Remote Management: Building "One Team" across five countries.

The purpose of this blog is to answer what you should know before embarking on a role in remote management. The points below are the distillate of what I found to be most important after two years of continuous learning (or perhaps more honestly 'trial and error'). For context, my experience in remote management is of leading a fast-growth SaaS team spread across five offices in Continental Europe. However, I think the considerations below can be applied to other industries and functions where team members are remote from each other and/ or their manager.

There are a number of challenges that are more pronounced with remote management. The goodness from sales management training courses on things like coaching needs to be reinterpreted for a remote relationship. Being in a different office, you lose knowing how someone is feeling, what they are spending time on and what's on their mind. You miss over-hearing calls and receiving informal questions and updates that keep your finger on the pulse of the business. Different countries means different languages, business cultures, regulatory environments and levels of technology maturity leading to different challenges and needs across the team. You can't be everywhere at once, so you have to make trade-offs on which customer meetings to attend. Building and maintaining cross-functional and cross-line of business relationships are core to the role but difficult to scale effectively across multiple offices.

These challenges are reciprocated as a remote employee: you don't have a manager to jump in to meetings with you, it's less enjoyable to win on your own and more painful to lose on your own, your market can feel like less of a focus, you hear less communication in the office specific to your role leading to information being missed and you have fewer relevant people around you to learn from and to ask questions to.

Talent

With a team of 8 people or so, on average per week you will have about three hours of contact time with each person. This is not a lot of time to help someone develop through training, coaching, joining meetings and reviews. This means you need to hire people who are already at the level of the role. Be cautious and realistic about how much time and resource you can invest in someone who is taking a step up in to a remotely managed position. The exception to this is where you are hiring the cream of the crop internally.

At LinkedIn we have a robust interview process to assess the core competencies of Leadership, Leverage and Results as well fit with our culture. The specific attributes and competencies that I have found particularly important when hiring remote employees are: self-motivation and proactivity, resilience, being a 'player not a victim', collaboration, a focus on self-development and comfort with change and ambiguity. The secret sauce was finding people who are as passionate as I am about building our business and the transformation of B2B sales.

Talent is the number one operating priority.

Vision

Vision, the true north, the purpose for the team of what their actions individually and collectively seek to achieve is vital in galvanising a remote team. It provides the 'why' and aligns everyone in the same direction on the same big picture goal. The team vision should neatly tie in to the company vision, which at LinkedIn is to "Connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful."

Our team's vision is "To get Europe social selling".

Our team's mission is "To be a world-class social selling team that creates world-class social selling teams".

What I learned, is what makes a vision and mission become truly special, exciting and real is when you can measure the progress made against them. We are fortunate as a team in a big data company to be able to do this. For our vision, by measuring the total addressable market (of sales people) in Europe and the increase in penetration of Sales Navigator. For our mission, by measuring our own Social Selling Index (and benchmarking against internal teams) and the Social Selling Index of our customers and countries and the increase over time.

(Our team vision and mission are due for a refresh to "Modernise how Europe sells" and "To be a world-class sales team that transforms our customers' sales teams " to reflect better the value of Sales Navigator far beyond just social selling ).

Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.

Culture

Every team has a culture whether it's been intentionally created or not. Culture is the stuff that binds a team together, (and combined with values) it provides the framework for decision-making and guidance for expectations. Creating a strong, consistent team culture across several offices where remote employees feel included and have a sense of belonging is not easy. Research has shown that diverse teams win and that culture is a competitive advantage. I believe that when you combine diversity with culture then magic happens.

A thriving culture for a remote team requires the foundations of trust and connectedness. When my team ("The Union") was first created, my team and I codified our culture and values to create our identity and bring together a sense of team. However, I wouldn't advocate doing this in the future if the company (and in our case division too) already has a strong set of cultures and values. Instead, I believe a better focus is how to reinforce and manifest the company cultures and values within the team.

The key opportunities for impacting culture with a remote team are hiring, on boarding, team meetings, team off-sites and within all team communications. Culture begins with hiring in sourcing and assessing candidates. I am a believer in including the team in the process. The first item in on boarding should be culture and values. I advocate including the team in on boarding by delegating functional topics and assigning buddies. Team meetings are the vehicle to share personal and professional wins, key business updates and group discussions for challenges and learnings to bring everyone together. Team forecast (and pipeline) meetings increase connectedness by focusing the team on a common target while increasing individual accountability. Team off-sites reinforce culture with awards, celebrating successes and building relationships. All communication to the team, with the team and about the team must also be consistent with the team culture.

To understand business culture better in each country, the Culture Compass App which leverages Hofstede's research is very helpful. One regret I have is not doing an Insights Discovery session with the team to help us understand ourselves and each other better.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Communicate the focus; focus the communication

Communication is a balancing act in remote management. Too much communication is distracting and too little makes people feel like they really are remote. Communication on too many things does not help people focus on what is important and on too few things soon adds up to a lot of information missed. It's tempting to send lots of reminders but people can then become reliant on them. Communication is also a minefield where expressions and sayings don't always translate from one language to another with the same meaning! Slang doesn't help.

Keep communication succinct, relevant and clear. For continuous topics (for example forecast, pipeline and sales excellence) the communication needs to be consistent in cadence and content. To balance volume of communications with highlighting key information, I've found it best for something of high importance or urgency to communicate it in isolation and for less critical items to group them in to one communication.

Across the team it's important to have common and established channels of communication for formal and informal, individual and group situations. A blend of email, instant messenger, video conference, phone and social media.

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

Getting sh*t done (prioritisation, organisation & structure)

A lot of sales management is about joining customer meetings to help drive deals and provide coaching. With remote management, constant travel to join meetings is not scalable nor sustainable. Instead, I've found that the best approach is to reserve travel just for key meetings and for other less crucial meetings join remotely or (as applied when there are language barriers) invest time with the employee in advance to prepare and afterwards to review.

As a remote manager, travel disrupts not just your diary but those of your team and anyone else that you have regular meetings with. Keeping travel to regular times helps combat this, traveling Monday (evening) to Wednesday (afternoon) worked well for me.

Structuring weekly meetings with employees to increase touch points on specific topics helps to increase the focus and impact of the meetings while creating a rhythm and predictability to the business. The framework I adopted was Mondays - one-to-one's / pipeline reviews, Tuesdays and Wednesdays - travel and customer meetings, Thursdays - team/ individual forecasts and team meeting, Fridays - planning, admin and InDay participation.

A couple of other things that I found to be really important are to have the team build robust business, territory and account plans, then use one-to-one's to track progress. The second thing is the need to be commercial with which relationships to build and when lean to in to them.

The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.

This role has been an amazing journey. I'm proud of the high-performing team built, inspired by our customers and their transformations, excited by the Sales Navigator product road map and forever grateful of the relationships built. I shall be looking on from the sidelines with great excitement... Next Play!

A special thanks to my managers Maria, Liam, Vern and Kevin, to my cross-functional partners Eanna, Miguel, David, Andrew, Michael, Bart, Marie and Aleks, and most importantly to my team ("The Union") Arjen, Cindy, Paulin, Rafik, Anna, Markus, Kim, Guillaume, Mimmo, Sylvia, Thao, Alberto, Agathe and Christopher. Cheers.