Distributed Team Management: 10 Success Secrets You Can Use Right Now
So you've made the switch to work-from-anywhere. And you are getting the sense that it requires a different set of practices to lead manage everyone effectively - because uncertainty isn't going away. And if you want to keep up, neither is work from home.
Whether you like to call them "virtual teams" or "remote teams" or distributed teams - I've been working this way since the 1990's. I've done it with clients on the Fortune 500, I've done with small business and high growth startups. And our company has been distributed from day 1 (six years ago).
Here's the thing - you can realize 2x performance gains almost immediately. Even with kids running around at home, even with things shifting. It really takes a few simple principles.
I've heard from a lot of CEOs and their teams they'd like more detail on those principles - because not a lot of outlets are providing simple steps for management activities. So in this video, I'll give you 10 principles that work in any size company. They are especially useful if you are working to get to your next revenue milestone.
Full transcript below
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In this video, I'll give you 10 secrets for success with distributed and hybrid teams. By the end of this video, you'll have specific actionable principles you can use to keep everyone aligned, accountable, and highly focused. And you can do all those things without micromanaging so that your teams perform like the very best teams in the world. And if you stick around to the end, I've got a special bonus for you.
I'm Scott, CEO of ResultMaps, and I've worked with some of those teams. I've been helping CEOs and leaders in the Fortune 500 and the Inc 5000, as well as startups, hit their numbers faster and more profitably with distributed and hybrid teams for more than a decade now. We make software that helps those same leaders and CEOs get visibility and acceleration at every level of their organization for distributed and hybrid workplaces. On this channel, we help leaders just like you accelerate your teams so you can hit your numbers faster, more profitably, and be healthy in the process. So, if you're new to this channel, be sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon so you're notified every time we put out a new episode. And if you're already part of our esultMaps community, if you're using ResultMaps software to accelerate your path, welcome. It's great to see you here.
There are a few principles I want to lay out for us to get started so everything else makes sense.
Tip 1: Simplicity
The first one is to simplify. Complications are bad for any team, but it's especially bad when you've got people in a hybrid or a distributed environment. You don't want to build elaborate processes and a lot of complexity into your work. And again, that applies for any team. One of the ways we'll do that is we're going to think about things in a way that's human-friendly. You don't want to build complicated documents and crazy amounts of detail that are hard for people to take in, to understand what you want from them. At the same time, you're going to need a certain level of detail, so keeping things simple is going to be really critical for success. So, in some of the later principles, I'll give you some keys that allow you to keep things simple without having so much simplicity that you oversimplify. We'll help you get to the right level of sophistication for your team.
Show, don’t tell
The next of our first principles is the idea of "show, don't tell." We're going to need to have a lot of written communication, but as you know, a picture is worth a thousand words. The more you can provide visuals, the more you can show people what you mean, the better off you'll be. Sometimes that could be in the form of a video, sometimes it's in the form of just a very simple diagram. We even sketch things from my teams. I give them pictures of sketches all the time, and I'm not a great cartoonist or great artist, so you don't have to be the world's greatest artist, whether it's sketching or creating cool graphics. You can use a tool like Google Slides or Canva or any other visual tool to map things out for people. Lucidchart's another great one. There are a lot of great tools out there to help you communicate visually, depending on what you need to communicate. Alongside that, you can use a tool like Loom or Zoom or whatever your favorite video platform is to make recordings and show people what you're trying to get them to understand as you're providing more explanation. So, "show, don't tell" is this principle.
Keep it healthy
The next of our first principles is to keep it healthy. Now, there's a lot of research on this. I won't go into it. If you're interested, drop a note in the comments, and we'll provide those links. But the main idea, the key takeaway, is human performance is at its peak when it's just on the optimistic side of urgency. When you get negative, when you get so urgent that you're losing that sense of optimism, that sense of focus, performance really tanks. So, we want to keep things healthy, and that's also going to let you retain people longer, develop better relationships, have people around long enough that you can develop their skills and they can grow within your team. And it's going to help you attract others to join your team. You know, right now, this is really one of the most challenging times to attract people because we all have so many options living in a distributed and hybrid world. So, it pays to keep your team healthy, and if you're interested, again, drop a note in the comments, and someone from my team will get you some of the resources we have to help with that.
