As the author of such books as How to Lead: The Definitive Guide to Effective Leadership, Power at Work: The Art of Making Things Happen and Leadership Rules: 50 Timeless Lessons for Leaders, Jo Owen has forgotten more about management best practices than most of us are ever likely to remember.
In 2016, Owen looked at what bosses can do to sustain those practices on the broadest possible canvas, with the publication of Global Teams: How the Best Teams Achieve High Performance.
While the book responded to trends well under way at the time, with remote work styles virtually the norm in the COVID-19 era one could argue its time has truly come.
Over a few short weeks, remote working in every part of the world has ramped up by several orders of magnitude – and many teams will have discovered that keeping the flame of interpersonal relationships alive on videoconferencing platforms is a very different beast to speaking to each other in person.
With that in mind, The Treasurer spoke to Owen about the things that teams can do to maintain their focus and cohesion at a time of enforced social distancing. Part one looks at team effectiveness. Next month, part two will explore team morale and motivation.
It’s an extreme scenario at the best of times, because when you’re remote and global, you’re asking people to make decisions while you’re asleep – and those people are in different cultures, speaking different languages.
So, if I can condense five years of research into one phrase, the overarching lesson is: everything is harder in a global team. And I think that’s true of any remote team, too.
As such, you must be far more deliberate about how you lead. And you must apply that more deliberate approach to everything you do.
In the field of team effectiveness, the two areas that consistently come through in any discussion of best practices are trust and communication. In professional life, we all desire effective communication. But you don’t get it unless you have trust, and you don’t get trust unless there’s effective communication. The two things are absolutely locked together.
In the office setting, effective communication is really easy, because you can just talk to each other. If I think I’ve misunderstood you, I’ll simply turn around to your desk and ask, “Hey Matt, what did you mean by that?” But it’s not as easy as that when you’re doing it remotely, because you may give me your pearls of wisdom, and you’ll see me nodding onscreen, and yet after the event, I’ll think: “Hang on – that made sense at the time, but actually… what on Earth was he talking about? What did he mean?”
I can’t just lean over and ask, “Could you run that past me again?” The whole process of dispensing information suddenly becomes a lot more formal.
That little 15-second chat in the corridor to refresh your memory can’t happen. Instead, you’ve got to schedule another meeting.
If you’re in a physical office, that’s quite easy, because you can see who’s overworked and who’s coasting. So, you can ask this person to do the work and not the other person. And when you explain the job to the team member you’ve chosen, they probably won’t get it first time around – and that’s fine, because they’ll come back to you for a quick word, and you’ll work it all out through a process of mutual adjustment.
None of that works on a remote team.
In that context, you can’t see who’s struggling and who’s coasting. And when you communicate the goal, the person you’ve asked to take it on may sort of get it, but they don’t really get it, and therefore they don’t own it, and they get quite confused, and then it all falls apart.
That’s just one, small example of why you have to be more deliberate and purposeful when you’re leading a dispersed team, in order to be effective.
Start with being far more deliberate about your communications.
On a remote or global team, if you’re not careful, communication will just explode exponentially. You could spend your whole time communicating, and not actually doing any work. That means you have to control the beast. And there are two ways to do that:
1. Kill email with extreme prejudice Global teams hate email, because it’s a brilliant medium for spawning confusion, misunderstandings and mistrust. It’s best to speak face to face, even if over your computer screens – but again, that could threaten to become another beast. So…
2. Establish rhythms and routines of communication A good example of that comes from the IT industry, where it’s common to divide discussions up into YTB (yesterday, today, blockers) or YTH (yesterday, today, help needed) meetings.
At the start of a new day, get the team together, and each member has 90 seconds to say what they did yesterday, what they’re going to do today and where they need help.
In the course of those 90-second bulletins, the team leader will build up a picture of exactly what everyone is doing, and will be able to course-correct any individual, or the team as a whole, if necessary.
The leader will also know whether the team members have done what they promised to do the day before, and find out about any areas where they may need a hand. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Done.
That may not be the perfect answer for everyone. But it’s an example of a simple discipline that creates rhythms and routines. And in a sense, the underlying nature of the rhythm or routine doesn’t particularly matter, as long as everyone on the team understands what it is and agrees to it.
Well, I’ll make a small allowance: in global teams, people have to use some form of email, because it’s asynchronous communication: it overcomes time zones. The tools we use can’t all be synchronous like Skype, Slack or Zoom, which depend upon team members following the communications live as they are developing.
But the problem you have when email gets out of control is that it’s just complete overload. You could spend your whole time just doing email.
