Simple truths about leading a virtual team

With circumstances having forced many to unexpectedly work remotely, leaders have had to think quickly and adapt how they manage their teams. Remote work isn’t going away any time soon (and many are hoping it never will). Those who are working and leading a team remotely successfully have embraced these simple truths about leading a virtual team.

1) It’s not the same as leading a team in person

Leading a team virtually is not the same as doing so in-person. You can’t just pop-in to each other’s offices to check in on things. You may not have those daily checkpoints about what you did on the weekend, the weather, or that great deal you got on <insert thing you love here>. 

The way things work in an office and in a virtual setting is different, but both can work really well if you know what will make it efficient and feel good. If you try to do the same thing you did in-person online, it may feel clunky and disjointed and like things aren’t working.

The key to figuring out what to do next is knowing that it may be very different than what you’ve done in the past, and that’s OK!

2) Creating connection helps

One of the amazing things about working in an office is the connection between employees - both when it comes to working on projects and problems together, but also just the “chit chat” in the halls. In fact, one of the things that we hear the most about why people wouldn’t want to work from home all the time/permanently is that it would be too lonely or that they don’t feel that they connect as well and understand what’s going on as well online.

That means that opportunities for two-way conversations, collaboration, and “chit chat” should be worked into the fabric of the remote work culture. As a leader, you can encourage this and create opportunities for it throughout the workday. How you do this may vary depending on your team (some will love daily “stand up” check-in meetings, playing online board games, ice breakers and “my favourite trashy TV show” forums, and others would prefer brainstorming sessions and forums for sharing useful work-related tips - find what will work best for your team and start there).

3) Finding tools and systems that work for your team in a virtual environment is imperative

There are tools and systems for almost anything you can think of. Finding those tools and figuring out the best ways for your team to use them effectively can make all the difference between feeling frustrated with how things are running on your team (I have no idea what everyone is working on, I think they all feel like I’m micromanaging them, I don’t think they know what they’re supposed to do, they’re brand new and don’t have access to the whole team any time they have a question, etc).

4) It takes practice and patience

There may be bumps as you change the way your teams work to adapt to online. Things you thought might work might not, things that will work might take time to start working, things you’ve been avoiding trying might be the best option.

And you’re going to need to create new habits and ways of being that may be uncomfortable at first. All the folks on your team that would prefer to keep the camera off at all times may need to have the camera on at least a percentage of the time because it’s important for reading body language. Meetings that used to be optional may need to be required for a while so that everyone gets in the habit of taking advantage of certain tools and of connecting and communicating online. You may need to have more meetings than you think are REALLY necessary because creating connection needs to be forced for a while.

Some of making this work may require doing things that you know are good for you even if you don’t feel like doing them. Once you know that then you’ll be in a better position to create things that really work for everyone.

Want to learn more on creating connectivity and alignment with your team? Sign up for the Leading a Remote Team online program. Hosted by myself and Jocelyne Morin-Nurse, CEO of Loxentus Inc., this online instructional course uncovers the most efficient leadership styles for remote teams, including:

• Creating a team that feels cohesive and understands the core values of the business.

• Getting clarity on action steps, tools and systems.

• Gaining more time by learning how to best combine asynchronous and synchronous communication.

This is an implementation course that includes a downloadable worksheet, downloadable audio, downloadable transcripts, and bonus tips with downloadable audio.

For more information and to sign up, visit https://www.loxentus.com/leadingremotecourseinfo.

Creating clear marketing goals for action, success and more money!

Business owners often know what they want in their businesses, but they don’t have clear goals on how to get what they want. They just know they want to be successful. They know they want to make more money. They know they want to do the thing that their business does.

Here’s the thing though: having clear and specific goals makes it easier to do everything else. Having clear goals even creates more time in your business because you’re not spending time on things that won’t move you forward. Clear business goals also help you define clear marketing goals which will ensure your attention and messaging is focused on what will have an impact on your business. And good marketing turns into more leads, which turns into more sales!

WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS?