Stay focused on results
On to the next foundational principle. The next one of our first principles is to stay focused on results. Now, if you're a subscriber of this channel, if you're a fan of this channel, you know you hear that from me almost every video, but keeping the focus on results is going to keep you from getting pulled into the minutia of what we call the "task hamster wheel," where you're just spinning and spinning and spinning, working on things that don't amount to a lot of meaningful work. Staying focused on results is going to allow you to step back when you need to step back, think about the best way to move forward, and it's going to allow you to keep everyone focused on the right things as you're moving forward, even when things are changing.
Tip 2: Visibility and transparency
That brings us to the principle of visibility and transparency. This is going to support all of those first principles I just mentioned. So, to create visibility and transparency so you can see what's happening at any given time without bothering your people or starting to micromanage them, you need to get your action items and accountabilities tracked in a system of action. You're going to track them week to week. If you can, you're going to look at them together. You're going to look at the stats that measure success and the health of your team and show everyone how these things are fitting together. Even if they don't want to see it, you're going to start to just go on constant repetition: "This is what we're trying to build. This is how we're trying to get there." We're going to make things visible, and we're going to make our progress transparent.
Take ownership
And as you do that, in order to stay healthy, that first principle we just mentioned, you're going to have to take ownership first. So, when you're seeing someone maybe not deliver to your expectations or they're having trouble delivering in general, take it upon yourself to go look at what you've asked them to do. Have you given them clear enough requirements? Have you given them those requirements in a way that's easy enough to understand? Did you apply our first principles and make it easy for humans to consume? Did you make it simple enough for them to take in and visual so they can take it in easily? Start with yourself, and that's going to encourage your team to do their part. We'll talk in a minute about how visibility and transparency can transfer into learning for your entire team and for you.
So, make sure you stick around. We've got a couple of other principles to go through first. The key takeaway here is to keep things visible in some digital form because there are a wealth of benefits that we're going to show you how to tap into in the principles that follow.
Tip 3: Clear priorities
The next principle that's critical to the success of your hybrid and distributed teams is to keep your priorities crystal clear. To do that, it's very important to think of your priorities as a sequence, not a broad level of categorization. Now, Dr. Stephen Covey is one of my all-time favorite authors, my all-time favorite mentors. In his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, he actually laid out a way to categorize your priorities, and those categories have become incredibly popular. In fact, all kinds of crazy twisted stuff have been made out of them, but what's really important to understand is your team needs to know the sequence, not what category of priority you're giving them, but what's the exact sequence that you need them to do things.
The more you're willing to provide that level of clarity to them, the better the results you'll get will be. And if you're following the other principles we've just mentioned, if you've got a system of action, if you're tracking those things centrally and keeping them simple, it's going to be very difficult for people to misunderstand the priority you're giving to each thing they're working on.
Many times, leaders will do what I did early on, and we'll get worried that we're not going to be able to adapt fast or make changes. You can completely change the sequence because at any given time, people are only going to be working on one or two things. So, anything that's below one or two, you can reorder every day if you need to. You're not going to lose flexibility by drawing some lines in the sand about the exact priority you need.
Now, making sure your priorities are clear at most takes a few minutes a day. You could bundle all that up into one day per week where you're looking at it, or if things are really changing fast, you can check in every couple of days, every day, and just eyeball the priorities in your system of action because you've got that system of action. You've made things visible, so it'll be easy to see them. It won't take a ton of time, but what's important, we'll get into in a principle in just a minute, which is: don't keep shifting priorities when people are already working on those things. If you're continually doing that, it's going to be hard for your team to feel that they're making progress, and it's going to be hard on you because you're going to see a cascade of difficulties, conflicting priorities, and getting a constant shift in a barrage of information without a real sense of sequence and priority. It doesn't just burn people out. The research shows this is one of the number one reasons that strategy execution fails, and it fails 90% of the time. And by the way, just saying that you don't pay attention to strategy doesn't protect you from this. Strategy just means the sequence of things you're trying to do to deliver value. So, the key idea here is: avoid those problems, avoid that friction by keeping priority clear and thinking of priorities as a specific sequence. By sequence, I mean this one comes first, then this, then this, then this other thing, very specific sequence.
Tip 4: Build a shared sense of meaning
Next, we need to build a shared sense of meaning and purpose. Now, you don't necessarily have to build a massive vision document, but the more that you can give people a sense that you're on a journey together and that you're working to do things together, the more benefits accrue. The more people will lean into the work they're doing, and they'll also be able to make better decisions without you having to manage every single decision. We often refer to this as context, and context just means a way to make sense of the work that we're doing together, and it's been proven both in research and certainly in my own experience to drive higher performance over and over and over again. This has been proven.
