COVID changed how we live and work in many ways. One example is the increased need for remote communication and for managing and leading hybrid teams.
Wayne Turmel is part of The Kevin Eikenberry Group, and he and Kevin co-wrote The Long-Distance Leader, originally published in 2018, with a revised edition out in 2024. Wayne’s work focuses on remote and virtual communication in the evolving workplace.
In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 439, Wayne and Leading Learning Podcast co-host Jeff Cobb talk about what leadership is; how leadership does and doesn’t change in the context of remote, virtual, and hybrid work; the importance of trust and of choosing the appropriate communication tools for the situation; and what mules and hybrid work have in common.
Whether you lead a team, are part of a team, or both, you’ll benefit from the advice and insight Wayne offers around effective communication.
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Wayne Turmel: [00:00:00] Leaders need to seek feedback.
Celisa Steele: [00:00:08] I’m Celisa Steele.
Jeff Cobb: [00:00:10] I’m Jeff Cobb, and this is the Leading Learning Podcast.
Celisa Steele: [00:00:18] COVID has required many changes in the ways we live and work. One example is the increased need for remote communication and for managing and leading hybrid teams. Wayne Turmel is part of The Kevin Eikenberry Group, and he and Kevin have co-authored three books, including The Long-Distance Leader, originally published in 2018, with a revised edition out in 2024. Wayne’s work focuses on remote and virtual communication in the evolving workplace. In this episode of the Leading Learning Podcast, number 439, Wayne and Jeff talk about what leadership is; how leadership does and doesn’t change in the context of remote, virtual, and hybrid work; the importance of trust and of choosing the appropriate communication tools for the situation; what mules and hybrid work have in common; and the fact that Wayne’s been a contestant on Jeopardy! Whether you lead a team or are part of a team or both, you’ll benefit from the advice and insight Wayne offers around effective communication. Jeff and Wayne spoke in September 2024.
A Focus on Leadership in the Hybrid and Remote Workplace
Jeff Cobb: [00:01:33] When you work with people, what are you doing with them?
Wayne Turmel: [00:01:36] What we’re doing is helping them take a look at their leadership as well as their leadership development. How are they adjusting to the new hybrid and remote workplace? Where are the skill gaps that need to be addressed? And we then do training, consulting, all that good stuff. But it really starts with helping people understand what do they need their leaders to do? Before the COVID diaspora and everybody got sent home, there was a lot of concern about remote work, and now there’s a lot of concern about hybrid work or trying to figure out the right balance of remote and hybrid. We can help demystify some of that.
Defining Leadership
Jeff Cobb: [00:02:30] A key reason that we’re here talking today—we have many, many good bases for conversation—but you are releasing a new edition, the second edition of The Long-Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership, and so we want to dig into some of what that book can provide to leaders and aspiring leaders. I always like to start out—we’re sticklers for language here at Leading Learning—so we want to make sure we get our terms defined well. You’ve already brought up three that I think we need to be clear about. The most foundational one is simply “leadership” because everybody talks about leadership and being a leader and what it means to be a leader. When you’re talking about leadership, how do you define that? How do you define leadership?
Wayne Turmel: [00:03:14] Leadership, by definition, is getting things done through and with other people. We need to, whatever it is, whether it’s lead a committee, lead a Boy Scout troop, get your company’s project completed, leaders are those who inspire, coach, and—“exploit” is the wrong word; it’s so loaded—but get the best from people to help achieve those results. And that hasn’t radically changed. Genghis Khan ruled half the world and never held a Webex meeting.
Jeff Cobb: [00:03:55] Good point.
Wayne Turmel: [00:03:56] Julius Caesar did great out in the field. It’s when he went back to the office that things kind of went pear-shaped. Both the highest praise and the biggest criticism that we got when Long-Distance Leader came out was “Most of this is just a really good leadership book.” Well, yes, thank you. And they were going, “But it’s not all about remote.” No, it’s not. But, if you’re not doing the basic leadership things, being a whiz on Zoom or Microsoft Teams is not going to be the flex you think it is.