Spend time thinking about your business goals, specifically about what you're hoping to achieve through your marketing. It's probably (though not necessarily) a given that one of your goals is to make more money, but we want to get more specific than that today. Your goals may include things, such as:

• Being known as an expert at something

• Being seen as a resource on a certain topic

• Expanding your audience geographically or demographically

• Getting more engagement online and building community

• Increasing sales in a certain part of your business

• Getting other people to talk about you to their communities

• Filling a certain program

• Increasing sales online instead of in person

Because it always helps to see specific examples, I'll share some of mine and create some fictional examples:

• Be seen as an expert in explaining social media for small business

• Be seen as an expert in nutrition and wellness

• Expand audience beyond the Ottawa-area

• Expand audience to new moms 

• Increase sales in one-on-one coaching and speaking (or sign two new clients per month)

• Create content that is linked to by other bloggers and media outlets

• Be more findable in search

You can be even more precise and create goals that are channel-specific:

• Increase Facebook likes by 300 people

• Establish a presence on YouTube and get 1000 video views

• Get retweeted and tagged by industry experts on Twitter

• Get three media hits per month

REALLY UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE TRYING TO ACHIEVE

The more you work to figure out these goals and why you're setting them, the more likely you will work them into your plan efficiently. Take a few minutes and write down an explanation of what you mean by each one and why they're important to you. For example:

• I really enjoy helping small business owners figure out how to use social media for their business in a one-on-one setting. I get energized and excited when having personalized calls with business owners and hearing them figure out what they could be doing. Their lightbulb moments make my day, and their wins and increased revenue are my wins too. I want to do more of that so I need to make it clear that this is something that I do, like to do and I am good at.

• I feel that it's time to expand beyond my local market. I like to spend time in Toronto and Boston and want to start by growing my audience in those specific cities. To do that, I need to start to grow an audience in those cities, so there is already a start of a customer base in those cities when I arrive to hold an event or launch a product. I need to figure out where my audience is spending their time (online and off) in those cities so I can create a custom plan.

• I want to grow my online sales. I know that if I focus more of my attention on driving people to my online store and the products I sell there, I can increase that revenue stream. That may mean decreasing what I make in person while I focus on online or working extra hours to carry me through the gap.

TIME TO DO THE WORK

I challenge you to spend 10 minutes right now coming up with three or four marketing goals for the next six months. Really think about what you like to do, what you want to be doing and why you want to be doing it and give yourself some real explanations on why those are important and meaningful goals for you and your business and your marketing right now. Then leave a comment and share some of those ideas here!

How to get more out of your blog content

One of the most frustrating things about writing a long piece of content is feeling like only a few people saw it and hours of your time writing had almost no impact.

There are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to blog content that will help you feel like it was well worth the time invested. It’s as simple as making sure that nobody (including you!) thinks of your blog post as a “one and done” piece of content.

1)   SEO juice

Quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search engines (otherwise known as search engine optimization or SEO). Even if you just think of SEO as being there to help you rank higher in search - that alone is still not a bad reason to create good content for your website (some businesses get most of their leads through search!).

Every time you create new content, your website is crawled by the search engine bots. So, when you create new blogs posts, make sure you’re using the kinds of words you want to be found for. You should also keep your blog posts to a minimum of 300-500 words for them to be considered quality, and whenever possible, link to other pieces of your content within your site and try to get other people to link to your content from their web sites.

2)   You’re giving people a reason to visit

Without new blog posts, there isn’t much of a reason for people to keep coming back to your website. How many times can you promote your ‘About’ and ‘Sales’ pages and expect people to take the time to come and visit again?

By consistently creating new content that you know is of interest to your audience, you have an opportunity to entice them to return and make them feel like they’re getting value out of what they’re reading.

Once you have posted new content, make sure you tell your audience you created the content. Post it on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and on Pinterest. Also send an email to your mailing list letting them know you created the new content.

If you don’t tell people you created new content, they won’t know to go and look – so, promote, promote, promote!

I once heard you should spend as much time promoting a post as you spend writing it, if not more. Keeping that in mind will help you figure out just how much effort you have to put into getting people to see it for you to feel like it was worth writing.

A few other tips for promoting:

• Share it multiple times – on Twitter you can share it 5-6 times over 48 hours easily. On Facebook you can share it again 24-48 hours later.