Mission, vision, and purpose
There are only a few components you need. They may take a little bit of work from you, but those components are: a clear sense of mission, a clear sense of your vision and purpose - that's the future you see and why it matters to you; clear targets that map this idea to a strategy and then that strategy to specific actions; and a set of behaviors that you're going to encourage or discourage so that people can make decisions when you're not able to give them management on every single thing they need to do. Now, if you need help defining these things, you should check out some of our resources:
📚 Ultimate guide to creating a company vision
📚 Ultimate guide to creating company core values
📚 How to create a company mission
Tip 5: Build healthy work rhythms
On to the next principle. Now you'll need to build healthy work rhythms for yourself and for your team. Always on is a recipe for rapid burnout. Always on is the dragon that just blows continual fire that burns everybody out. You don't want to be at your kid's sports practice checking Slack all the time. You don't want to be at the dinner table answering an email. You need to create these rhythms so that your work has a certain rhythm that accelerates, and so that your life has a rhythm that allows you to accelerate everything you do and up-level everything.
And those basic rhythms we'll lean into are daily, weekly, and monthly. So these are going to be fairly tactical. That monthly rhythm I'm about to talk about will connect you to your larger strategy, and we'll provide more information on that in a little bit. But I want to hyper focus on this weekly idea and the daily rhythm.
Weekly rhythm
So, the weekly, something I covered in a previous video, I'm not going to go over it again, but it's a really powerful practice you can use to look at how your team is doing in very objective terms: look at your numbers, look at your progress against plan, look at any issues that have arisen, and do that sequencing of your priorities. And you can do that on your own. Ideally, you do that together with the team. Both ways will work. The more you can involve your team in this practice, the more they'll accelerate, the more they'll have autonomy. So, highly encourage you to bring your team into that weekly practice.
⚙️ See how ResultMaps supports the team weekly practice
Daily practice
The other practice that I mentioned, and I mentioned it first, this daily practice, is everyone providing some very basic information each day: what I accomplished, even if it's just progress or something I learned didn't work; what's the one thing I'm going to work on next, my number one priority for the next day. This is a chance for everybody to sync up and confirm that sequence that will keep this visible. We'll adhere to our prior principle of keeping things visible and using priorities in a very specific way. And then the last thing they'll check in with is: is anything stuck? Is there any friction point? Providing those, especially if you do it in your system of action where you do it digitally, it doesn't just provide information back to you as the manager or leader, it provides information to the whole team that you're on a shared journey.
So, leaning into this rhythm is far more powerful than most people give it credit for. There's all kinds of great research that go into the details on all the great things this does - improving creativity, resilience, engagement in general. I won't go into all that here, but remember to lean into these monthly, weekly, and daily rhythms. We've already talked about having a system of action and maintaining visibility and creating this sense of a shared journey related to these things.
⚙️ See how ResultMaps supports your personal daily practice and how it helps keep teams aligned
Tip 6: Embrace Digital Documents
The idea of embracing digital documents, and I have a very specific reason that I'm giving you this as its own principle. See, in my past life, I was actually a workflow and collaboration consultant for some of the very best companies in the world.
The crazy thing I've seen is that as humans, we get attracted to all different forms of messaging. We start texting, emailing, using Slack in a lot of ways that aren't really what those tools are designed for. When you create a digital document, you're able to create this workspace that can grow and live in a way that's easy to see, easy to keep healthy, easy to keep record of.
You're going to use digital documents for things like assignments that are a little more complex than just a simple obvious thing. You're going to use them to solicit comments so that the entire team can collaborate if you're coming up with a solution to a given problem. You're going to be able to do that without getting lost in searching through your message threads or so many different reply alls in your email or, heaven forbid, searching through the messages in your phone, which is about the least pleasurable search experience on the planet.
So, the great thing about these digital documents is they allow you to separate conversation that might be relationship building or just quick points of communication with structured communication that's really critical to team success. I mean, if you think about a basketball team, when something happens on the court and they need a quick decision or they need to understand the play to run, the guys aren't calling timeout and just saying, "Hey Joe, how you feeling? Did you go to the park with your kids yesterday? No, I went to dinner instead." And they're not socializing, which is what we tend to use a lot of our messaging tools for.
