Many managers see distributed teams as a nightmare, but they are a blessing in disguise. They force you to do what you should be doing anyway. Take advantage of the remote status and build good team habits.
Come together. Don’t let the team drift apart. You should always know what everyone is working on and be available to help.
Stay apart. Once you have touched base leave people alone. Let them take advantage of their remote status and get their work done.
Trust, but verify. Trust your team members. They are your people. They’ll do good work for you. Then verify what they did. Push for a culture if peer review and they will start to verify for each other.
Continue to inspire. Your team doesn’t see you everyday so don’t assume they know what you’re excited about. Tell them over and over again.
The details
A friend of mine says writing software is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. “It might take a little while, but eventually you find the edge pieces and start to work your way toward the middle.” Good software feels like a finished puzzle. Every piece fits together and it feels good to use.
When the different parts were strewn together haphazardly it just feels like a mess. So how do you make everything fit together when its made by people who are far apart?
Learn from the Best
The industry with the most experience in this area is high-tech manufacturing. Computers, cars, and airplanes are an amalgam of parts from all over the world. And they’ve been made that way for a long time.
The American side of the cold war space race was powered by Boeing’s propulsion and power division called Rocketdyne. They started in 1958 when the US launched its first orbiting satellite and stayed on top until the cold war ended in the 1980′s.
Suddenly the world was flooded by cheaper simpler rocket engines coming out of Russia and Boeing was in trouble. They needed an engine that was radically simpler than anything they had made before so they changed. They started working with other companies to design and stress test the engine. They realized that absence makes a team grow stronger.
You may have seen some bad software crashes, but think back to the Challenger disaster and you’ll realize they don’t hold a candle to a rocket crash. If Boeing got it wrong it would end in a ball of flaming hot metal hurtling back down to the Earth. They didn’t have room for any extra components or mistakes and they choose to build it with a distributed team.
Inspire
The first step to succeeding with any team is inspiration and inspiration comes from goals. Every telecommuter I know wants to succeed. They want to know that people are happy with their work. Managers give this drive toward success direction with goals. The best goals are possible, but just a little out of reach.
Your team isn’t in the office so you can’t surround them with motivational posters (a good thing) and your can’t herd them into endless vision meetings (a very good thing). The idea of your project must be sticky enough that it succeeds without face-to-face reinforcement.
Dan and Chip Heath outline a strategy for sticky ideas in their book Made To Stick: Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories. SUCCESs. Great team goals are all of these things. It inspires the team to work hard and make something your customers will love.
I’m not going to sugarcoat it, developing a sticky product idea is hard. Really hard. But you have to do it. Projects do not succeed without sticky ideas.
Lead
Take your sticky idea and present it to the team. If the idea is good they’ll get energized and start thinking of ways to make it happen.. Then they need a leader.
Your leader will be someone you know and trust. Someone with a good grasp of the problem and enough experience to make things happen. Spotting the leader is simple, they push the ideas forward..
When you first tell your team about the idea someone is going to start asking questions. They might seem critical of the idea, but they never dismiss it. They push you to expand the idea and make it real. That’s the leader.
The leader leads, but they don’t manage. They run out in front of the team and inspire them. And they do it without your help. Leaders lead by their very nature.
Manage
Your leader tries to pull your team forward and you have to keep the team together. Leaders make the team go faster, but they can also pull it apart. You are the counter-point to that idea. Pull the team back and make sure they stay together.
Keeping everyone together is easy once you have a sticky idea. With every decision you must ask, “does this get us closer to the goal.” You get one goal and that is it. Teams are lucky enough to do one thing right. Adobe Photoshop is a great product because it is a focused image editor, not because it also provides a spread sheet and a blog editing tool.
Review what your team is doing constantly, but don’t hold on to the idea of manager too tightly. You are there to help the team, not be the boss. Make sure your team is making decisions. Don’t do it for them.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Great information Zack! Thanks!
I had a question about the “Details” section. When it comes to telecommuting, one of the challenges that sometimes occurs revolves around communication. I am initially thinking of the Richness of Communication graph at this URL:
http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/communication.htm
Are there any tools you suggest or recommend to assist with the challenges of communication that might occur with telecommuting?
Thanks for the question Mike. Teams basically have two types of communication. Planned communication happens in scheduled meetings with larger groups and ad hoc communication happens at random times between smaller groups of people. Each of these types of communication have different needs.
For scheduled meetings a good conference phone is tough to beat. Many of the companies I spoke with had tried video conferencing and given it up. Video conferences work best for one-on-one conversations. I should write an article about why. I often combine conference calls with a web presentation package when I’m presenting remotely.
Ad hoc communication works best when the set up time is minimal. Telephones work well here, but I’ve also had very good luck with small groups over IRC. IRC is a better place to connect teams than IM. I’m working on an article about that already.
I found the ‘Manage’ section of this post rather confusing. You refer to ‘your leader’ and ‘you’ as as if they are separate entities with apparently different aims – or perhaps a pull in different directions. Can you clarify what’s intended here?
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