Chief Change Officer - Wayne Turmel: Hybrid Work Is Not a Strategy—It’s a Hostage Negotiation

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

Wayne Turmel, co-author of The Long-Distance Leader, joins the show to unpack the chaos of remote and hybrid leadership. Is hybrid work really a strategy? Wayne says it’s more like a game of tug-of-war—companies push for office days, employees dig in their heels, and somehow three days in the office feels like a compromise nobody loves. He dives into how proximity bias sneaks into decision-making, why intentionality is the secret sauce for great leadership, and how balancing deep work with collaboration can save everyone’s sanity. Whether it’s giving feedback on time (without needing to see someone’s face) or managing your team across time zones, Wayne serves up leadership advice with wit, practicality, and just the right amount of Zoom fatigue relatability. Key Highlights of Our Interview: Lessons from History’s Leaders “Genghis Khan ruled half the world without a Webex meeting. Julius Caesar? Brilliant in the field, but the office politics got him. Leading from afar isn’t new—it’s just evolved.” The Proximity Bias Trap “In hybrid setups, those in the office often get more attention and opportunities—intentionally or not. Awareness is key to ensure fairness across the team.” Bridging the Trust Gap “Leadership tasks haven’t changed, but relationships, trust, and proactive communication now require a conscious effort to avoid gaps and micromanagement.” The Synchronous-Asynchronous Dance “Effective hybrid work balances synchronous collaboration with asynchronous deep work. It’s not about clocking in at the same time but about delivering results with flexibility.” Intentionality Over Chaos “Hybrid solutions require intentionality. Schedule in-office days for meetings and collaboration. Leave remote days for focused work. Let people own their time to produce quality results.” _________________________ Connect with us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Wayne Turmel Chief Change Officer: Make Change Ambitiously. Experiential Human Intelligence for Growth Progressives Global Top 3% Podcast on Listen Notes World's #1 Career Podcast on Apple Top 1: US, CA, MX, IE, HU, AT, CH, FI, JP 2.5 Millions+ Downloads 50+ Countries

Hi everyone, welcome to our show Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. I'll show it is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today I'm sitting down with Wang Thurmal to dive into a crucial topic, long-distance leadership, in an era where communication technology is rapidly evolving for both workers and leaders. Yes, you heard that right. Long-distance leadership, not long-distant relationships. But just like with any relationship, maintaining, nurturing, and fixing long-distant leadership is far from straightforward.

This conversation couldn't be more timely. When we recorded this episode, Amazon's CEO had just announced their RTO return to office policy for 2025. And so far, the media narrative surrounding it hasn't been exactly positive. So, how can Wing and his team provide solutions as remote and hybrid work models continue to change shape? Let's find out. Thank you for having me. This is really exciting, Vincent. Wayne, let's start with a bit of your background. How does your past experiences make you the perfect fit to write several books about long-distance leadership and communication for leaders? Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to intentionally stop myself from going down to the rabbit holes

because it has been a long winding trip. But the short answer is that I'm originally from Canada answer is that I'm originally from Canada while I was in school studying journalism as a stage performer and eventually, like most stage performers, had to get a real job in the real world. And I started in the presentation skills arena because I learned at the age of eight how powerful it was to be able to communicate that the number one factor in how you're perceived as an executive, as an employee, is your ability to communicate. I was always fascinated by that and that's where I started from and I started in traditional stand at the front of the room presentation skills, but about 20 years ago, realized that electronic communication at the time WebEx was the main tool was going to change how we work. And so while I was teaching and studying leadership and other things, the electronic communication really became my focus.

So I've been studying that for over 20 years. And then about 10 years ago, Kevin Eikenberry and I merged. He bought my company. We merged his expertise with traditional what we think of as leadership skills and my expertise in the remote and electronic world. We now have three books later, established ourselves really as leaders in the field, if that doesn't sound too arrogant. I was just going to say the big thing for me is that I learned so early that how you communicate is how you're perceived. And so many people are subject matter experts.

They're incredibly smart, but they struggle taking what's in their head and putting it in the minds of their customers, their employees, and other people. As consultants, you know your business. of their customers, their employees, and other people. As consultants, you know your business. My job is to help you communicate that to the world. What exactly does long distance leadership mean? How would you define it? Yeah, we get awfully hung up on, are my people remote?

Are they in the office? Long distance leadership is taking what we know makes good leaders and always has and applying it when you are not always or sometimes ever in the same physical space as the people that you lead. And it's funny because there has always been some version of long distance leadership. Genghis Khan ruled half the world and never held a WebEx meeting. Julius Caesar did great out in the field.