Jeff Cobb: [00:04:31] Right, and it’s a good point because Genghis Khan or Julius Caesar were remote leaders in many ways. They were obviously leading a lot of people who never saw them, probably. Now, the other terms that relate to that, that I want to make sure we’re clear about from the beginning, you’ve used the term “remote” a number of times already, “hybrid” and maybe “virtual” too. I haven’t heard “virtual” come up as much. But when you think about those three things—hybrid, remote, virtual—how are those the same or different in your context?
Defining Remote, Hybrid, and Virtual
Wayne Turmel: [00:04:58] Remote is one person is someplace, and somebody else is someplace else. There’s distance between you. That’s remote. Virtual is a little more ambiguous. It tends to mean your teams; maybe don’t have direct reporting mechanisms. A project team, for example, is a virtual team. There might be people from all over the place from different departments. Maybe they have a real boss somewhere who is not the project leader. But you still need to form those relationships, and you need to get the work done, and you need to get stuff done, mostly through influence as opposed to coercion and direct reportorial power. And hybrid—you may be careful about asking me this question because I’m a little bit like a dog with a sock. I think that hybrid, right now, means some of us are in the office; some of us aren’t. Maybe we need to be in the office three days a week. Most of what people are calling hybrid work isn’t really hybrid. It’s a hostage negotiation. They said, “Well, COVID’s over, and we want to get people back to the office.” And there was this negotiation process. “How much can we make them come back to the office before they quit?” “How much can I whine about going into the office before I get fired?” And they agreed, compromised. Nobody’s 100-percent happy with the arrangement, but it works. And now let’s get back to work.
Wayne Turmel: [00:06:46] A real hybrid is not just a mushing of things together or a negotiated settlement—not that there’s anything wrong with negotiated settlements. But, if you really want to be strategic about hybrid work, hybrid is when you take two distinct things and create a third distinct entity. The classic example is a mule. Yes, it’s a horse, and it’s a donkey. But, if you’ve ever met mules, you realize that they are their own unique thing. Mules are mules. They are not horses, and they are not donkeys. When you’re trying to put together a strategic plan for a team, you want to be intentional about “What is it that we’re trying to achieve?” You can be office-first. You can be remote-first. But a real hybrid team is not just what work gets done where, which is how we think about it—well, they’re at home or in the office. A true hybrid team also takes into account when the work happens, so the balance of synchronous and asynchronous work not only can be very different, but it is very defined and carefully thought out as opposed to smushed. I warned you.
Jeff Cobb: [00:08:18] The image of you being a dog with a sock, I like that in my mind. And hybrid as a mule, I like that as well. Obviously, remote, hybrid, virtual have all existed for a while, certainly since well before this thing called the global pandemic hit us, but that escalated a lot of these issues or the issues that come with these different forms of working. What, in your mind, has changed fundamentally in the wake of the pandemic, if anything? Maybe nothing has changed. I don’t know. And what’s fundamentally the same?
What’s Changed with Remote, Hybrid, and Virtual Work Since the Pandemic
Wayne Turmel: [00:08:52] What has not changed is human beings. They are still wonderful and full of potential and dumb and petty and all the stuff that human beings are. I started looking at remote and virtual work almost 20 years ago, and The Long-Distance Leader—the first version came out in 2018, so it was almost exactly two years before the pandemic. So we’ve been standing on this corner for a while. One of the reasons for the new edition is “What’s changed?” There are two buckets of things that have changed. The first is clearly the technology is different. Before the pandemic, Zoom was a free product that had zero corporate penetration, and then suddenly it went from “What’s Zoom?” to a verb to a syndrome in 18 months. A lot of people had been thinking, “Maybe we should look into remote. We’ve got to think about that one of these days.” Whatever. And then we all got pushed across the Rubicon.