So, this document gives us a way to structure things in a way that's easy to see, it's recorded, and again fits with all these other principles we've already mentioned. So, digital documents are really powerful, whether you've got Microsoft version or Google version, or you're using something like Notion or Coda. There's so many great tools out there.
The key idea here is to allow these documents to grow and develop, leverage the comment functionality. Don't use them as your system of action that creates a whole other challenge, but do use them to get clarity on where you're going, how you're planning to get there, and so that you can learn where there may be gaps in understanding, gaps in how one or multiple parties are communicating.
Just a wealth of knowledge gets unlocked when you use digital documents in this way. If this is making sense so far, if these principles are resonating with you, give us a yes in the comments, give us a like below, and if they sound like complete poppycock, give us a dislike, tell us why they don't resonate and what you think should be done instead.
This channel is here for you to help you, your feedback, and your likes or dislikes mean the world to myself and my team. So let us know what you think. On to the next principle.
Tip 7: Respect the clock
All right, so the simplest principle that I've got for you, and maybe the hardest one sometimes for us to embrace, is to Respect the Clock. Respect the clock. I find I need a reminder for this because with something like Slack, which is a great tool, it was invented so people could leave and then come back and pick up a conversation thread. But it's so tempting to just drop some things in the comments when people should be off.
So on our teams, for example, we require people to turn off their notifications once they're logging off for work. Have your life, respect people's time. You're also going to respect the clock in your meetings. And again, in the video on work sessions and the other video on weekly work sessions, we talk about the importance of managing time inside of what we normally think of as meetings, that I like to call work sessions.
The more you can keep regular hours, the more your team can keep regular hours, the better everything will be because you'll be able to predict when and how to interact with people versus disrupting people's lives in a way that's unsustainable. So, respect the clock, keep things within certain hours, and really use that calendar in your time to keep you healthy, your team healthy. That accelerates you, it helps everyone hit your numbers faster.
Tip 8: Iterate to Elevate
What I mean by that is rather than trying to get people to read your mind, rather than trying to get people to read very, very long, hard-to-digest documents, we want to use iteration as a learning cycle, as a learning tool. What I mean by that is you're going to give someone an assignment or a series of assignments. You want to get the results back as quickly as possible so that you can say, "Okay, yes, and I also need that assignment to include these things. I also need the quality raised this way."
And you want to think about spinning through these loops because every cycle through the loop, you're improving your output, you're building better rapport, you're teaching your team what it is you expect, and as a team, you're getting better at taking action, getting a result, getting the feedback, moving on to the next thing.
So, the more you can iterate, the faster you'll be able to go. It's also going to give you the right level of detail in your processes because you're going to start simple. And I mentioned back when I gave you that first principle, I was going to give you some ways to make sure you didn't oversimplify. And this is how you do that.
If something's too simple, you'll be able to see it because you're iterating through rather than take the unhealthy approach and say, "This is totally wrong, we can't do it this way." Think of it as an iteration. Every cycle around, you're learning, you're improving. So, this next iteration, tell your team, "I need it done this way," or you learn, "This is how I'm going to ask for this to be done. This is how I'll communicate that sense of urgency. This is how we'll improve this next cycle."
And you're doing that on a daily basis. You're doing that through that weekly rhythm I mentioned, on a weekly basis, and in that monthly rhythm I mentioned, you're doing it on a monthly basis as well. So, you're always iterating to elevate your performance. If you don't know the word iterate, we use it a ton in the software world. It just means cycle. You're going through a cycle, moving through, but iterate and elevate rhyme, so I didn't want to use the word cycle, so I used the word iterate.
Tip 9: Celebrate to Accelerate
You're going to try to set up wins for your team. Your job as a leader is to set up high fives, put people in position where they're doing work that they're able to do. They're getting quick wins. You're telling them, "That's it, let's go, high five, on to the next play."
Think about yourselves as a great sports team, and there's actual research that shows that great professional basketball teams go farther in the playoffs when they high five more. They actually have correlated performance. The key idea here is just like we talked about when I referenced the core values video, culture is really about a set of behaviors. And our values just describe a set of behaviors you want.
Getting quick wins and iterating that deserves some encouragement, some celebration. I don't mean you should stop everything and have a big office party, just letting somebody know, "Hey, great job, there, really appreciate that, and like the way you did x, y, or z," giving people that feedback is really valuable. It creates positive momentum, positive brain chemistry for everybody involved. Celebrate to accelerate.
