Managing across the void
Lessons learned managing a distributed team
In October 2015 I was given the opportunity to lead the Travelstart Mobile development team in Taipei, Taiwan. This team had been tasked with creating an innovative mobile app called Flapp: a two-tap, flight booking app for one of the busiest air commuter routes in the world (Johannesburg — Cape Town). After my first few weeks with the team, we decided to extend this functionality to be our flagship, full-featured, app.
Fast-forward to the present and we’ve grown the team from 6 to 11 members in the Taipei office. We‘ve increased our release cycle from once every 5–6 weeks, to every 2 weeks. Even with our Head of Product in Cape Town, our customer value delivery has increased per release as well.
In my previous post, I gave a high level overview of how we do “remote work” at Travelstart. After receiving a few questions I thought I’d follow up with some personal lessons learned along this journey.
Effective communication
When you’re in a leadership role, communication is important. When you’re working with a remote team, and/or team members, it becomes even more important.
All the latent, casual, water-cooler type conversations that happen in-person, where subtle tidbits of information are passed, no longer happen. Any misunderstanding mishaps are amplified when effective communication is not the number one focus.
Take two desk-mates from any office and I can guarantee that there will be some miscommunication that happens when one or both work from home.
The solution here, quite simply, is to lean towards over-communicating. Always assume you have not explained something correctly and ask for clarification to make sure the understanding communicated back, is what you actually meant. If not, rinse, repeat and try again.
Communication and collaboration also needs to be deliberately architected and agreed upon by the team to be truly effective. Something that may seem great for you, may not be that convenient for others. Let the team decide what works best for them and adapt to remove any barriers for them.
Timezones
Also mentioned in my previous post, asynchronous communication becomes a key skill to master. This is especially powerful when you have a team working in a different timezone. Knowing how and when to communicate means that you can minimize the “need” for you to always be available.
Taiwan is 6 hours ahead of South Africa, this is great in that we have an overlap of ZA morning and TW afternoon. It means that we can still have meetings without being too much of an inconvenience for any one in the company. It also means that I can send an email (or Slack message) with questions, tasks or information that can be “processed” when the team comes online the following day.
What has worked really well for us, is that the team is co-located, so all team communication can happen when it needs to — as early as possible.
Writing
I’ve realized that one of the skills I’ve needed to improve the most over these last 2 years, was the ability to communicate effectively with my writing. A skill I’m still trying to improve by writing here 😉.
When you’re leading a team remotely, your writing needs to be clear, concise and to the point. Writing lends itself to this by allowing you more time to think about word choice, grammar and context.
This focus on writing needs to be shared across the team. When discussions take place in-person, the outcomes should be written down and shared where needed. An example of this is when discussing unclear logic in new stories or tasks. We discuss this first, then update the task with the agreed upon outcome.
Getting used to silence
Regular chats and catchups with your team are will be replaced by frequent calls. Part of having these calls, especially across multiple timezones, is getting used to long, awkward silences. You will need to become comfortable with these if you work with team members who are introverted, soft-spoken, or communicating in their 2nd or 3rd language.
While this is not necessarily unique to remote calls, it does make a difference not being able to see or feel the body language and reactions which help alleviate the silence.
Video calls obviously help with this immensely, and this should always be the first option. However, this is not always possible and, as I’ve mentioned previously, good sound always trumps bad video. In this case, I recommend using a tool that allows you to know the connection status of all parties. I’m currently using Zoom. It let’s me and any other party know when the connection is unstable so eliminates the awkward, “Hello. Are you still there?”, questions that could interrupt deep thinking or periods of reflection.
Driving towards self-organization
I believe that the greatest barrier to the success or failure of distribute teams is self-organization.
If you, as a leader, are constantly the bottleneck to resolving issues, you need to focus on stepping back, letting things fail and work on having each team member take ownership of the success of the team. This may mean some tough or uncomfortable conversations but the end result will be worth it.
This is an issue regardless of where your team is situated. When your team is across the globe and/or in a different timezone, it is critical that team members feel empowered to make decisions. This means they should have the skills, information, tools and trust to make decisions.
An important first step at putting this in place is getting yourself a good mentor. Someone you think exudes great leadership and will be able to give you objective advice and guidance along your journey.
I still believe I have a lot more to do to achieve this at a level I can be fully happy with, so expect future posts returning to this theme.
If you’re a manager who leads a distributed team, what other challenges have you experienced? What would the number one lesson be that you could pass on to others? I would love to hear any thoughts or feedback in the comments.
