Lessons to facilitate “Virtual” leadership, helping deliver medicines to patients.

This article will help teams transitioning to a COVID-19 pandemic remote working situation, and still drive high performance through a virtual leadership style. 

My experience as a pharmaceutical professional/working mom has always involved impromptu remote working. Often through challenging milestones whilst caring for my two children. This has taught me the do’s and don’ts of delivering on time and how to incorporate emotional intelligence when leading high performing teams remotely. These Four Steps will help leaders continue to deliver on their company’s strategy whilst providing the necessary support to their teams.

Four Steps to help transition towards virtual leadership and remote teamwork.

1. Check-in

2. Review

3. Simplify

4. Improve

1) Check-in 1:1 with each team member.

Ask your team if they have any concerns with the changes to their new remote working situation and reassure them “it’s Okay” and that you will support them through it.

• Be transparent about your own personal remote working situation as a leader. Explain how it could potentially disrupt upcoming team meetings (It might be reassuring to them knowing you are in or have previously experienced a similar situation).

• Determine an appropriate platform to facilitate your meetings (e.g. Microsoft OneNote), and integrate any required technology (e.g. Skype Meetings, CISCO WebEx Meetings). Access should be granted prior the meeting and technology tested.

• Set meeting rules and circulate them before the meeting starts. These could be as simple as The meeting will go ahead as planned, please dial in and participate as best you can. Minutes and actions to be circulated after the meeting.

• Continue to check-in with your team following the meeting, a personal email to see how they are doing will be much appreciated.

2) Review your teams workload.

Identify if anyone on the team is struggling to keep up with the workload.  Review each team members objectives and if necessary provide support to alleviate unnecessary stress.

• Introduce a  Visual Factory (Excel worksheet that captures key objectives and metrics aligned to the business goals and strategy).  This will help monitoring team progress towards on-time delivery.

• Team members with young children or caring for someone will be working around the clock trying to deliver on objectives.  Talk to them, help them, do not let them burn out!

3) Simplify team meetings.

Keep the agenda to a minimum, with realistic time slots.

• Prioritize critical agenda items for the start of the meeting.

• Ensure all links to necessary documentation are functioning correctly prior to the meeting start, to prevent wasting valuable time during the meeting.

• Keep the meeting short, if longer than 1 hr ensure sufficient breaks are integrated.

• Preassign team members to help capture Actions, Minutes, Timekeeper, etc. 

• Reinforce meeting rules and Who holds the “D” (Decision Maker) at the meeting start.

• Walkthrough your meeting agenda in the allotted time, try and keep to the meeting end time.

• The Decision Maker decides the actions required in response to each agenda item, and determines if critical discussions need to move beyond the allotted time. Items impacted due to time restraints should be taken offline or moved to a future meeting.
  

4) Improve (continuously) your virtual leadership style.

Ask for feedback: “How can I be a better leader? How can the meeting be improved?  What support do you need from me?”.

• Forget the After Action Review templates, a simple one-liner asking for feedback through email of Skype chat will do.

• Review any feedback, thank your team for it and let them know what you are going to do to incorporate it into an improvement plan.