Chances are you inherited part of your team, expanding its skills with some strategic additional hires. It’s the fastest way to create new context for those who may not have chosen to be on your team.

When hiring new people to build a team I tend to focus on decision-making skills, accountability, and, yes, kindness in written communication. Everything else can be tought and learned. When reshaping an existing team, I work first and foremost on trust and accountability - there’s usually a lot of past trauma to untangle.

I believe team leads, all the way up to the CEO, have a duty of care to make sure that their people feel connected to their work, know what’s going on (even if it’s scary), and understand how they can move the needle. Transparency can feel terrifying, but the level of loyalty and results it can create is very much undervalued.

You want to understand their decision making framework: does it include several pages of pros and cons? Do they involve others? Do they consider long term impact? Do they use different frameworks for different types of decision? How do they course-correct if needed, and what does it take to act?

Whether you need someone who spends three weeks on risk analysis before formulating a plan, or someone who experiments on the go - that depends on the type of industry you are in, and the type of team you need for the job at hand.

The bigger the company, the easier it is to move a problem from your (metaphorical) desk to the next person’s (metaphorical) desk. “Not my problem”-syndrome often happens in the gray spaces between job responsibilities, and it’s one of the main reasons for processes to baloon out of proportions: you need people who feel accountable for their own work and also for making everyone else’s work easier. Or at least, visible.

If your company is flexible enough to include at least one chat interviews, try this.

Otherwise, see if you can find other examples of their written communication style, on LinkedIn or elsewhere. Even their emails can be a source of information.

Remember: If your team does not share an office, a lot of the conversations will happen in writing. Conference calls simply do not scale well. In writing, we loose a lot of nuance, and our brains, threat-detectors that they are, are literally wired to take everything personal.

It’s very easy to forget that there’s a person on the other side, not just an avatar. That person has their own feelings, insecurities, ideas, and stress level. Explicit kindness becomes the smile you’d use in a real-life conversation.

You still need to get your team together in person occasionally (let’s say, twice a year) - and in the meantime, they need to be considerate with each other. There’s no need to make each other miserable, just to save three words.

My default is to trust the people who end up on my team. They made it through the hiring process, so if I can’t trust them, I’d have to take it up with the hiring decision makers first.

That doesn’t mean, I won’t verify that the work has been done, but I am not going to micromanage and surveil them at every step of the way (unless they ask for help, obviously). If at some point I get the impression that I can’t trust someone, there’s no future for that working relationship.

Trust can’t be earned, it can only be given. Interestingly enough, if you trust people to do their best, most of them deliver. The rest is education and practice.

In a nutshell: be people-first, always. Then use processes to channel the behaviours that you want to see in people.

PS: If you want to learn how to lead your team if you don’t share an office - meetup included - get in touch and I’ll tell you more about the next Remote Leadership Accelerator.