It's when he went back to the office that things went a little bit pear shaped. So we've always had to find ways to do this. And as technology has changed over the years, it's becoming both more common and easier, technically easier to do. But technology changes how we as humans communicate. And so if we aren't aware of those dynamics, it's very easy to get stressed

or even lost in the weeds and not do the things that we know leaders need to do. The role of long distance leader, it's not so much what you do because if you think about the roles of the leader, a manager, an entrepreneur, you need to hire, you need to train, you need to delegate, you need to coach. Yep. All those things need to happen, but how we do it becomes different when we're mitigated and mediated by technology. when we're mitigated and mediated by technology. So our job is to help leaders understand the nuances and adjust their behavior based on the circumstances

in which they find themselves. How have these changes helped or disrupted the way we lead and manage teams? In other words, how have you seen long-distance leadership evolve? What changes have you noticed in terms of how it works, how fast it's changing, and the And direction is heading? Our first rule in our book is think leadership first location second. We believe if you think of what you need to do as a leader, you'll find a way to make it work. If you are not confident in yourself as a leader, if you do not exhibit great leadership behaviors, remote is going to make it harder. Because if I struggle to give people feedback on a regular basis, if I'm in the office with them,

I'm going to physically see them and my brain goes, ah, that's Vince. I should talk to him about X. If we're working remotely and I don't see you, I may not give you the feedback that you need in a timely manner. That's going to impact the quality of your work. It's going to impact the quality of our relationship. And ultimately it's going to impact the quality of the team. And ultimately it's going to impact the quality of the team. So we has to be more mindful of including all the members of the team, no matter where they are, and we don't get the benefit of physical proximity.

So I still need to coach you. I still need to include you and delegate you tasks and check on your work and all those things still need to happen. But I need to be more mindful and intentional about making that happen. Or we had a conversation a week ago and our next team meeting is two weeks from now. And I may not communicate with you during all that time, a lot can happen. If I have not developed a relationship with you where you're comfortable coming to me, if you have a question, I'm going to assume that everything is fine because you didn't

say anything. As I said, what we have to do, the individual tasks that we have to do as leaders are the same as they've always been. But there is this piece of intentionality and making sure that we have the information flow that we need, but also the relationship that we need. Trust, proactivity, avoiding micromanagement. Those kinds of things are different in degree in a long distance work relationship. And as we begin to settle into what we're calling hybrid work, which

usually isn't hybrid work, but that's a different discussion where you've got some people in the office and some people not in summary in a couple of days. We develop another layer of challenges, which are things like proximity bias, where the people in the office get our attention. People in the office are given perhaps more opportunities and considered more valuable than the people who are not. And that can impact the team negatively as well. One thing that we found before COVID

was the rules for how do you get promoted and how do you get your performance evaluation. All those things favored the people who were in the office most often, intentionally or unintentionally. And in a little bit, I think we're going to talk about some instances where companies make very specific decisions about these things. If you're consciously deciding that the people in the office get the advantage, that's fine. That's a legitimate business decision. The problem is when it's not a conscious decision, when you think you're being equitable to all your employees no matter where they are, and yet the people in the office

feel very differently than the people who are working remotely. So there's a level of intentionality and mindfulness to remote work that good leaders are probably doing very well anyway. And poor leaders are the ones where the gap becomes wider and wider between the good leaders and the poor. Everybody listening to this

has worked for people who are okay or maybe they're not okay but we also immediately have those leaders in our lives that we go that's the guy right that's the person that we want to follow. And when I say that guy, that could be gender neutral, of course. But that's the person I want to follow or that's the kind of leader I want to be. The first edition of the book came out in 2018. What we were really trying to do was help leaders realize that as stressful and different and unusual as this can feel, you can apply all the things that make you a remarkable leader in this new environment.

We want to help you be the leader that people point to as exceptional, interesting, and excellent. You've released a second edition of this book. Why now? What's changed since the first edition came out in 2018? That's a great question, because the first edition, of course, came out pre-COVID. It came out in 2018. And it was very well received.

It sold very well. We're in seven languages, including Cantonese and Mandarin and Korean and Polish and Lord knows what all else, but the world has changed a little bit. I think there are two maybe two and a half primary things in terms of the book itself. It's about 25% new or updated material. And it falls into two areas. The first, as you say, is the technology. Technology has just changed.

When we wrote the book, zone was not a thing. Skype for Business was Microsoft's enterprise tool. Now it's Microsoft Teams. So while we are not a technology book and we don't want to get hung up on the technology, the way that we work is different now than it was six years ago. So the technology is certainly a piece of it.