• If you’re worried about seeming repetitive, use ICYMI. It stands for “In case you missed it” and recognizes you’ve posted it before, but that you know not everyone will have seen it.

This next piece is really critical:

3)   Don’t forget about it.

Once you’ve promoted the content, plan to share it again over time. Not all of your content may be evergreen, but if it is it, plan to share it again in two weeks, six weeks and nine weeks later. You may even want to schedule it to share again in those time frames while you’re posting it the first time. It will save you time and make sure you don’t forget to keep re-sharing it.

4)   Reuse pieces

Don’t think of your blog post as just a blog post. Take pieces of it and do different things with it.

Reuse it as a script for a short video, take quotes out and share as tips on Twitter or create visuals and share on Instagram. 

Creating great content can be time consuming, but if you make that time well worth the investment then you will see results - results that make it easier to keep doing. By making sure the content is being properly promoted and shared on a regular basis, you’re going to see far more results with one piece of content than you did before.

Spend some time thinking about the content you’ve written in the past – how can you apply these things to it now?

5 things business women need to stop doing ASAP

As a business coach, I spend many hours with entrepreneurs and there are big themes that come up on a regular basis. Today I'm sharing five themes that stop business owners from truly enjoying their businesses and living the life they want to have.

1) Doing things because they can

"Just because you CAN do a thing doesn’t mean you have to do a thing."

What?!

I’ll say it again.

Just because you CAN do a thing doesn’t mean you have to do a thing.

Have you ever taken on a contract or task you really didn't want to do? Something that you were not only perfectly able to do, but that you could probably do really well, but just don’t really like doing?

Why did you take the job if you don’t really like doing it?

Because you’re building a business... and you need to make money... and you want people to be happy with you and… and… and…

Start thinking about what you WANT to do. Make a list and keep it at hand, you need to be doing more of that.

Start thinking about what you don’t actually like doing. Make a list and start saying no to those tasks. The more intentional you are about getting the work you DO WANT, that’s what you’ll start to get. You’ll be happier doing it, and probably make more money doing it because you won’t be wasting your time, procrastinating and being bitter that you’re working on a project that you hate.

2) Doing things because they should

The amount of times people tell me what they should be doing when I ask them what they could be doing to make their business more successful or to make them happier in their life or their business might really surprise you.

We get stuck in our 'shoulds' ... 

We should be eating healthy

We should be out networking

We should be on Twitter

We should be trying to make 6 figures

You CAN do all of those things, but don’t do them because that’s what you SHOULD do, do it because that’s what you want to do. Don't let someone else decide how you should be living your life and running your business.

3) Doing things because that’s what "one does”

What does success look like to you? Have you really thought about it? How much money do you want to earn? Why?

I see business owners all the time who are caught up in the quest for “more.”

More is better. More is success. More money. More business. More sales. More things.

I’m not going to lie, I like more too. :)  What I think is key is to decide what you actually want. What do you want your life to look like and why? What does success actually look like to you?

You can have it look like anything you want--but you need to take the time to decide what you want and not just let your next steps be dictated by what you think other people would do. I have a worksheet to help you do that and you can grab it for free here.

4) Doing things without a baseline measure

Do you suffer from shiny object syndrome? I do. 

I love new ideas, projects and heading in new directions at the drop of the hat. It’s a big reason I’m an entrepreneur--so I can do that!

But not every good idea should be implemented (bummer, right?).

Not every idea makes sense for you. For your family. For what you want in the long run. For what you want your business to look like in the long run.

That life plan I mentioned in point three gives you something to hold up next to your new idea and to help you decide one of three things:

* This fits perfectly. I’m doing it!

* This doesn’t really fit with my life plan and that life plan is actually more important. I choose that plan and will let this idea go for now.

* This doesn’t really fit with the plan, but it’s a REALLY good idea, and I think it’s worth sacrificing some of the things that I thought I wanted to make this happen.

Any of those decisions are great, but if you didn’t have the plan to hold up next to the new idea, you wouldn’t have anything to measure the new idea by to make sure it’s a good fit. Trust me… this is how you end up running a store in a mall, working crazy long hours into the nights and weekends when you meant to be quitting your corporate job to be spending MORE time with your kids. I really wish I'd gone through this exercise back then.

