 Leading your team can be hard even when you're at home. So how can you do it effectively from the road? Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. Developing your team and helping them meet their goals while you're at home is tough enough, never mind trying to do it from the road. Today I've got four tips for you to help you lead your team effectively when you're traveling for business. And stay tuned to the end, I'm going to give you a link where you can download our free leadership development plan workbook. And that'll help you develop your goals for the next two, five and ten years and build a plan to achieve them. I used to travel a lot for work when I was in the Air Force. We used to call it T-U-I short for temporary duty. And I remember this one assignment I had when I was in Colorado, I would travel at least three or four days out of the week. And that was usually three weeks out of the month at a minimum. So I was gone a lot. And when I was in this job, I was the director of operations for a squadron. So that meant it was my job to make sure that all these 60 people in the squadron were all moving in the same direction, getting their jobs down and getting the mission accomplished. And that was really hard to do while I was on the road traveling and they were back at home station or even off in other locations while they were traveling. And I love this job. It was really rewarding. We got to do a lot of rapid prototyping and getting things out to the field quickly. But it was really challenging. The leadership aspects of this were really challenging with all of us distributed all around the world. So the four tips I'm going to give you today are the tips I used and I kind of developed when I was in this job. And they're just good leadership practices. So you can use these even when you're at home. They don't necessarily need to just be for when you're traveling. Now last week, we talked about some tips for helping you disengage from work when you're trying to rest and relax and take a vacation or even if you're just staying at home for a few days and getting away from the office. This week, these tips are going to be really more about staying connected with your team even though you're off traveling and doing great work out in another location. And like I said before, these are just good leadership practices. So some of these tips are going to be the same as disconnecting when you're taking a vacation. And some of them are going to be a little different. But like I said, these are just good leadership practices and you can try to work them in whether you're going on vacation or whether you're traveling for business. Tip number one for leading from the road is prep your team just like before you go on vacation. And now it's a little bit different because you're going to be connected. You're going to want to be talking to your team while you're on vacation, not trying to disengage, but the principles are still the same. You want to make sure that each team member understands what their responsibilities are while you're gone. Look them in the eye and get that positive handoff just like we talked about before going on vacation. Make sure they know where to find all the information they might need to accomplish their work or make a decision in your absence if they need to do that. Make sure they understand what decisions they're allowed to make while you're gone, what decisions they need to wait for you to come back for or what decisions they need to call you about. What would constitute a real reason for them to call you while you're traveling for business and interrupt the good work you're doing while you're on the road. Make sure they understand what constitutes an emergency where they should break you out of a meeting and get you refocused on something that might have to happen right away. Tip number two when you're traveling is to stay connected with your team. And this is a lot easier than it was 10 years ago when I was doing all that traveling. I was traveling so many days out of the month. Back then I had a Blackberry and a cell phone but it was still kind of hard. You couldn't really read attachments on a Blackberry. Public Wi-Fi wasn't very common. It wasn't really easy to do work tasks other than talking on the phone to someone even just 10 years ago. Smartphones, tablets, Wi-Fi being everywhere, great cell phone plans. That's all changed that things like social media and ways to connect with people. So take advantage of all those tools. You may be able to instead of just being on a phone call, you may be able to be on a live video chat with someone on your team. So take advantage of those tools and if you don't have those tools available, if you don't have your documentation set up in cloud storage or video chat tools that you can chat effectively with your team while you're on the road, look into getting those. A lot of them aren't very expensive and they are probably worth the cost if you're going to be traveling a lot. Staying connected is about more than just using the latest tools that you have at your disposal. There's also a little bit of a time management aspect to this as well. Tip number three is to make sure that you set aside some time while you're traveling to connect with your team members so you can address any needs or questions that they might have for you. And I know the last thing you want to do when you're traveling, when you get to that hotel room at night after you've been on a flight all day is to get on a video chat or a phone call with your team members. But the advantage to this is that your team member might be having a problem that you might be able to solve in the location you're at with a face-to-face meeting with someone. Now that's not always going to be true and it's important to be selective about what you talk to your team members about. It's okay to do that. It's okay to say, hey, I want to check in with you about this and see if there's anything I can help you with while I'm on the road in this location or if you're having a real problem or emergency, we can spend some time talking about that. But you don't need to get the whole rundown on everything they've been doing and you don't need to give them the whole rundown on everything you've been doing. So be selective about this but make some time, check in with your team members and see what you can do for them from the road and what they may be able to do for you from home station. Tip number four is to use your downtime effectively when you're traveling. Traveling is always an exercise and hurry up and wait. Flights get delayed, there's long waits at the airport, you may have to get there for security early, find out that the line's really short, you may have an extra few hours in the airport, we have to wait for ubers and cabs and that kind of thing. There's lots of downtime that you can take advantage of and I like to use this downtime to take care of quick simple little tasks that I don't have to invest a lot of time in or get started on the maybe put away if my flight gets called aboard or the gate changes or something like that. So I like to just blaster emails, triage through those emails, delete the ones that aren't important, go through social media, do a lot of my social media engagement while I'm sitting in airports or sitting in the back of an Uber or waiting for a cab or something like that. So there's all kinds of little things you can do to take advantage of your downtime. And if you're like me, I like to get to the airport early, I hate to be stressed going through the line at the last minute wondering if I'm going to make my flight. A lot of people like to do that, that's not me. So I tend to get to the airport early, so I often have a bunch of downtime before my flight, sometimes like an hour and hour and a half depending on how the security line goes. So what I do is if I know I'm going to have that kind of period of time, I might leave a longer task to review a document or make some comments on something or look at a project plan or something like that, make edits to things. So use your downtime wisely when you're traveling. There's all kinds of things you can do and that'll leave more time for checking in with your team and let you be focused on what you're actually traveling for, who you're meeting with, what the purpose of that is, and sticking to that if you can accomplish all these little tasks in your downtime. So there you go. Four tips to help you lead your team while you're traveling and doing great work out on the road. Nothing's ever a perfect solution and this is no substitute for face-to-face engagement with your team members, but try these four tips next time you're on the road and it'll help you stay connected and engage with your team and I know they'll appreciate the effort. If you found this helpful, please like, comment, and share it with a friend or co-worker. Click on that link below in the description and that'll take you to where you can download our free Leadership Development Plan workbook. That'll help you set your goals for your career for the next two, five, and 10 years and help you build a plan to achieve them. If you have any business or leadership questions, put them in the comments. We'd love to hear from you or email us at info at EvilGeniusLeadership.com. EvilGeniusLeadership.com is also where you can find out about all of our coaching programs, so if you're looking for a little more one-on-one training to work on your leadership style and develop your leadership techniques, check us out there. We'll set you up with a free consultation. Thanks for watching today. I really appreciate it and remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.