Wayne Turmel: [00:10:07] A third of the workforce found themselves not going into the office and still needing to get work done. The technology, Microsoft Teams, for example, was a gleam in somebody’s eye, but that’s about it. It was still Skype for business. Slack was on the ascendance, but it hadn’t achieved what it became. So the tools changed, and the book tries not to dwell on specific tools. We don’t care if you use Outlook or Gmail, but you’ve got to think about your e-mail in a certain way, if that makes sense. But the second part is more important, which is, in the year of our Lord 2024, what does remote work look like? What we found is there is a much larger percentage of people than before the pandemic who work primarily remote.
Wayne Turmel: [00:11:07] They need to be addressed, supported, developed, managed. There’s more of this hybrid work that started as “O, dear Lord, let us return to normal. Let us pretend the last two years didn’t happen and get back to our lives.” You can’t really do that because the genie’s out of the bottle. You walk into any office, even one that has supposedly returned to normal, and anywhere from a third to half of the desks are empty. Not that there aren’t people who belong to those desks, but So-and-So is traveling; So-and-So has a sick kid; today’s their day to work from home. Whatever it is. At its core, if you have one team member who isn’t there when the work’s getting done, you have a remote team. The same dynamics that you need to take into account—I’m happy to go down that rabbit hole—need to be in account even when you’re in the office; otherwise, you can unintentionally create havoc.
Wayne Turmel: [00:12:18] Proximity bias is a very natural way that our brain copes with problems. But, on a hybrid team, for example, it can result in the people who aren’t in the office feeling excluded. It can result in perception—and it may just be perception, but that doesn’t mean it’s not corrosive—the perception that the manager favors the people in the office. Part of developing leaders in this new environment is to say, “Yes, you’ve got to do all the leadership stuff.” The Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar stuff, he’s still got to do that. And you need to be aware of how the dynamics of your workplace are going to impact that and adjust accordingly.
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Leadership First, Location Second
Jeff Cobb: [00:13:43] One of the key principles in the book—you have a number of principles that you cover—but it’s this whole idea of leadership first, location second. I assume that’s a principle because a lot of organizations don’t do that. They screw up that order. You’ve mentioned some of what can happen when you do that. What trips organizations up there?
Wayne Turmel: [00:14:01] Part of it is they become focused on the fact that people aren’t there. Some of them go to extremes. We get keyboard monitoring. We get, “You must be logged on at a certain time, and you must be logged off at a certain time.” The attempt to micromanage sometimes goes up. Here’s the thing: Bad leaders are going to be bad leaders, and good leaders are probably going to find a way to make it work, regardless of the circumstances. But technology does play a part in this, and it does change how we think. We might be the most diligent coaches in the world, but giving feedback is different when you have to go to your keyboard and type something out to somebody or make sure they’re there so that you can talk to them before you walk up to their desk and start talking to them. A really terrible example of this…well, it’s a great example; it’s a terrible story. My wife was once fired by instant messenger. See that face that you made and that little noise? I would expect that 99 percent of people listening to this would go, “Yeah, that’s probably not right.”
Wayne Turmel: [00:15:20] Now think about it from this point of view of a terrible manager: “I don’t want to deal with this person. I’m already done with them. I want them fired. I don’t have to listen to them cry and the drama and everything.” Because, at the end of that interaction, the goal was achieved. She was fired. She was no longer working for them. We can reasonably assume that this guy is a terrible human being. But now let’s take that to a slightly more understandable version of the same thing. “I need to give Jeff some feedback, but it’s already 4 o’clock on Thursday, and I’m just going to send him an e-mail, and I’ll deal with it tomorrow.” In the great, perfect leadership world, that’s not the right thing to do. But, man, is it easy, and it’s convenient, and it saves time, and it gives me time to get my head together about how I’m going to deal with Jeff. Those are the little things. A huge piece of remote and hybrid leadership is making sure that we’re choosing the right tools for the right communication and that we are helping the team establish the norms that are going to get the work done in the best possible way.