5) Doing things without a destination

Are you doing what you thought you were going to be doing when you started your business? Have you veered left or right at some point and you're not sure how you got to be doing what you’re doing now?

If you are, trust me - you're not alone. So many business owners start a business to do a thing - “graphic design,” “sleep consulting,” “lawyer,” “coach," and don’t think through the plan. They don't know what kind of work they want to be doing, who they want to be doing it with, how they want to deliver their services, what kind of hours they want to be working, etc That’s like saying you know you want to go to the United States from Canada (or vice versa) and not knowing where in the United States you want to go. You can start heading south, but where you end up is a pretty big gamble.

If you pick a specific state or a specific city, you can pick your route - then there's a lot more certainty you'll end up in the right place.

Instead (my car analogy goes on a while here, stay with me) most of the entrepreneurs I talk to are driving down the highway with the pedal to the floor going as fast as they can. When I ask them where they’re going they yell, “I don’t know!” and when I suggest they stop and figure it out they yell “I can’t! There’s nowhere to stop!”

You need to stop the car and pick a destination and a route. It’s going to make it so much easier to know if you’re heading in the right direction if you have a destination. And if 100 miles down the road you decide you want to stop and stay right where you are, or you decide you want to go west instead, you totally can, but at least you’ll know you’re making that decision intentionally and not just letting it happen by accident. 

You may have noticed a theme here - it’s all about thinking about what you want. You CAN be choosy. You CAN be specific. You CAN decide what you want your fate to be.

Not only CAN you, but making all those intentional choices has a magical effect. It has you loving what you do more. And when you love what you’re doing, you attract more of what you want.

The first step is choosing - what do YOU want?

5 Ways to Build Your Community Online

Whether you're trying to build engagement in a Facebook Group or on a Facebook page or just on Twitter or Instagram, there are a few things that are important to keep in mind to build community: 

1. Set the tone

Lead by example! You are the leader of your community. The way that you behave in that community, from the kind of support you give, to the language you use, to the amount that you're present in the group, is key. If you're not willing to demonstrate through your own behaviour how you want the group to look and feel, you can't be surprised if things go off course. 

In my group there is always a distinct drop in participation if I'm away too much. I need to participate a lot if I want others to participate a lot. Also I find that people are really helpful, respectful and follow the "rules" without having to be policed because they see what the group is meant to be like. 

2. Ask simple questions

People have short attention spans, you need to ask questions (at least some of the time) that are so easy to answer people don't even have to think.

Where are you from?

How many kids do you have?

What's your favourite colour? 

Questions like that seem like fluff but what you need to remember is that your goal is to get people to participate, even just once. Once they've commented on something, they'll be more likely to comment again another time. They'll also be more likely to see your content if you're building your community on a tool that operates with an algorithm.  

Even if you're going for something more complex than the questions above, keep the questions pretty simple so they don't have to think too long. If a person is required to think too long they often decide it's not worth the effort and move on. 

3. Always go first

People hate going first. If you ask them a question they worry that what they want to say might not be what you're actually asking for or they don't know how to share the information they want to share. 

When you ask a question or if someone in your community asks a question, do your best to answer it. You're taking away a lot of the anxiety of being the first to post and you're essentially providing them with a template for their own answer.

4. Be relatable

Share you. Share your realness. Let people see that you're human and not that different from them.

The more you can do that, the less intimidated they feel, and people don't engage in places they feel intimidated. It's why the idea of sharing messy realities works so well.  

The time I accidentally uploaded a draft version of my podcast to iTunes I was horrified. I shared that in my community and it was one of the most popular posts I've ever shared. Why? Because people like to know everyone makes mistakes sometimes. Because they like to know that I'm not that different than them. 

5. Make people feel important

When someone posts anything, like it. Even better comment on it. It's a lot of work but you're rewarding people for their participation. When you give them answers and make them feel like they are truly in a place that is there to support them, they will keep posting and commenting, and that's what you want.  

Creating an active online community is a lot of work, but it also can be really rewarding, fun and help you reach your sales and business goals. 

I hope these 5 tips were useful - and that you'll join me in the Biz Studio if you haven't already!