The 5 Essential Leadership Skills You Need
Here are 5 essential leadership skills every leader needs to succeed in a hybrid work environment:
1. Communication Clarity
In hybrid settings, unclear communication doesn’t just cause confusion – it causes disengagement. Leaders must master the art of clear, concise, and consistent communication across multiple channels and time zones. This includes encouraging communication across time zones and ensuring that the remote members of the team are as included, consulted, and involved as those in the office.
2. Trust-Building at a Distance
Hybrid work can strain relationships. Leaders need to build and maintain trust without relying on physical proximity, which means being visible, responsive, and authentic – even when remote. As my co-author Kevin Eikenberry and I have demonstrated in our book, The Long-Distance Leader, there are three components to building trust on any team: alignment and common purpose, proof of competence, and proof of motives.
Strategic hybrid teams start with ensuring everyone is on the same page and there for the same reasons. From there, giving the team visibility to each other’s work and a chance to build real relationships regardless of location is crucial to building trust across hybrid teams.
3. Outcome-Based Management
Micromanagement doesn’t work in hybrid teams. (It generally doesn’t work anyway, but it’s particularly difficult and corrosive at a distance.) Leaders must shift from tracking activity to managing outcomes: defining clear expectations, measuring results, and allowing flexibility in how the work gets done. What has your company done to re-examine your metrics and KPIs?
4. Inclusive Leadership
It’s easy for remote team members to feel like second-class citizens. Hybrid leaders must be intentional about inclusion, ensuring equal access to information, development opportunities, and visibility, regardless of location. Areas where managers frequently fall prey to Proximity Bias include the amount and balance of feedback.
Where hybrid leadership requires a change in mindset is not defaulting to the “everyone is in the office” mindset. Managers need to start with the notion that every member of the team should be included in communication, no matter where they are. The idea that some people hear or are consulted later than others can be corrosive. It is easy to delegate to the people that you see more often, which can create the perception of favoritism. It is not a radical re-boot of leadership skills, but mostly an awareness of your team’s dynamics and making appropriate adjustments.
5. Tech-Savviness with a Human Touch
Hybrid leaders don’t need to be IT expert, but they do need to be comfortable with the tools their teams use. More importantly, they must use technology to enhance human connection, not replace it. Helping the team determine the ground rules of how to use the communication tools at their disposal will reduce a lot of tension over time. How and when to use AI will be one of the most important ways leaders will impact their teams going forward, and it needs to be used in a consistent way with the rest of the organization.
Especially important will be identifying the team processes that should be automated to reduce “busy work,” while coaching your team on how to work with AI. A good example is avoiding “cutting and pasting” answers from your LLM/GPT tools. These tools are fallible (the cute word is hallucinating), and the experience and tacit knowledge your people bring to their jobs will be far more valuable than they think. This will also lessen fear about adopting these tools.
To build a productive hybrid workforce, leaders must master these 5 essential leadership skills. While a strategic approach is key to successful hybrid work, the real impact comes from leadership at every level.
Learn more about creating a thriving hybrid workplace in my webinar, Hybrid Work Solutions: 5 Leadership Strategies That Deliver.