The Myth of the Less Productive Workplace
Jeff Cobb: [00:16:46] I suspect a lot of people…because I know I do wrestle with that and wrestle with getting to a point of confidence around, “Am I using the right tools in the right ways to do this?” I suspect another source of hesitancy and fear, and I can say I’ve felt the tug of these at times with being a remote leader, it’s that concern that, if you are that remote or hybrid organization, you aren’t going to be as productive. You’re not going to be able to achieve the same level and consistency of outcomes that that more traditional organization can achieve. How do effective remote leaders move past that fear and ensure that goals are achieved, that employees are on track, that it is a productive organization?
Wayne Turmel: [00:17:28] The first thing is you need to figure out is what is it that you are measuring. Most organizations for the last 100-odd years have measured activity versus productivity. For example, people say, “Well, you should be logged on at a certain time and logged off at a certain time. We want you at your desk for the eight hours a day that we are paying you,” which sounds reasonable because, in the office, we look, and is somebody at their desk when the day starts? Are they still there when the day ends? But you and I know that somebody sitting at their desk is no guarantee that they’re being productive or that they’re doing good work. What matters is is the report written on time? Is it up to a certain quality? Is it achieving the goals? Are the customers being served? That’s the stuff that you want to be measuring. If we’re talking about a financial analysis needs to be done by our meeting Tuesday, does it really matter if that report is written between 9 and 5, when everybody is all online at the same time? Or, if I decide, “I’m a morning person; I’m just going to bang this out first thing in the morning while my head’s clear,” why does it matter that it was done at a certain time?
Wayne Turmel: [00:18:49] One of the things with hybrid work is people are saying, “I can’t get any work done. If I have to go into the office, people are talking to me, and there are conversations, and there’s cake in the break room because it’s Alice’s birthday, and I can’t get any work done. And then, when I work from home, I’m on Zoom calls all day, and I can’t get any work done.” This gets back to what I was saying before about what work gets done where and when. Maybe the days that you go into the office are not going to be days where you get a lot of stuff checked off your list, but those are the days that you have your coaching conversations with people, that you have to sit around, brainstorm sessions, that you take the time to bring in pizza so people can converse and get to know each other and form relationships. On the days when people are working from home, you leave them alone to get the work done, and, as long as the work is getting done, I don’t really care that you’re online at the same time as everybody else.
Jeff Cobb: [00:19:56] Yes, I agree completely. I know a lot of people who struggle to let that go, though, but I think it’s something to constantly be working towards and maintaining as a leader.
Wayne Turmel: [00:20:08] That’s the key. Coming out of COVID, we’ve never done this before. It’s no wonder it’s confusing and frustrating. But, coming out of COVID, senior leadership sat around and said, “Okay, this is what it’s going to look like going forward,” and there were a lot of assumptions that were wrong. There were a lot of assumptions that couldn’t be supported. The one thing Kevin and I are really, really clear about with our clients is that this is an evolving situation. We’re all learning to do this better at the same time. And, for the love of everything that’s holy, think pilot before policy. Before you create a policy that says, “This is how it is,” try it and then see how it went and what needs to be changed. Some people are going to find they want to be in the office more than they expected, and other people are fine not coming in that often, and the work is getting done.
Wayne Turmel: [00:21:12] You said something earlier that I almost responded to, but I have trained myself not, which is this notion that somehow, by virtue of the fact that they’re remote, teams are less productive. There is very little evidence to back that up. As a matter of fact, during COVID, two things went up in the first year of COVID: employee engagement and productivity. Some of that is the circumstances. Why did engagement go up? There’s a crisis. People want to keep their job. They want to make sure their friends and teammates are supported. They want to make sure the company doesn’t go out of business so that they’re employed. When people care, they are more engaged, and they do good work. Some of it was not constructive. One of the reasons productivity didn’t drop is we worked more hours. We started the minute we got out of bed, and the boss was sending e-mails at 10 o’clock at night, and we were answering them. For a lot of people, it took time to develop the discipline and the guardrails around their time so that they weren’t burning themselves out.
Engagement in Remote Workplaces
Jeff Cobb: [00:22:39] You brought up engagement, which, of course, is the other area that people worry about. Are people going to be engaged when they’re working remotely? At Leading Learning, all of our work is in the world of learning. When we’re talking about remote learning, online learning, engagement is a huge thing. It’s a thing in face-to-face now too—are people really engaged or not?—for probably some of the same reasons it’s seen as an issue or feared as an issue in remote work.
