How Remote Leadership Has Transformed Since 2018

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Marisa Eikenberry
Welcome back to the long-distance worklife. We help you lead, work and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Marisa Eikenberry, a fellow remote worker and joining me is my co-host and remote work expert, Wayne Turmel. Hi, Wayne.

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Wayne Turmel
Hello, Marissa. Hello, listeners, wherever you may be. Hi. How are you?

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Marisa Eikenberry
Great. How are you?

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Wayne Turmel
I am, I'm fine. I'm excited. We have a new book coming out. Kind of. Sorta.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yes. So do you want to introduce that a little bit before we get into our questions today?

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Wayne Turmel
Well, I'm excited. We are coming up, in 2018. Of course, Kevin Eikenberry and I wrote The Long Distance Leader Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership, which, you know, came out before Covid, and it it's in seven languages, and lots of people have read it and that's wonderful. but it was 2018 and the world has changed. So we now have the long distance leader revised rules for remarkable remote and hybrid leadership, which is the second edition and the updated edition of the original long distance leader.

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Wayne Turmel
There's about 2,025% updated content in the book.

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Marisa Eikenberry
That's incredible. And we're actually going to talk about some of that today. specifically, we're going to dive into what is now chapter two of the revised one, about how remote leadership has changed and, that kind of thing. So I guess I want to start off with, how has the perception of remote leadership changed from, you know, 2018 to now?

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Wayne Turmel
Yeah, it's changed. And I will give you a very concrete example of how it's changed. When I joined the Kevin Eikenberry Group and Kevin hired me. We actually formed a subdivision called the Remote Leadership Institute because people didn't know how to lead remote teams, and they hadn't done it. And it was this weird kind of thing. And over the last year or so, the brand of Remote Leadership Institute has actually gone away.

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Wayne Turmel
It's been folded into the Kevin Eikenberry Group because it's no longer its own unique thing that nobody knows what the heck to do with. It's part of the water we swim in.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, I remember when it was still a big deal about what we were going to call it because, well, some people call it telework and some people are calling it telecommuting, and these people are calling it remote.

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Wayne Turmel
And when was the last time somebody used the word telework? Right. So, so much has changed. I mean, in since 2018, when we wrote the book, zoom literally did not exist. It was a free service that had no corporate penetration. And suddenly it went from what? Zoom to a verb.

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Marisa Eikenberry
In like two months.

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Wayne Turmel
To a syndrome where suddenly people had zoom fatigue.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

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Wayne Turmel
And so things have changed. It is the short answer. Now, what really has changed? Well, a couple of things. Number one is more people have experienced remote work. more people have been successful doing remote work than anybody, especially their bosses thought they could.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yes.

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Wayne Turmel
so the genie is out of the bottle. the other thing that's happened, and this is why we've added the word hybrid to the title, and a lot of the new content is about hybrid teams, because even though a lot of organizations are returning to the office, are they really?

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Marisa Eikenberry
You're right.

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Wayne Turmel
You know, so many organizations have come to the situation where, well, you know, we're going to be in the office 2 or 3 days a week.

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Wayne Turmel
And that's great. It's a compromise. Everybody's kind of doing the best they can. But as I like to say, that's not a strategy. That's a hostage negotiation. Right. You know how how much can we make them come back to the office before they quit? How much can we whine about going into the office before they fire us? And so they kind of reach this compromise, that sort of kind of works?

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Wayne Turmel
Yeah. Real hybrid work is a very different thing. And what we urge in the book is to take a look at whatever it looks like. Right? Whether it's you've got full time, some people remote full time, some people in the office, people are in a couple of days a week. That's still a remote team. If you have one member of your team who isn't where everybody else is, you have a remote team and don't forget that.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that you talk about in this new chapter, the book, is this concept of first order versus second order changes. Can you explain what that is?

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Wayne Turmel
Yeah. It's kind of like, a first degree burn is how a third degree burn has you in the hospital. All right. The same is true when you are talking about change. A first order of change is we need to do this differently. We need to do it better, faster, smarter, whatever a second order change is, what we're doing isn't working.

