Lisa Lampanelli—offer guidance on building trust, listening, practicing servant leadership, and engaging stakeholders inside and outside the organization.
Trust is a biological feeling, it emerges and cannot be created at will.
Trust is a feeling, not an instruction
Trust emerges in safe environments
Unsafe environments foster cynicism, paranoia, mistrust, and self-interest
Make it your goal to inspire, not threaten, when addressing performance issues.
Show that you care and worry about people.
Recognize that there may be factors you are not aware of
Showing vulnerability is an important factor of safe-environment building.
Vulnerability is about honesty, and not being afraid of saying:
I don’t know what I’m doing
I don’t know how to do that
I made a mistake
When everybody is pretending to be strong and to know what they’re doing, the company gets weak
Model vulnerability for others by admitting your mistakes and exposing your own weaknesses.
Bringing humanity to work makes the organization stronger.
Charlene Li: Listen at scale
Listening at Scale is constantly tuning in to the audiences that are important to you for reaching your goals
Listening is both an art form and a combination of techniques and methods.
Leaders can’t listened to everything, so choosing who to listen is very important, and that is an art form.
Once you have selected your audience, allocate 15 minutes everyday to just listening, and try to get to what is your audience’s “truth”
Identity and listen to your trusted filters; they filter and curate the information you are interested in in more digestible chunks. They are connectors, influences and subject matter experts, whose views you trust.
Charlene Li: Share to shape
Differentiate talking at someone and sharing with someone.
Talking at someone is saying what you want to say, wether it will stick or not.
In order to share ideas with someone, it is important to show that we believe that idea will be beneficial for achieving our common goals.
Sharing Has a win-win aspect to it.
Be sure to listen so you understand what others want to hear from you.
Know your sharing limits.
When developing your communication strategy, determine in advance the topics that you will not discuss
Show your humanity by creating informal and personal videos
Write emails as if they may end up on New York Times front page resonate
Pair personal insights with business acumen to create a well-rounded portrait of a leader
Lisa Lampanelli: Practice servant leadership
Let your audience know they’re not alone
How to pick the right story for your audience?
Aim for impact. Ask:
Will my story resonate with the audience spiritually?
Emotionally?
Rationally?
Be mindful of your core audience’s limits
What are their limits compared to yours?
Try to isolate a piece of wisdom
Choose the story that lights you up
Charlene Li: Engage to transform
Participation in a dialogue with a group either as a whole or by a proxy
Be intentional about your reasons for engaging and clear about the outcomes you expect
Make a plan outlining how and when you will engage with that stakeholder
Engage selectively with a problem-solving objective in mind