Wayne Turmel: [00:23:08] There are a couple of things. First of all, I think that the focus on engagement in general is a little disingenuous. They used to say only a third of the workforce is actively engaged, and then there’s the rest, and then there’s the group that is actively disengaged. I’ve been hearing that for 20 years, and part of my brain goes, “That sounds about right.” In any group of humans, you’re going to have the people who really care and work really hard. You’re going to have the people who do exactly what’s expected of them and not a lot more. And you’ve got the sluggards. If you really work hard, you can move that bell curve a little bit to the left. But there’s always going to be that group. Now the problem with remote and hybrid work is that what we are learning is the people who are engaged are really engaged. They’re not going anywhere. They like the work. They’re happy. They maybe have more work-life balance. They’re not spending all that money on a commute. They ain’t going anywhere. Those are your star performers. The problem is that the people who are least engaged are really disengaged. And, not only is it harder to coach them and get them to acceptable minimum standards, they are at far greater risk for turnover.
Wayne Turmel: [00:24:34] If they’re your least engaged people, “Do you really care?” is a fair question. But the problem for people who work remotely is that there are no barriers to changing jobs. If I go into the office every day, and now I want to change jobs, I might have a longer commute; my childcare situation changes. There’s a lot involved in changing jobs. If I work remotely, literally the only thing that changes is my log-in information. We do need to be conscious of engaging everybody and doing the best we can. The problem with the whole conversation about engagement is there’s only so much that the employer can do. Let me give you an example. I meet somebody; I’m wildly in love; I decide I want to spend the rest of my life with this person; I buy a ring; I get down on one knee; I ask them to marry. They are not engaged until they say yes. As employers, we can do everything in our power. God knows we do enough to make it easy to disengage, but all we can do is make it as easy as possible and desirable as possible for them to choose to engage. Because engagement comes from within the individual.
The Role of Trust and Clarity in Leadership
Jeff Cobb: [00:25:59] What are the factors on the employer side? You talk about trust in the book. Probably that’s one. But, if we’re trying to position ourselves as the type of leaders and organizations that people are going to want to engage with, what are some tips for that?
Wayne Turmel: [00:26:17] A big piece on that is clarity. Starting big-picture, are people clear on what the work is? Why do we do what we do? You have worked with enough corporations, and I have worked with enough companies in my life to know that some of them are just soulless drone factories. It doesn’t matter that there are foosball tables in the break room. If my job is just to fill out C-17 forms all day long, and that’s all I do—that can be hard for me to engage with. If I’m filling out C-17 forms so that people’s bills get paid on time, I’m probably a little more engaged with that activity because I’m doing it for a reason. Do people understand what the job is, who the company is, what is it we’re trying to achieve on a macro level? Then it’s really important to have expectations around goals, tasks, and “What do we expect of you?”
Wayne Turmel: [00:27:21] Do I expect you to be logged on at 9 o’clock every morning and don’t log off until 5? I can make that expectation. Not sure it makes a lot of sense, especially if I’m in a different time zone than you, but your house, your rules. But, if I say, “I need this report analyzed and reported out, and I need it by Tuesday, and I need it to this level of quality, and I need you to involve the following people in that process,” and I do that, you probably don’t need to micromanage me very much because clearly I am capable of doing the work, and the work is getting done. If I decide to go to the gym or go to Target over my lunch hour, what does it matter? Now that doesn’t mean you don’t, again, have to be intentional and mindful. Are there times of the day when you want people to have synchronous access to each other? That’s not unreasonable. I live in a three-hour time zone different from Kevin. I’m on the West Coast. He’s on the East Coast. It’s not entirely reasonable to think that I should be online the exact same number of hours that he is, starting with the hours that he is.