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Wayne Turmel
We need to do something else.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Gotcha.

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Wayne Turmel
So a first order change is we need to use our webcams more often. Yeah, a second order change is we need to make sure that we meet once a quarter as a team, regardless of where people are. It is worth coming together to do that so that our team is connected, engaged, gets to know each other. All that good stuff.

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Wayne Turmel
And those kind of changes, those kinds of changes are bigger than we think. I mean, the thing about remote work is the first order change is great and come in a couple of days a week.

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Marisa Eikenberry


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Wayne Turmel
A much bigger change is we don't expect you to come in and try to get your tasks done that day. We're going to do all our meetings on the days when we're together and allow people to not have to join meetings on the days that they're working from home, right.

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Marisa Eikenberry
That's a huge shift in mindset in how you work during the week and everything. Well.

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Wayne Turmel
This isn't in the book, but it's core to, I think, how we think about hybrid work. And it's kind of mentioned, but.

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Marisa Eikenberry
So you're getting an inside scoop, listeners, are.

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Wayne Turmel
You getting an inside scoop? Here's the thing. Most of what we call hybrid work is not it's a blend. It's a compromise, a true hybrid takes two things, puts them together and creates a whole new entity. So the most obvious example is a mule. Yes, one parent is a donkey and one parent is a horse. But if you've ever dealt with mules, you know that they are their own unique animal.

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Wayne Turmel
They have traits of both. But a mule is a mule and it is not a horse. And it is sure not a donkey. That's the thing about hybrid work. For hybrid work to really take the next level, to really be strategic, we need to realize that it's not just some people are in the office and some people aren't.

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Wayne Turmel
Yeah, it's not just what work gets done where, but what work gets done where, when?

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

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Wayne Turmel
It takes time into account. And so that's going to require a little bit of different thinking. But just as remote leadership was look do the leadership stuff and you'll probably be okay. Right. What we do as leaders hasn't changed. How we do it is a little bit different.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. But the basic concept is the same.

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Wayne Turmel
Basic concepts are the same. The same is true of hybrid, except you're building time into the equation in ways that weren't when it was just like, okay, work wherever you want.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Well, and speaking of the idea of, you know, the leadership concepts haven't changed, but how we do them does. So one of the things that we've seen happen with this remote and hybrid shift is the shift of written communication, more than, you know, oral communication. You're not going down the hall and telling Suzy Q that something has changed.

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Marisa Eikenberry
So because of now the shift to written communication and the prevalence of email, like, how is that impacted leadership styles?

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Wayne Turmel
Well, it's not just the prevalence of email. Email is in fact becoming less prevalent than than it was because things like teams and slack and text messaging and all of that stuff. But what that does is it changes the way we communicate. Written communication, by its nature, is less rich than spoken communication.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

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Wayne Turmel
Right. I can send you a message. I can't see your face. I have no idea if you've even read it. I don't know whether you're going to take action or not. If you have a question, it's going to take time for that question to get back to me. Whereas if we're sitting face to face and I say something, you don't understand, I can see on your face because I want to play poker with you someday.

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Wayne Turmel
Oh, I can see, oh.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, I replace lose.

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Wayne Turmel
So that there's confusion and. Yes. And whatever. Right. And and on a hybrid team, that can be a challenge because the people that are physically together get a different level of communication. Sometimes than the people who are remote. And at best that can lead to kind of quickness. And at worst it becomes a proximity bias issue. Right. Which excludes the more remote members of the team.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, we've talked about that in some other episodes, and I'll link those in the show notes. And so, you know, with this, like we're constantly learning and we're constantly changing how we're doing things to adapt to this remote and hybrid environment. So, you know, why is it so crucial for leaders to accept it, that, you know, they are going to require ongoing learning and they are going to require adaptation that maybe they weren't doing prior to the remote shift?

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Wayne Turmel
Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. one is that when Covid hit and there was the explosion in remote work, everybody was just dog paddling as fast as they could to get through it. And the good news is that they got through it. Yeah. Productivity did not drop the way people thought it would. Employee engagement did not drop the way that they thought it would.

