Remote Control?

Tell me something interesting about some of the people you work with. 

Perhaps:

• Bob has a banana and crisp sandwich every day for lunch.
• Jacqui is a part-time line dancing instructor.
• Kevin is responsible for that slightly odd odour that permeates the area of the office by the photocopier.

Don’t underestimate how much of what you know about your colleagues is inferred from the process of simply being with them in the same room. For a manager, that knowledge, gained from corridor conversations, water-cooler moments and casual observation is a big part of what enables effective leadership. Arguably, this is one of the reasons why large open-plan offices are increasingly the norm.

If you are managing a team, perhaps look it at this way:

How much of what you know about the ability and attitude of individuals in your team, their strengths and weaknesses and how they relate to their team-mates, comes from actual formal 1-2-1s and team meetings?

So pity the poor remote manager. How much of this vital knowledge is lost purely because the leader never sits with his or her troops? More importantly, what do they have to do to acquire this vital knowledge by other means?

Ultimately, the remote team manager has to be far more proactive. You cannot provide direction, create harmony, and empower your people reactively, by putting out fires if you are so far away you don’t even see the smoke. And it takes a very courageous person to ring up their manager and admit to having set the place alight.
 
Put simply, a remote manager cannot find and deal with problems that are invisible to them, and it requires a giant leap of faith to expect every problem to come and find them. If you yourself manage remotely, do you believe your people would happily pick up the phone and admit ‘Hey boss, sorry to disturb you during your crucial multiparty negotiation but I’ve gone and dropped a right clanger’?

If the answer is yes, then well done you. You have a found a way to weave trust, open communication and fairness into the fabric of your team – from a distance. That’s some achievement.

In my experience, remote managers often refer to their critical success factor as this: the ‘open-door’ policy, an often implied team protocol whereby each individual can, and should, feel comfortable in approaching their manager with their issues, concerns and clangers safe in the knowledge that said manager’s focus will be squarely on fixing it quickly and rationally. The manager will not apportion blame or turn a dark shade of puce and beat their loyal hireling around the head and neck with a unopened wad of A4 copy paper. Naturally, on asking the team whether this is, in fact, the case, the response is often a loud snort of derision, or more commonly, at least for the remote worker, the comeback that there is no point in your manager having an open-door policy when the door, and indeed the office, is over three hundred and fifty miles away.

So what one single thing can the modern remote team manager focus on to acquire real knowledge of their team’s abilities and attitude, their hopes and fears, talents and levels of personal hygiene? The easy answer is to consider how they can really create a culture wherein issues and problems come to them, as opposed to the manager having to seek them out if and when they have time. Mostly by email and telephone.

The reality is that this is often a complex transition which can only succeed if the team has is built on a solid foundation of trust, openness, kept-promises and effective communication. Perhaps eliciting feedback from your team on how solid they believe their particular foundation is, will provide a valuable starting point for your journey.