Wayne Turmel: [00:28:48] Now what happens organically is that I’m an early bird. My day, [6:30], 7 o’clock, I’m functional and banging away, which means on the one hand, “Oh, Wayne’s off work at 2.” Yes, mostly. But I started at [6:30]. But that’s a choice. That’s how my body clock works. One of the reasons I don’t work 9 to 5 is I’m useless at 3 in the afternoon. There is a three-hour slice of every day when anybody on the team can access anybody else synchronously. How much do you need? Realistically, how often do you need to be synchronously attached? And, if once a month we have a team meeting, an all-team meeting, that’s at 7 o’clock my time, okay, I’ve got to be up and take a shower and dress like a big boy in time for that meeting. But that doesn’t happen every day.
Outcomes, Others, and Ourselves
Jeff Cobb: [00:29:55] There’s a significant chunk of the book that’s about leaders knowing themselves and knowing how to position themselves and engaging in reflection, seeking feedback, setting boundaries that are going to be workable. Can you talk a little bit more about that, the importance of understanding ourselves as leaders?
Wayne Turmel: [00:30:14] I love when people have read the book. That’s so cool. That doesn’t universally happen. There are four models in the book, but the one that ties mostly to what you’re talking about is the Three-O Model, which says, “For work to get done”—and this is true remotely or otherwise, but it’s particularly important in a remote and hybrid environment—“the three Os are outcomes, others, and ourselves.” You always start with the outcomes. What do we want to have happen? How do we best serve our customers? Do we know who does what, with which, and to whom? Do we know where the handoffs are? Do we know that the workflow is happening the way it needs to happen? We started this whole conversation with the idea that, as leaders, we are not supposed to be doing all the work ourselves.
Wayne Turmel: [00:31:11] Our job as leaders is to get those outcomes achieved through other people, and that’s the part of leadership everybody’s cool with. I have to manage. I have to get these people to do that. But where you separate the good leaders from the less good leaders is a level of self-awareness that says, “What about me?” During COVID, we found out that there is a dark side to the whole servant-leadership piece of this. Very often, leaders consider themselves last. If somebody’s got to be on that morning call with Hong Kong and that evening call with Australia, I’ll take the bullet, and I’ll do it. What we found is managers were burning out at a much faster rate than anybody else in the organization simply because—I remember having this conversation as a manager. I was asking somebody to do something, and it was a lot. It was a lot that I was asking them to do, and they were putting up some resistance. I said, “Well, I’m not asking you to do anything I wouldn’t do.” And they looked at me and said, “And exactly what is it that you wouldn’t do?” Ouch! But am I taking care of myself? Am I working in a vacuum? Am I getting…?
Leaders Need to Seek Feedback
Wayne Turmel: [00:32:44] I literally just wrote a blog post before I logged on to talk to you about how leaders need to seek feedback. We know how important it is to give our people feedback. But, especially if we’re working remotely, we aren’t getting a lot of feedback. We’re basically left to our own good intentions and the voices in our heads. I don’t know about the voices in your head, Jeff; mine are not kind. I would instantly fire any manager who spoke to an employee the way I speak to me. My self-talk is very often not as constructive as it should be. But this stuff matters. If we’re not putting guardrails on our time, if we’re not intentionally setting models for the behavior that we want them to achieve, if we say, “We want you to respect your time, and your family time is your own, and I don’t expect you to be answering e-mails at 10 o’clock at night,” why am I sending e-mails at 10 o’clock at night? Because no matter what you say, no matter how benign you try to appear, you are still the boss. There is a huge power discrepancy between you and the people on your team, and most human beings are going to default to appeasing the person who has control of their paycheck.
Jeff Cobb: [00:34:11] Yes, true enough. In so many ways, what we’re talking about at this point has to do with learning. All of this has to do with learning. We covered this earlier on. This is a process. Nobody comes out of the gate saying, “I know how to lead over Zoom and e-mail,” or “I know how to lead” period. But, to take us to the end of our conversation today, this is a podcast about learning, and we’re called Leading Learning, so it’s both about leading and learning. We always like to ask guests about their approaches to learning. Maybe for you this is how you constructively engage with those voices in your head. What are your lifelong learning habits and practices?
