Leading Dispersed Teams

Leading dispersed teams is a new skill for many. And it’s not necessarily intuitive to all leaders. For a long time, people have relied on the power of presence, eye contact, and reading body language cues to guide their approach in helping their team members be their best. The opportunity to celebrate the achievements of your team is without doubt one of the most rewarding aspects of leadership.?

COVID-19 complicated leadership

However, leading became harder with COVID-19. Even though video communications have changed remote working, there are nuances, such as people’s aversion to eye contact on camera, simply not knowing where to look, and substandard cameras and lighting, all getting in the way of tried and tested leadership approaches.

We’ve all heard the rationale for national, sometimes international, team off-sites of the past, including the irreplaceable value of in-person bonding with colleagues. Well now they must be replaceable. Because we are never reverting entirely to what we did before. We are staring directly into a hybrid future of sometimes physical and sometimes digital engagements, and we must be proficient in both. And quite rightly so, given we’ve had the technology in the cloud for people to live and work from anywhere for some time now, but are only just fully grasping what that means.?

What we know for sure is that while we are inventing exciting, new ways to collaborate online, we are simultaneously called upon to adapt new ways of interacting with our teams.?

These few tips might help:

Work harder to keep top talent

In a dispersed team there are many more opportunities for top talent to be lured away. Location is no longer a barrier for your competitors.

Additionally, we have a skills gap here in Australia and New Zealand. Research by AlphaBeta predicts that in Australia we need to fill an additional 6.5 million digital roles by 2025 to meet the growing demand for technology skills. In this environment top tech talent can choose where they want to work. Therefore we, as leaders, must be attuned to their needs, understand how they engage with their roles, and allow them to create their own blueprint for success.

Perhaps this means helping them to harmonise work and home life so that they CAN do the school pick up or they CAN visit that family member during the day. As Solution Architects at AWS we already commit to being where our customers need us to be, whether in their offices, in a coffee shop or online. Trusting our employees to do the same, i.e., make good decisions as to where they should be and when they should be available, is important. Those who feel secure in where they are working, bring their best selves to work.

But don’t ditch in-person meetings altogether

It must be said, there is no real substitute for “breaking bread” together. It has been part of social bonding since it was done around a fire in primitive times. During COVID I have been doing weekly virtual morning tea with my teams in each city on a rotational basis, with delicious pastries delivered to their door and an hour spent together talking. With my directly reporting team members, I have a Monday morning ‘virtual coffee’ where we spend 30 minutes talking about anything but work, just learning about each other. These interactions have been every bit as critical as business meetings.?

As travel opens, I know I will find myself once again in our offices and our customers’ offices, spending face to face time with them over breakfast or lunch. I am not a fan of team dinners as I don’t like to take folks away from loved ones. But everyone has time for lunch!?

Communicate often

With dispersed teams that spend a good chunk of their time interacting virtually you need to be much more intentional about communication, ensuring nothing is lost in transmission. It helps to allocate more time than you think to crafting your messages, sharing them and re-sharing them. Repetition is key since you can’t get a feel from the room about how something has landed. Remember to test that your messages have been received as intended.?

For the leader, all of this means committing more time to communication, versus expecting teams to “figure it out”.

Set input not output goals

Clear and simple input-focused goals remain critical, even in virtual environments. If you set too many goals you risk losing sight of your outcomes. Focus on the ones that really matter.

Recognise that goals that measure output (which you can’t control) versus input (which you can) create anxiety. Aim to be clear with your team around your expectations and self-serve your reporting against those expectations. This makes performance management far easier, as everyone is on the same page regarding the performance bar.

Review your toolkit

Make an inventory of the processes, tools and software that support you in engaging with your team and ask yourself if they are still fit for purpose. Consider what additional tools might be useful for leading in a dispersed model.

For example, I like sharing both a formal and informal Slack channel with my team. That way it is clear where we are asking for help or input above just sharing funny trivia or photos of pets. You need both.

Do live activation for online events

If your team is dispersed and your events are online, you can still make them personal. Our team does a yearly hackathon which used to be face to face. For the last two years we have done it virtually. If you have ever participated in a hackathon, you know that bouncing off each other in the room is part of the buzz. Achieving that virtually is harder, but it beats NOT doing it. As leaders we should always challenge ourselves to think how we can bring in personal engagements. For our virtual hackathon, a big box of swag delivered to people’s homes helps to raise the energy!

Successful remote and hybrid workforce leaders think about all of these things and more. In particular, it pays to bias towards more versus less communication. I call it “being captain obvious”.? Still, in these unpredictable times no-one has all the answers and we are still figuring things out. Let me know what works well for you.?