Tip 10: Build Trust
As you're going through these cycles of iterations, as people are delivering work and you're taking a look and you're reflecting, give people space to fail, and take ownership on your end of everything you can before you make it about the other person because if you don't do that, you're going to erode trust, you're going to make things unhealthy, and there's a cascade or a spiral you'll go into that can be very difficult to get out of.
On the one hand, and from a profitability standpoint, you'll destroy your profitability on the other hand because everything will take longer, people won't be engaging as much, they won't be giving you solutions that are quite as good or as creative. Building trust is really important. So, some of the things you can do to make sure you're building trust, it's taking your team extra cycles to iterate to the right solution, be patient whenever you can. Impatience is tempting, but you'll be better off if you go for trust.
As I mentioned already, allow people to fail and learn and find the next solution. That's a really powerful motion as long as you define the places that are safe to fail. Obviously, there are some places that aren't, but create those safe failure zones and allow people to try things and experiment and fail within them.
Extreme ownership
Okay, next, get comfortable with that idea of extreme ownership. That's what I was referring to when I said presume it might be you first. Make sure that you're doing everything you can to learn and be the best leader or manager that you can be. The more you exemplify that, the more comfortable your team will be doing that themselves, and they'll model that same behavior.
And then, as I mentioned in the work rhythms, if you do have an issue with someone, if they've angered you, this can be really difficult especially if you're in a high-pressure situation, high-pressure project, or maybe it's a tough day, maybe the kids are home from school, whatever the case may be, really try not to jump down someone's throat because that right away erodes trust. Try to take a step back and think of things as a system problem. If this were a system problem, how would I solve it? How can I frame it to my team in our next weekly as a system problem that we can all solve? That last thing I mentioned, that is a secret unlock code to great teams right there. So, building trust is really critical.
Bonus tip: Embrace constraints
Time is usually the biggest constraint we have when we think about giving assignments or making asks of people. And actually, time bounding what we're asking them to do, "Joe, I need you to research this. Please take 30 minutes and do that," or "Please take a day and do that," whatever the time is, you convey a sense of expectation on your end so that if they come back and say, "Oh, I looked for a couple of minutes, but I didn't find anything," versus asking them to say, "Take 30 minutes and list everything they can find online and then give you a short summary," whatever the case may be.
You can use constraints to provide a lot more specificity in what you ask, and that will in turn allow you to sequence things and give them good prioritization without completely interrupting a workflow without creating missed expectations or understanding gaps. And again, you'll be keeping these things visible.So, a lot of times expectations aren't truly visible. We think that a one-liner conveys all the meaning in the world because we think that someone else has all the context they need, and frequently, they don't have the context. Frequently, we haven't fully conveyed things.
When we go ahead and add in some constraints like time or we add in constraints like I need you to make it look like this or I need it done like this last assignment you did, whatever the case may be, anything you can do to constrain the output, the last case I gave you, "I need it to look like this thing or time required on the output," which is a form of investment you're making into it, the more you can constrain those things, the more you'll be keeping things visible, easier it will be to get the win and celebrate to accelerate and all the other principles will be easier to meet. So, embrace constraints.
Bonus tip: Bias toward action
I'm going to share with you one of our core values. Steal it, use it for your team, and it's very simply a bias toward action. You want to high-five people when they take action, especially on a distributed team but again, any team. Having people make decisions and take actions and get the data is so valuable. It's going to keep people from getting stuck too often. It's going to give people the confidence they need when they're faced with decisions because every decision they make, they're going to get better.
And as long as you've laid out where they shouldn't make decisions, maybe you create your standard operating procedures and iterate to some guidelines for where you can't make a decision, you want to create an environment though inside of that where people are confident taking action and they trust that even if they make the wrong decision, you'll discuss it, you'll learn from it together, and you'll move forward. That will create an incredibly healthy team.
Now the guys at Echelon Front talk about this idea of default aggressive when they express it, and I love that one. One of our ResultMaps clients, my friend Jim Fitzgerald, fantastic CEO over at Taredel, he likes to say, "Make a decision, take action, get a data point." That's another way you can express this idea.
However you express it, this is such a critical idea, and so many of the great leaders that I've been around, so many of the great leaders I admire have something very similar to this. So use that on your team, and when people do it, even if they don't get the outcome both of you wanted, give them a high five because they took action. That's going to allow you to unlock these other principles. You'll build trust, you'll embrace this idea of moving in cycles of iterating to elevate, you'll embrace that idea of celebrate to accelerate. It unlocks so many of these other principles.