The Role of Curiosity in Lifelong Learning
Wayne Turmel: [00:34:50] First of all, to me, the most useful characteristic in another human being is curiosity. It bothers me that I am going to die without learning everything. I’ve come to terms with the fact that is going to happen, but I’m still going to give it my best shot. I am omnivorous around stuff. It got me on Jeopardy! in 1994. It didn’t teach me enough to win, so it only gets you so far. But that’s the big thing—curiosity—for me. Interestingly, I have the attention span of an Irish Setter, and so, when things get too normal and mundane, I get restless, and better that things constantly keep me interested and engaged. That’s the big thing. I think also—and this is where organizations have lost their focus—the ability to take what’s in your head and communicate it to somebody else is so critical. It is maybe the number one thing about being a great leader. You must be able to communicate your vision and take in input that they give you and process that. We’ve kind of lost that.
Wayne Turmel: [00:36:13] A lot of organizations aren’t teaching presentation skills. Why? Because we are doing this, as you and I talked about so many years ago. That’s exactly the problem. For those of you listening on audio, I am pointing to the camera. But, if webcam is our method of communication, we had better optimize that. I’ll give you an example. Kevin rolls his eyes when I start to say this because he’s been listening to me say this for a number of years. My career extends exactly as long as we’ve had e-mail. The first major project I worked with in a big-boy job was rolling out e-mail to my company. So 30-ish years. In that time, for the first time in human history, 70 percent of our work is done in writing—e-mail, text messages, online chat, reports. Seventy percent of our communication is in writing. When was the last time you or anybody on your team got any coaching or education around writing?
The Importance of Written Communication
Jeff Cobb: [00:37:31] You’ve picked a topic area that is dear to the hearts of myself and my co-founder and probably a pain point for some of our employees because, for us, we come out of a writing background, so it’s something we talk about a lot. But I completely get your point because it is so important to be able to communicate well through writing.
Wayne Turmel: [00:37:51] It’s funny. One of the massive changes is, when I started with e-mail, e-mails were very long, dense things. “Dear Sir, Pursuant to your letter of the 17th….” Because we wrote e-mails the way we wrote memos; we were just sending them electronically. And, over time, things changed to, now, I open an e-mail, and it will just say, “Yes.” Maybe that’s an answer to a question. Maybe I have to dig through the previous five e-mails to figure out what they’re responding to. So that’s part of it—are we really communicating effectively? But also doing all that communication in writing makes communication—or can make communication—very transactional. “Send me this file.” “Here it is.” If that is the only interaction we have, sending each other messages on Teams, and they’re short, very transactional type messages, are we building a relationship? Are we building trust? Are we having fun and enjoying our work, heaven forbid? I’m a little obsessed with this notion of communicating through the technology in the right ways.
Wayne Turmel: [00:39:13] Personally one of the most important models in the book is the idea of “richness versus scope,” which is simply a way…and it’s not even our model. Bettina Buechel wrote it in 2000, 2001, whatever it was. It basically says, “All communication is a balance of richness and scope.” We need richness. We also need the convenience, speed, and scope. If we think about firing people by instant messenger, it’s efficient, but there’s not a lot of scope. You’re not going to build a relationship in a positive way. You’re not going to appear empathetic and the kind of leader that people want to work for. So maybe not the right tool. But has your team had these discussions? Has your organization had the discussions around when do you send a chat message? When do you send an e-mail? When do you get on webcam? When do you talk on the phone? When do we need to come together in person as a team? And make those choices intentionally, and make them consistent so that the old white guy isn’t managing by e-mail while everybody else is texting to each other. Some of that is generational. Some of it is work style. Some of it is leadership style. But we need to be on the same page for the team to move forward.
Celisa Steele: [00:40:53] Wayne Turmel’s work focuses on remote and virtual communication in the evolving workplace, and he co-authored The Long-Distance Leader with Kevin Eikenberry. Learn more about the work The Kevin Eikenberry Group does and learn more about the book.
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