That’s exacerbated by another problem, which is that people often use email purely to cover their backs and leave an evidence trail. Everyone copies everyone else in on everything – and once people have been copied in, they have an instant, knee-jerk desire to show that they’re aware of the new information by making some sort of response. And we go straight back to people covering their own backs again.
As a result, it grows like a weed – but it’s not actually serving any real purpose. Other than enabling people to leave defensive evidence trails that have more to do with self-preservation than team spirit.
Absolutely. And there are people on global teams who have had enough of it and just vituperate against it. “It’s a plague” is perhaps one of the more charitable reactions I got to email when I was researching my book.
A third problem with email – which very much ties in with its mutation into a political tool – is people expecting replies every time of the day or night. And you should not expect replies any time of the day or night. But that’s clearly a very acute problem on global teams.
I built a business in Japan, and it was a nightmare, because the Americans would always insist on having their conference calls at nine or 10 o’clock in the morning, which in Japan would mean starting the calls at 10 or 11 o’clock at night. By which time I’d probably be drunk from taking some clients out.
And then the emails would start flowing through the small hours, and their senders would pop round reminders saying, “Why haven’t you replied?” Well, because it’s three o’clock in the morning, thanks very much.
I’d always take revenge by sending an email in the middle of their night, then send another an hour later saying, “Why haven’t you replied?” And then, of course, I’d get a really snotty response. None of which is terribly constructive.
When you think about it, you’re now having to trust people to do stuff in conditions where you can’t see them and you can’t look over their shoulders.
Trust, therefore, is vital – and whether or not it’s ingrained in your daily interactions provides a great test of whether you’ve hired the right team. If you can’t trust your team, you can’t delegate to them. And you can’t micromanage them very well remotely. So, if you can’t delegate at even a rudimentary level, you’ve hired the wrong team.
In a team context, trust stems from two areas. The first is an alignment of values and agendas. The second is credibility – or establishing a track record for doing what you say you will do. And that’s harder to navigate than it seems. Every professional is bound to declare with pride, “Of course I’m doing what I say.” But the problem is rarely in the doing. It’s typically in the saying.
For example, if I come to you with a request for a pay rise or promotion, you may tell me: “I’ll look into it, I’ll see what’s possible, I’ll have the discussions and I’ll get back to you.”
Now, in your mind, you’ve given yourself all sorts of get-outs: you’ll look into it, you’ll have discussions – and then, in the end, you’ll report that it’s not possible.
But what I’ve heard is, “He’s got my back! He’s going to make it happen!” So, when you come back to me in two weeks’ time and say, “I’m sorry, but there’s no chance whatsoever that you’re going to get promoted”, trust completely breaks down. And as for getting into the whole I-said-he-said argument, where I’m trying to retrospectively decode tone of voice and intention – well, forget it. Because that just makes things so much worse.
The problem is in the saying. And this goes back to the communications issue. You have to be brutally clear in your communications. It’s not enough to merely transmit. You must also receive. In other words, you’ve got to hear back from people what it is they think you’ve said.
You must get them to paraphrase you while they’re right in front of you after you have just briefed them. Because if they don’t say it back to you in a way that can be spot-checked, they’ve probably misinterpreted it. And it’s far better to have a difficult conversation at the beginning of a process than an impossible one at the end.
Trust is like an antique vase. It’s a wonderful, precious object. But the moment it’s broken – well, you can sort of put a vase back together again, but it’s awkward, takes a huge amount of time and is never really the same.
Exactly. If you nail down the communications and trust, and then you’re really deliberate about all your other leadership processes, you’re probably going to have a team that will perform really well.
And actually, we should look at this as an excellent opportunity for any team leader. As I said at the top, if you’re leading a global or remote team everything is harder. Now, isn’t that wonderful news?
It means is that, as leaders, we really have to step up. We have to go back to basics and get the fundamental disciplines absolutely right. And what a marvellous learning opportunity that is. In the office, we can skate over all sorts of stuff. If things fall apart, we can put them back together again very quickly and we’re all fine. When people work together in the same room, a lot of stuff happens really informally, and borderline subconsciously. We don’t even think about it.
In an office, the way alignment works is that people have to line up their values with those of the most important and powerful person in the organisation. The reverse is highly unlikely to happen: it’s a one-way street.
A team can keep going remotely. But the problem is when you bring in new team members, because trust is typically built face to face. Technology is great for transactions – but terrible for trust. I have yet to see how you build trust by email. If someone came up with a way of doing so, they’d make a fortune – but I fear it’s a fortune that will never be made.
Matt Packer is a freelance business, finance and leadership journalist