Managing a distributed team (even teams in which one person works outside of the office) requires a different mindset than managing a fully colocated team.
Here are some of my biggest takeaways after years of managing distributed team members.
Create empathy; encourage clear asynchronous communication; provide continuous context
Empathy
Becoming a strong remote team leader starts with empathy. One of the most effective ways to develop empathy is to listen. Ask questions of your distributed teammates about how they see the world; probe them on the challenges they experience with their work; get curious about the topics they’re curious about – and simply listen.
Listening unlocks your ability to see the world through their eyes. If you can understand and empathize with their perspective, you’ll be able to identify tools and processes that help them contribute to the best of their ability.
And once the team understands the needs and perspectives of their remote colleagues, you can start to establish norms and values that engage those needs within the context of the team.
Communication
An empathic understanding of your remote teammates serves as the foundation to develop team-wide communicative norms.
Face to Face Comms
As a leader, it is critical to develop trust. The saying goes:
trust equals consistency over time
One way to compress the time variable is with consistent, synchronous touch points. Weekly 1:1s and regularly scheduled team meetings are two fantastic tools to accomplish this. And an effective way to drive this home is with structured, annual/semi-annual team gatherings.
Async Comms
Cultivating a culture of asynchronous communication is key component in inter-team communication.
One of the biggest challenges facing remote teammates is ensuring that they are able to collaborate and unblock each other regardless of their location and timezone. And depending on the geographic distribution of your team, it might be unrealistic to expect the everyone to meet in real time.
Small things, like making async stand-ups a part of everyone’s daily ritual, steer in that direction. As does finding tools to make your on-boarding, project management, and agile rituals async when appropriate.
Context
After communication norms have been established, it’s important to leverage those channels to provide as much context as possible to your remote team members. One of the most important aspects of a leader’s responsibilities is to reinforce the “why” behind your team’s work.
Contextualizing their work with respect to the success of the organization drives engagement. Engaged teams are happier and more productive – which act as positive feedback mechanisms driving even greater communication within the team.
The goal is this:
- Use the trust you’ve developed within the team to establish communication channels
- Those channels allow you to provide consistent context to each member of the team.
- This acts as a virtuous cycle that enables you to further develop that trust and engage your team on increasingly more meaningful levels.
My hope is that these tactics serve as useful guidance for managers engaging with remote teammates. If you have thoughts on this, I’d love to hear how your tactics have found success with regards to remote management.
