By Ceci Amador, www.AllianceVirtualOffices.com 
Great leaders and managers empower their teams to be proactive and motivate them to follow-through.  This requires that leaders have excellent communication skills. Given our increasingly remote working world, excellent communications skills are even more important. In the previous blog we talked about clear, precise communication and word choice. Continue to enhance management skills with these additional lessons from coaching certification.
- The Rule of Silence
More often than not, when someone makes a statement or question people feel pressured  to respond so if one person is thinking, the other often jumps in to fill the gap. This interrupts their thinking and prevents them from responding.  A certified coach will teach you that the power of silence can go a long way in improving relationships and opening up communication.  Silence gives people the opportunity to think thoroughly about their comments or responses.  In fact, “coaching training teaches that silence after a question is respecting each person in the conversation.”
For remote teams, having a 15 to 30 second policy of silence before responding to any question will help team members gather their thoughts and put together a valuable and insightful answer. This can help teams reach better, more viable solutions and it can help stave off any confrontations or frustrations.
- The Power of a Forward Focus
Great coaching teaches individuals to create and encourage positive forward focus.  In order to successfully manage a team of remote workers, you want to understand their goals, motivations, wants, and interests.  This will empower you to effectively connect your employees’ personal and career goals with the project at hand or their overall responsibilities.
Consider: How will being a part of your team or project help remote employees get to where they want to be?
Encouraging forward focus among members of a remote team can be effectively done through the right choice of words, clear and precise communication, and good questioning. Follow the lead of a certified coach who typically encourages clients to think in terms of “want to” or “choose to” and use this type of wording with your team.
Ask questions to create a positive, forward focus. Â For example: What do you want to do? Â What does success look like to you? Â What steps will you to take to be where you want to be? Â What results do you expect? Â What will you think or feel once you reach a milestone?
Whether working with your own coach who models these skills or attending coach training, the lessons from coaching applied when managing remote workers are an amazing tool for getting the desired results.
