Leading Distributed Teams

You want to pull your team together for an impromptu brainstorming session. Great idea! Except your team is distributed across time zones and geos – so quickly gathering snacks and having everyone meet in an empty conference room or the roof deck isn’t an option. Situations like this are just one of the challenges leaders of distributed teams face. Ensuring that the team is in sync, maintaining a fair manager presence, and remaining flexible is complicated because it is easy to feel disconnected from your team and run into communication issues. Harvard University instructor Julie Wilson explains, “Managing a [distributed] team requires managers to double down on the fundamentals of good management, including establishing clear goals, running great meetings, communicating clearly, and leveraging team members’ individual and collective strengths.” How can you keep everyone on the same page? How can you foster a positive team culture when people are in different locations? For even the most seasoned managers, success takes time, patience, and a lot of practice. Acknowledging that this is a learning process and that there will be some hiccups along the way, let’s look at a few strategies you can use as a manager to maintain a productive and engaged distributed team.

Fostering inclusion can be more complicated when your team is distributed. Recognize proximity bias – whether it’s based on location or previous working relationships – and put practices in place to counteract this. Talk with your team about how you can best work together. Establish a team norm that all-team meetings take place over Chime even if a few employees are co-located since having everyone in a “Brady Bunch box” on screen equalizes all. If there’s a conversation about work, be it in-person, virtual or chat, that even inadvertently excludes a colleague not present due to location or time zone, make sure that everyone is given the opportunity to weigh in. Saying something simple like, “Let’s get Elle on the phone to discuss this.” fosters inclusion. Avoid defaulting to convenience. Align each team member to different projects, cross-functional teams, and initiatives. By making everyone on the team a point-of-contact for a topic or project area, everyone remains actively involved, visible, and included.

At the end of the day, what’s most important to distributed team performance is the same as any team. Team members should have open communication, feel psychologically safe, and be able to trust and rely on each other. Effective managers discuss expectations with their teams on which communication channels they feel most comfortable using as a group and then establish a clear strategy for how their team will engage both with you and their colleagues so that they feel involved and up to date. Tips for keeping communication clear and consistent include:

• Be consistent with a chosen method of communication to avoid overwhelming your team with messages from different channels and to avoid your communications being missed.
• Clearly communicate team priorities and objectives so that people are clear about the most important work that needs to get done. This helps employees remain nimble when disruptions inevitably occur.
• Build in a good communication rhythm with frequent check-ins, longer deep-dive meetings, and an expectation that team members have brief one-on-ones with each other.
• Centralize communication in a specific platform so that important messages aren’t siloed or missed. Social technology tools like Slack enable teams to work well together. Slack functionalities facilitate communication and help build stronger relationships as it offers the ability to work through topical issues, have informal & fun conversations, and creates a shared environment of team cohesion and awareness throughout the day.

Effective managers that Earn Trust provide vision and direction for the team, then allow them to manage implementation, with checkpoints along the way focused on delivering results. A results-based managing style requires you to place the emphasis on what your employees are producing, and less on the details of how they’re doing it. Encourage team members to take strategic as well as tactical ownership while providing continuous opportunity to demonstrate measurable success. How do you foster this sort of culture? Start by setting crystal clear expectations about what tasks and responsibilities each employee has to fulfill to accomplish team goals. Then, provide clarity about how you define success. Basically, what are they working toward? Using SMART goals or measurement systems like Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) can provide the necessary visibility into what they should be focused on—so you can step back and get out of their way.

Reflect on your recent Forte conversations. Were there any points of feedback that caused you or an employee to say, “Wow, I wish someone would have told me this sooner”? Regular, recurring one-on-ones allow you to connect with your team about their daily work, challenges, and their broader career goals. It’s not only a great way to demonstrate that you’re invested in their work and success, but it also presents an opportunity for you to collect feedback about what is and isn’t working in the team environment. Some questions you could ask include:

• What do you think our team is doing really well in terms of collaboration?
• What challenges are you running into with team members being spread out?

It is impossible to know everything and you’re definitely not a mind-reader, so these questions provide a chance for employees to bring up concerns or sticking points that wouldn’t have occurred to you otherwise.

There are a lot of logistics to take care of when leading a distributed team, but the emotional side deserves just as much emphasis. The relationships we share with the people we work with have a huge impact on our happiness, performance, and even stress levels. Forging these bonds becomes a little more complicated when your entire team isn’t working side-by-side with regular opportunities for things like small talk and shared lunches. For that reason, you need to provide social opportunities that are accessible to everyone. A few ways you can bring all of your employees together to help forge bonds include:

• Create a dedicated team Slack channel for friendly chatter, like Prime Video recommendations, and pet, kid, or travel photos.
• Reserve time at the start or end of your team meetings for personal updates and small talk.
• Schedule some remote-friendly team gatherings and activities, like participating in a virtual trivia contest, attending a virtual happy hour, or contributing to a shared productivity music playlist.
• Set up a standing Chime or Slack video room for coffee or lunch breaks so that people can pop in and chat freely like they would in the office kitchen area.