How to Lead a Successful Remote Team: Increasing your Influence

The nature of leadership is to influence others to achieve certain goals. At Lead Read Today, we’ve discussed many strategies for increasing your influence and persuasiveness. Today, we will look at how to apply some of these basic principles of influence and persuasion to virtual communications.

1. Simplify Your Messages

In the past, we discussed the necessity of using different types of messages to persuade different audiences. In order to persuade people who are motivated to seek information and are already knowledgeable on the topic, you can send emails that are as detailed as possible and support your arguments with extensive evidence, facts and data.

To influence those who either lack motivation or knowledge on the topic, simplifying your messaging can increase your chance to persuade them.

However, as remote work requires a large amount of detailed communication, we continuously receive extra-long emails from everyone about everything. This sheer growth in quantity and length of emails has caused many people to experience the so-called “email overload.”[1]^,[2]  Even for our most knowledgeable and motivated audiences, chances are they do not have the energy and resources to carefully read and respond to all emails they’ve received.

So if you have to send an email, make sure they are short and your points are clear. Otherwise, resort to other forms of communication, such as a quick conference call or a video chat. Because, as we will discuss next, in-person communication often results in better outcomes.

2. Leveraging the Cues

Persuasion professionals (salespeople, marketers, etc.) have been leveraging contextual cues to increase the persuasiveness of their messages for many years.

For audiences who either lack knowledge on the subject or the motivation to conduct detailed pre-research on the topic themselves, using certain cues in the persuasion attempts can lead to better outcomes than piling up the data and evidence.

One important type of cue is what’s known as a “social context cue,” which makes your audience aware that you are paying attention to them. However, emails are notorious for filtering out the social cues due to the lack of social context (e.g., body language, facial expression, eye contact, etc.).

Due to the lack of these social context cues, it is hard for people to understand others’ perspectives. So when we send requests over emails, if not very careful, we can make others feel that we are only focused on ourselves.[3]^,[4]This perception of self-absorption is one of the reasons why requests over email tend to yield less favorable results than those over face-to-face interactions.

Studies have also showed that the emotions the sender of an email intends to convey are often misinterpreted by the receivers,[5]^,[6] which can surely increase the chance of miscommunication.

Therefore, if you have to send requests via emails, try to show consideration for others. Be polite and positive. Try to avoid spelling errors and the misuse of capitalization because it is found in research that some people have really negative feelings about them.6

When you have a video conference with others, pay attention to your environmental cues. More specifically, make sure that your background is clean and your room is well-lit. Such peripheral cues can have an impact on your not-so-motivated and not-so-knowledgeable audience.

3. Priming and Motivation

Although we discussed many flaws related using email as the primary communication channel, if used properly, it can be a great motivation tool.

One study found that CEO emails that contain motivating and achievement-related words can increase employee weekly performance by 15 percent and efficiency by 35 percent compared to an email that only has neutral communication.^[7] These motivating and achievement-oriented words enhanced employee work motivation, which led to better performance.

So next time, when you have to send emails, try to use achievement-related words such as: prevail, accomplish, compete, strive, thrive, achieve, triumphed, mastered, win, success, gain, attain, etc. These small words can make a big difference.

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References

[1] Dabbish, L., & Kraut, R. (2006). Email overload at work: An analysis of factors associated with email strain. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 2006, (pp. 431–440). New York, NY: ACM Press.

[2] Sappleton, N., & Lourenço, F. (2016). Email subject lines and response rates to invitations to participate in a web survey and a face-to-face interview: The sound of silence. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 19. 611-622.

[3] Roghanizad, M.M., & Bohns, V.K. (2017). Ask in person: You’re less persuasive than you think over email. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 69, 223-226.

[4] Sproull, L., & Kiesler, S. (1986). Reducing social context cues: Electronic mail in organizational communication. Management science, 32, 1492-1512.

[5] Byron, K. (2008). Carrying too heavy a load? The communication and miscommunication of emotion by email. Academy of Management Review, 33, 309-327.

[6] Byron, K. & Baldridge, D.C. (2007). Toward a model of nonverbal cues and emotion in email. Journal of Business Communication, 44, 1-24.

[7] Stajkovic, A.D., Latham, G.P., Sergant, K., & Peterson, S.J. (2019). Prime and performance: Can a CEO motivate employees without their awareness? Journal of Business and Psychology, 34, 791-802.