The second piece is that now that we've gone through this change, more people in North America, for example, 50% of the workforce worked from home, at least part time some of the time during COVID, which means that people have a lot more experience now, including senior leaders. Pre COVID, which means that people have a lot more experience now, including senior leaders. Pre-COVID, many senior leaders had never worked anywhere other than the office before, so they had no frame of reference to say, oh, people can be successful, they can be productive. And so a lot more people have experience. So as we started to say, are we gonna return to the office?

Are we not going to return to the office? We're in this state of flux. As I said, we're in the middle of this seismic change that we're all trying to figure out. And the answer for many people is then we're gonna get people to come back to the office some of the time. The word that they use is hybrid. It's not really hybrid. What most organizations have done is not so much a

strategy as it is a hostage negotiation. The company says how much can we make them come back to the office before they quit and there's too much turnover and too much chaos and the employees are saying how much can we resist going back to the office before we get fired? And I guess we've settled on three days a week and they're young. That's a compromise. It might be working for you, but it's not really a strategy. Hybrid work in its most effective form. And we're seeing this in organizations is more than just what work gets done.

Where it includes the concept of time, what work gets done, where and when. For example, do you really have a hybrid strategy if I'm working from home, but I have to log on at the same time as all of my peers in the office get there and log off at the same time? Does it matter if I'm doing deep thought analytical, that I do that between the hours of nine and five New York time. We are a hybrid organization with Kevin Eikenberry Group. I'm three hours time difference from Kevin in Indiana. There are a number of hours a day that we overlap that we're synchronous. But he doesn't manage my time. If I want to start very early in the morning and knock off in the

afternoon, as long as my work gets done, as long as the clients are getting serviced, as long as my teammates can reach me in a effective manner, that works for us and that's where what we call hybrid work really becomes something different. The balance of synchronous and asynchronous work. What we're hearing from our clients, for example, is we want people to come in three days a week so that they have time to collaborate and get to know each other and brainstorm. That sounds great. In theory, what we're hearing though, is people are complaining

when they go into the office. Oh, I can't get any work done. People are talking to me and there's noise in the office and people are stopping by my desk constantly. And there's cake in the break room because it's Alice's birthday. And I have to go deal with that and Then when I work from home, I can't really get any work done because I'm on zoom calls from morning till night That's the result of not being intentional about what work gets done where when

You're right. If your job is to check things off your task list going into the office may not be the best way to get those tasks completed. It doesn't mean there is an important work that has to happen there. So how about you decide all the meetings that I have or as many as possible are going to take place when we're all together Right as a leader. I'm gonna do my coaching sessions when people are in the office and we can be face-to-face And on the days when they're not in the office I'm not gonna have them on meetings from morning till night because that's when they're going to do that task completion

Getting stuff done deep focused thought morning till night because that's when they're going to do that task completion, getting stuff done, deep focused thought that is best done uninterrupted. And if they want to do that at eight o'clock at night when the kids go to bed because they can think better, I don't care. As long as that report is in on time, it's up to the quality and standard that we expect. And you are available to your teammates and adding to the value of the team. Now that's a hybrid solution,

as opposed to merely a compromise. This interview feels super tiny, especially with Amazon CEO announcing that starting in 2025, corporate staff will return to a five-day work week. There's been a lot of buzz around us. So far, the reaction has been mostly negative. Some people say it's the end of remote work. Others say they will quit over it. What's your personal take on this? Or let's imagine if Amazon invited you to help with this transition, how would you apply your leadership models to this situation? Maybe you can give us a quick overview of your models

and how they could fit into Amazon's latest development? Okay, so the first thing is to say we can help them because even though I'm here talking about long distance leadership, the Kevin Eikenberry group as a whole focuses on leadership. And so there's all of Kevin's remarkable leadership, which is in the DNA of our remote content and our remote content is totally consistent with the remarkable leadership. So we can address anything. The second thing is that we often get lumped in with the remote work zealots, the people death to the office and the four day work week and all of that.

And while we certainly embrace that as an option, we believe that every organization is different and needs to do what it does. Amazon intentionally has a very 20th century factory model, the nature of what they do, it's 90% warehouses and deliveries. Those are in-person, pick it up, stock the shelves, in-person functions. They also, by the way, have 150% turnover every year.

They churn and burn people and have throughout their entire history. That is their business model. And so if they decide this is what we're going to do, it's easy to say we're coming back to the office and so we have no remote employees, but that's not true. no remote employees, but that's not true. If I am a regional manager, I might have employees in 12 different warehouses. We are not physically together. We might be working the same hours,

but I can't see what you're doing in each of those locations. So it's really important that you get back to that you don't get hung up on the fact that we're not all in the same place. If we are in the same place, great. We need to think like leaders, right? We need to coach and present the vision and give feedback and all of that stuff. And if I have people who are in different locations, I need to exhibit those exact same behaviors adjusting for the difference, the distance.