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Wayne Turmel
more people quit after Covid than quit during it, quite frankly. so the we can do it. And we got through it and we kind of burst our way through it, and we did the best we could. And some people had the good sense to buy the long distance. Later or, you know, have us teach our long distance leadership series.

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Wayne Turmel
and that's certainly still available. But the nuances.

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Marisa Eikenberry


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Wayne Turmel
Of how do we do this in a remote environment? There was kind of a tendency to think, oh, we can go back to the before times. We can go back to the way things were. But for the first time, leaders over frontline supervisor are now likely to have at least one member of their team who is remote.

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Wayne Turmel
So kind of relying on the way we did it in the before times creates some issues with employee engagement with communication that don't often turn into burning fires, but they are problems that could be believed and situations that could be better than they are.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

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Wayne Turmel
And so with this notion that, well, we're all back in the office now. Well, no you're not. On any given day, 50% of your desks are empty. So it's easy to kind of fall into that. Remote's over. We're back to normal. Well, no, the new norm is that you are going to have these things. You're going to have to figure out how to include your remote employees in the discussion in a meaningful ways.

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Wayne Turmel
You're more importantly, for the first time, organizations cannot just put their succession planning and their employee development kind of default to the people in the office. If you want to keep your best people and statistics say that your mid-level and junior senior, you know, not C-suite, but, director level folks are most prone to want to work remotely at least some of the time if you do not as an organization, adjust to that, develop succession plans, develop personal development plans.

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Wayne Turmel
It's going to be very hard to keep good people. It's going to be very hard to attract people, and it's going to make onboarding a real pain unless you systematize, systemize, systematize. I'm not quite sure what the word is, but you know what? if we don't somehow create a system that acknowledges the differences amongst the team and builds those into creating one team, it'll work, but it won't work.

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Wayne Turmel
Great, right? And none of us are listening to this podcast because we want it to just work. We want it to work great.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right? So, you know, how can leaders kind of prepare themselves and their teams for, you know, more inevitable changes in work expectations and technology advancements? I mean, we've already discussed this is the new normal. We're going to have new stuff coming in all the time.

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Wayne Turmel
But well, and it's normal this week, the exactly I mean, one as of 1048, July, whatever the heck it is. this is the normal. By the time we talk next week, it will be something else.

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Marisa Eikenberry


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Wayne Turmel
So the first thing as leaders is don't panic but don't get comfortable. Understand that change is inevitable. Things are going to change. Keep an eye on it. Right. Don't just keep an eye out. You don't have to know every new thing. You. I guarantee you have someone on your team who is the first one to say, hey, there's this new thing we should use, and nobody likes them and nobody listens to them.

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Marisa Eikenberry
And you know, we do. We can.

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Wayne Turmel
You're early adopters are lovely human beings, and frequently a bit of a pain. but as leaders, you need to be aware of not so much what tools are out there, but what problems might a new tool address?

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Marisa Eikenberry


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Wayne Turmel
That's how to look at new technology, right?

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Marisa Eikenberry
Because not every new solution is going to work for every team too.

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Wayne Turmel
And those of us who survived the Betamax, VHS, TiVo DVR comes with my cable system. Oh, look, I can fit it all on my phone who have survived that understands you can't get too comfortable with technology.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right about the time that you think this is going to be the thing it's not. And then, you know, vinyl comes back.

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Wayne Turmel
Well, I mean, as we said before, Covid, Microsoft Teams did not exist, right? It was slack for business or Skype for business. Skype for business no longer exists. Now we have teams, right. Because organizations were looking for not having 17 different tools. They wanted one ring to rule them. All right. And whether that rather.

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Marisa Eikenberry
That ring should be Microsoft is a whole different.

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Wayne Turmel
Ballgame. It's a totally different question. But they will take the convenience of having one thing and the less and cost and the ease of not having to get 17 licenses for every single tool. Absolutely right. As we've said so many times on this show, every decision gets made for a reason.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Right? It makes sense to somebody. It just might not be, you know.

