Hybrid work is no longer the future of work — it's the present of work.
The task now is to get better at managing hybrid teams. Much like the way email was foisted upon many of us with no real training about how to use it, we have to fix the plane of hybrid work while flying it.
Aside from its novelty, what makes managing a hybrid team challenging is that it's much more complex and requires different ways of thinking through common work problems. Simply put, it requires a different way of managing.
Here are three principles to better manage your hybrid teams:
Focus teams on achievable outcomes
The lockdown, turnover and burnout has required many managers to drop into a lot more of the "doing" work than before the Covid. Even before that, the perennial "doing versus managing" tension was stressed.
Additionally, the last few years have normalized the presence of unrealistic goals and unwinnable games. Somehow, teams were supposed to hit the same goals, with less staff, while figuring out how to work in completely different ways.
We all need some wins aside from getting through the day.
Managers’ jobs are to focus the team on the right wins so that they help teams avoid the downward spiral of focus. That spiral occurs when people are unfocused, so it's harder to focus on the work and projects that will help them focus, so they remain unfocused.
Make in-person time make sense
It's frustrating, demoralizing and wasteful to require people to commute to offices only to do virtual meetings and put headphones on so they can do their deep work. We’ve shown that we can do those from home.
It's also just as frustrating, demoralizing and wasteful to try to do real-time collaborative coworking sessions or whiteboard time via virtual meetings. We’ve learned that we don’t want to do those from home.
What I'm seeing in the field is that if in-person time aligns with the work to be done, folks are fine with coming to the office to do real work with their teams. But coming to the office just because managers need to see people working — especially when they haven't articulated achievable outcomes and why those outcomes matter — makes explicit that managers don't trust their teams.
Let teams co-create the how by improving team habits
Most people want to do a good job and want their team and company to win. Many people have great ideas about how to work better together with their teammates.
But the "doing versus managing" tension I mentioned above has led many managers to accidental micro-management and over-driving their teams. Teammates are expected to do the work how the managers would do it themselves and the team runs the way the manager feels they can run the team.
Consider this: Why do managers have to run team meetings? Why do they need to tell everyone what their action items from meetings are?
Both of the above are team habits that are changeable, and even if those responsibilities were re-distributed, that'd let the manager focus on other things the team needs them to while opening the door for everyday innovation and contributions from other teammates. (My book, "Team Habits," shows types of team habits other than meetings that can be changed.)
It also creates the opportunity to build and reinforce trust across the team. Managers show they trust their team, which allows their team to show they're trustable. Most people want to trust and be trusted; when distrust is signaled, people mirror distrust. That's just how we humans are wired.
When we shift to focus on improving our team habits, it lets us address changes to the how without devolving to character and competency attacks. It's usually true that the play didn't work, not that the players are incapable.
Inviting the team to co-create the plays not only creates plays that are more likely to work — it builds buy-in for them to actually run the play and not feel like they were the victims of change rather than the co-authors of it.
Charlie Gilkey has advised hundreds of teams, from Fortune 100 companies to tiny nonprofits, through Productive Flourishing, the coaching and training company he founded. His new book, "Team Habits: How Small Actions Lead to Extraordinary Results," shows how to improve your team's belonging, performance, and morale by creating better team habits. Learn more at betterteamhabits.com.
