Darleen DeRosa - Leading at a Distance

11 CHAPTER 5: Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind: How to Inspire and Motivate from Afar Find Ways to Recognize and Reward Employees Get to Understand the Values of Your Remote Team Members Help the Team Find Its “Why?” and Then Focus on the “How” Create a Sense of Purpose and then Focus on the “How” Become a Storyteller The Bottom Line Notes

12 CHAPTER 6: “You're on Mute”: The Ultimate Guide for Hosting Virtual Meetings Before the Meeting Running the Meeting The Five Types of Disruptors in Virtual Meetings and How to Handle Them A Few Important Caveats About Media Richness: Video Burnout The Bottom Line Notes

13 CHAPTER 7: Hiring Without a Handshake: Discovering Successful Virtual Leaders Create a Dynamic Profile That Reflects Your Future Needs Defining the Requirements: What Should I Look for in a Great Virtual Leader? Walk the Talk: Virtual Interview Best Practices Virtual Hiring: A Net Benefit for All The Bottom Line Notes

14 CHAPTER 8: Surviving Day One: A Toolkit for Remote Onboarding Onboarding CEOs and Senior Executives Four General Onboarding Recommendations Conclusion The Bottom Line Notes

15 CHAPTER 9: Continuous Improvement: High-Impact Coaching and Accountability at a Distance Principles of Virtual Coaching Managing Accountability Setting People Up for Success After-the-Fact Accountability Booster: Three Coaching Questions The Bottom Line Notes

16 CHAPTER 10: The Culture Conundrum: Building and Sustaining Culture Virtually Party Time: Creative Ideas for Hosting Culture-Boosting Events The Bottom Line Notes

17 Afterword: The Virtual Road Ahead Some Sectors Are More Suited to Virtual Work The Gender Gap May Grow Even Wider Leaders Will Be More Selective with Business Travel Technology and Innovation Will Accelerate Virtual Work For Some People, Remote Work Will Be Unsustainable In a Virtual World, Everyone Must Behave Like a Leader The Hybrid Model Will Present New Kinds of Challenges Notes

18 Acknowledgments Acknowledgments from Jim Citrin Acknowledgments from Darleen DeRosa

19 About the Authors

20 Index

21 End User License Agreement

1 Chapter 1 FIGURE 1.1 Organizational Impact FIGURE 1.2 Individual Impact FIGURE 1.3 Virtual Work: What has been challenging? FIGURE 1.4 Virtual Work: Impact on the following factors FIGURE 1.5 Impact on stress a result of of the shift to remote work

2 Chapter 3FIGURE 3.1

3 Chapter 9FIGURE 9.1

4 Chapter 10FIGURE 10.1

5 AfterwordFIGURE A.1 Virtual road ahead.

1 Cover Page

2 Table of Contents

3 Begin Reading

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At the start, we were all operating on adrenaline.

When the COVID-19 global pandemic broke in early 2020, millions of organizations and hundreds of millions of employees shifted on a dime to working remotely. A can-do spirit set in individually and collectively, fueled by the once-in-a-generation sense of shared humanity, driving people around the world to adapt and perform at unimaginably high levels of productivity. Employee engagement scores increased as CEOs and corporate leaders stepped up and communicated with much greater frequency, transparency, and authenticity than they had felt appropriate before the crisis set in. And a great many office workers, powered by Zoom, Teams, WebEx, and BlueJeans, quickly found joys in working from home and eliminating the grind of the daily commute and business travel.

A year later, much of this novelty had washed away.

This is not only about Zoom burnout. Fear and uncertainty about the virus and the resulting global economic collapse, concerns about the well-being of loved ones, and job insecurity were further exacerbated by the many other afflictions of Annus Horribilis 2020. The all-too-well-known list includes historic levels of political polarization, nationwide protests over racial injustice ignited by the killing of George Floyd, and record-destructive wildfires throughout the West Coast of the United States, just to name a few. And the work-from-home (WFH) trend, which was a part of many professionals’ working lives pre-COVID-19 but dramatically accelerated when companies closed offices due to the pandemic, will remain both a privilege and source of ongoing stress, taxing mental health, putting pressure on personal relationships, and uncovering new challenges for employees and their leaders alike.

Someday the COVID-19 pandemic will end – and we hope you are reading this book from that vantage point. But even as we write this, at a time when “social distancing” remains an imperative and few companies are encouraging or even letting workers return to offices (with masks on), this much is clear: we are in the early days of a dramatic, long-term shift in how work is done. In this emerging world, the work of leaders will less frequently occur face-to-face, and more of it will be done virtually, whether by means of audio, video, email, text, Slack, Teams, or whatever new technologies emerge. Our goal with Leading at a Distance is to share highly practical insights for how to be the best virtual leader you can be. Given that an important aspect of leadership is role modeling, it will also be important to share advice about how to be the most effective virtual employee you can be.