And so we would go back to, why do you have 150% turnover every year? We know that people don't quit jobs. They quit bosses. We know that when leaders exhibit good coaching, good feedback, fairness, all the things that good leaders do, those teams tend to have less turnover and less chaos. those teams tend to have less turnover and less chaos. So let's improve the leadership mindset of everybody from the new supervisor.

The skills of moving from a employee to a leader need to be trained and coached and carefully defined. And then as you become a leader of more and more people, there's likely to become a distance component. It might be physical distance. It might be that Amazon is a 24-hour operation. If I am the warehouse manager, I'm going to have leaders and teams that are working when I'm home in bed.

How am I going to establish the expectations, establish the standards, coach and develop people so that the operation is running when I'm not there? We're on a 24 hour clock. Okay, we have to make sure we're communicating between the different shifts. How are we doing that? I have 12 warehouses that I'm responsible for. Okay, how are you going to communicate, set the expectations, manage the performance

with the people in those different locations? And once we get back to what is leadership, performance with the people in those different locations. And once we get back to what is leadership, what is good leadership, what do good leaders do, the specific circumstances you can adjust. Here's my personal experience. Except for the first few years of my corporate life. Most of my career has involved a good degree of remote or hybrid work. world with colleagues and supervisors scattered across different locations. So I got used to working with people across time zones, staying up late or waking up early

to make it work. I've also experienced the evolution of technology from working without a BlackBerry, then with a BlackBerry, and later moving on to other devices. Now as an entrepreneur, to work with people from all over, I've noticed that in the U.S., remote work has become a very contentious issue. Whereas here in Asia or in Hong Kong is a different story. Hong Kong is a dense, highly populated city. And the concept of remote work doesn't carry the same weight. Many people just head back to the office, as the living spaces here are typically smaller

than in the U.S. For those with families or children, the office actually becomes the preferred place to get work done. Again, what are your individual circumstances? The remote work conversation in the US is very different than it is in Western Europe and Asia, because you're right, people in the US say, I have a spare room and that's where I do my office. If I live in Tokyo, what's a spare room?

And it gets back to Amazon. Even in Amazon, I talked to somebody in Seattle yesterday and they went, oh, great. If Amazon really does this, I don't work for Amazon, but they've just added 15 minutes to my mute because the traffic around the Amazon headquarters is already a nightmare. It's going to become so much worse. So the people that say I have to drive to work and now it's an extra half hour out of my life may decide to work

from home more often. There are ripple effects and this goes back to what we were talking about that nobody really knows what the new normal is going to be because we're going through these changes. The second thing that is really important to what you said is I've always worked remotely because of my circumstances and that's really critical. We've always been able to work, make it work. I believe William Burroughs said, the future is here. It's just not widely distributed. And what we found during COVID was the people like

you like me who had always been working remotely due to our circumstances, what's the big deal? But people who had never worked in that environment got lost into the deep end of the pool and had to figure it out. We're going through this period where the people who learned it during COVID got very surprised. A lot of senior leaders got very fooled.

They said, oh, there will be no employee engagement. People didn't get their work done. In the first six months of the pandemic, when more people went home, employee engagement actually went up. Productivity did not drop off nearly as much as people expected it to. So our assumptions pre-2020 are now being examined and tested and applied in different ways and so it's going to be very interesting the next few years while we figure out what work looks like. Jamie Dimon made a very famous speech.

He said, starting immediately, we want everybody back in the office. But if you choose to work remotely, we will continue to pay you as long as you do your job. But you have taken yourself off the career track. We are no longer thinking of you as the same kind of valuable employee as the person who comes to the office every day. There was massive outrage and all the remote work. People lost their minds. And I found myself in the strange position of cutting him a little slack. Because if we think about high finance for 200 years, the business model has been one of mentorship. It has been one of long hours in close proximity.

That's how you learn the business. That's how you network. That's how you learn the business, that's how you network, that's how you do those things. And so the people in the leadership positions in iFinance only know one way to do this. Now there are some companies that are experimenting and asking, okay this is how it's been done for 200 years, is it the only way to do it? Great. Come here. We're trying this new thing, which is part of seeing how all of this shakes out. With Amazon, a lot of people are going to quit.

Amazon is planning next year, a 15% reduction in their middle management. They are increasing by 15% the number of direct reports each manager has. The fact that people are going to quit, I suspect, and I don't know this, but I'm guessing, is as much a feature as it is a bug. Right? They're going to lose a certain number of people, but they were going to lose a certain number of people anyway. So let people select whether they're the ones that lead. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host.

Until next time, take care.