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Wayne Turmel
So and we're not going to go down the Microsoft rabbit hole. But you know, your question was what do leaders need to think? We just need to keep listening. you know, exclusion on remote teams is the biggest, most corrosive thing. When people feel they are not included, when they feel they're being actively excluded, which is frequently not the case.

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Wayne Turmel
I'm not being mean to you. I am not promoting you because I don't like you. I literally don't think about you because I got somebody right here in front of me.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. You need we, as one of our coworkers says a lot. Guy Harris, he says, assume benign intent. They didn't intentionally do this to hurt you.

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Wayne Turmel
Right. And we need to know. You need to keep taking the pulse. You need to have rich conversations. You need to give people the chance to engage. Engagement comes from within. I can't think I can engage with you, but you will not necessarily engage with me unless you choose to. Yeah, but I have to give you that opportunity, and I have to avoid the things that will make you disengage.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Yes, it's a give and take right. So, you know, we've discussed that like things are always changing, they're always adapting. And we need to be doing that. So what are some effective ways for leaders to stay updated and continuously improve their leadership skills.

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Wayne Turmel
Yeah. And I mean, this sounds self-serving because look what we do for a living here at the Kevin Eikenberry Group. But there are plenty of including our own. And we're happy to share those with you ongoing newsletters and updates. And there's no shortage of stuff out there. If you're on LinkedIn, find the gurus that speak to you and just subscribe to them on LinkedIn.

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Wayne Turmel
Kevin and I are on LinkedIn. We post new information all the time so that you at least have some sense of what's happening out in the landscape.

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Marisa Eikenberry
Absolutely.

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Wayne Turmel
There are ways to develop your skills. There is e-learning, there is shortcuts, and there are actual training. Whether your organization provides it or you come to someone like us and our long distance leadership series. and oh, by the way, not for nothing. There's books out there, right?

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Marisa Eikenberry
There's there's learning for everyone. So speaking of that, and because we're coming up on our time, I do want to.

00;20;34;04 - 00;20;36;05
Wayne Turmel
See the subtle way I let us.

00;20;36;07 - 00;20;59;01
Marisa Eikenberry
To. I did I did, so, as you know, those of you who are watching just saw Wayne hold up a lovely book. And so we have a special announcement and that is that the second edition of the Long-Distance leader is available for preorder and will be launching on September 17th, and this updated guide is perfect for navigating today's remote and hybrid work environments with new principles and proven strategies.

00;20;59;02 - 00;21;21;00
Marisa Eikenberry
Kevin, I can very Wayne Trammell show you how to lead effectively no matter where your team is located. So don't miss out on the latest insights and exercises designed to boost productivity and morale. Preorder your copy today at Long distance Work life.com/l d l and strengthen your leadership skills today. And Wayne, thank you so much for this conversation.

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Marisa Eikenberry
I hope that people are really excited about the new book. it's you've changed so much, and I think it's really going to be helpful for the people who are reading it.

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Wayne Turmel
So it's it's, it's a blast. And, you know, it's funny, we say all the time here at the cabinet Kingsbury group training as an event, learning as a process. And that includes for us.

00;21;42;22 - 00;22;09;26
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, absolutely. We are also learning all the time and, you know, early adopting, but anyway, thank you so much for listening to the long distance work life for Shownotes transcripts and other resources. Don't forget to go to long distance work life.com. And if you haven't yet, subscribe to the podcast so you won't miss any future episodes. And if you're on Apple or Spotify, please give us a rating and review.

00;22;10;01 - 00;22;25;19
Marisa Eikenberry
Your feedback helps us improve and reach more listeners just like you. Feel free to contact us via email or LinkedIn with the links in our show notes, and let us know you listen to this episode, or suggest a topic for Wayne and I to tackle in a future episode. We would love to hear from you. Thank you for joining us.

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Marisa Eikenberry
And as Wayne likes to say, don't let the weasels get you down.

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