OUTsight/ Leading Across Distance
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Photo by Jon Asato on Unsplash
Hilversum, 13 November 2019 — How do you lead change with remote team members and clients?
It’s in Kevin Eikenberry’s book The Long-Distance Leader.
Distance leadership is increasingly important in our world nowadays. Who doesn’t have a remote team member? Many teams are now spread around cities, countries, and timezones.
The new normal in many companies is to be assigned to work with people you have not had a cup of coffee or tea with, and perhaps you never will.
Distance leadership is also called for when you connect with people for a purpose in your online networks and communities. Influencing people across distance is now becoming a critical skill.
That’s why I quickly picked up Eikenberry’s book on Kindle, keenly interested to learn from his experiences in leading across distance, to share with the leaders I work with.
And I was disappointed.
The book didn't impress me as much as I had hoped—the authors seemed to mostly take Boomer generation experiences as their starting point, instead of 21st-century workplace realities.
What I did like, however, was their Three Os model for leadership. I found that it is fully consistent with the Three Worlds Model that I created earlier for my leadership training and coaching work.
So what are the Three Os and Three Worlds?
As Eikenberry points out, leadership is always about Outcomes, Ourselves, and Others. That sounds reasonable, right? Yet it’s an important truth that’s often forgotten.
I put these three Os into my Three Worlds model in the diagram below. Let’s see how they fit.
Outcomes happen in our Observed World, where you set out to play a Bigger Game. Without setting goals and achieving outcomes, thinking like a leader is often just dreaming.
What about Ourselves? Leadership always (re)starts with self-leadership in your Personal World, where it is an Inside Job to align yourself with the outcomes you want to achieve.
And Others? They are in your Social World, where leadership is a Contact Sport that turns your dreams and plans into reality by engaging with others and making commitments.
It’s clear that Eikenberry’s Three Os fit perfectly into the Three Worlds Model, further enriching our toolkit for unpacking what leadership development is all about.
Note: The Three Worlds Model I created for leadership training and coaching is in turn is based on Integral Theory and the Direction - Alignment - Commitment (DAC) model.
A key difference you need to be aware of in distance leadership lies in how you work with Others.
As informed by research, and borne out by my own experience, it takes more time (and effort) in remote work to develop the emotional bonds that will lift your relationships to a level where you can consistently deliver high-quality outcomes.
There is no shortcut to this.
Investing in the emotional dimension of remote working relationships is key, and that’s why we practice this in our community of leaders.
If you’re interested to learn and practice how to lead across distance, our community of leaders may be a good fit for you. Visit Grow3Leaders to request your invitation.
Joining is free of charge—not free of commitment.