Leading Globally Distributed Teams

John J. Schaub 

July 11, 2022 

Having led teams in different timezones and different countries for many years I was probably overconfident in my ability to handle multiple teams in multiple geographies simultaneously when I joined Lynx. I very quickly learned that living in Canada and managing a team in the UK or a team in India is a vastly different thing then managing multiple teams in multiple geographies simultaneously. The following are a few quick tips and norms that I've picked up that will probably help you if you are taking on responsibility for a globally distributed workforce.

Get on a Plane - This applies wither you are managing a single team or many, you simply must meet the people you will be working with as soon as possible. As a leader you need to understand who they are as people and the environment they work in. My recommendation would be that at a minimum you spend time on each site you are responsible for at least once a year. Obviously more time on site would be better but travel is time consuming and expensive so once a year is a reasonable middle ground. Some companies prefer to bring all employees to a head office and that can certainly work but in my career I've seen real benefit in visiting teams on their home turf and will always try to do so as frequently as possible.

Stay in Touch - Short one on one virtual meetings go a long way to help maintain relationships and ensure lines of communication remain open. When you are managing teams with dozens of people it is not at all practical to connect with everyone one on one but at a bare minimum you need to be meeting with every individual that reports directly to you each month and more often would be better. 

Scrap Status Meetings - As technology leaders our default behavior when leading a large team is to get everyone in a meeting as a simple way to keep the team on the same page and ensure decisions are made and communicated. With a local team this works fine as long as the meetings are managed correctly. With a few hour timezone difference status meetings are still plausibly workable but once you are dealing with multi-hour timezone differences meetings become positively counter productive. The issue is that no matter what time you schedule the meeting someone on the call will be operating well outside their typical waking hours and inevitable their work will suffer. You might think that rotating the meeting time will help to distribute the load across all team members and you would be right but good luck getting attendance at a recurring meeting that is constantly being rescheduled. 

The solution is to scrap the status meetings entirely and make use of distributed project tools like Trello and good old fashioned status emails. Every week each project manager is responsible for collecting status on all work items in progress and any decisions that have been made and sending the details to every team member and interested manager. The distribution on this email should be kept as small as possible and there needs to be an absolute expectation that each team member reads it and asks questions where needed. 

To be clear meetings will absolutely continue to happen and may even happen outside typical work hours but waking up at 5am should be the exception not the norm.

Calendars Must be Visible - Working with distributed teams almost always means working with groups that are outside your email domain who might not be able to see your availability. This situation creates a massive productivity drag when different staff need to be brought together but must first find a time that works for everyone which means a potentially multiday back and forth trying to find an open 15 minutes for a call. This situation is an absolute nonstarter and must not be allowed to exist. In a properly functioning distributed team every team member is responsible for making their calendar available via a tool like Calendly, posting the link in their email signature and keeping the calendar up to date. When someone needs input from a given individual they simply book the time because they know it is available. 

Leaders need to Manage their Availability - As the leader who needs to be available to staff around the globe you cannot simply leave your calendar open all day every day or you will very quickly find yourself booked in a 5am with the team in London and an 11pm with the team in Manilla. The secret as a leader is to be a bit flexible in your working hours but make sure you block off time so you don't end up with 16 hours days. Each leader will need to choose a schedule that works for their life, the teams they are working with and the timezones in question but what I found works is to leave Sun, Mon and Tues evenings open and Thur, Fri mornings open. This allowed me to meet with team members in every timezone but prevents me from being scheduled into marathon days and also provides predictability for everyone.

Leaders need to Manage their Accessibility - Emergencies happen and being responsible for globally distributed teams means at some point you are going to get woken up at 3am. The key is to make sure that you are not woken up unless it is absolutely essential. First setup your phone so only emails marked urgent will alert you outside business hours. Second setup your phone so that it only rings when the caller has called twice inside 10 minutes and make sure those team members that might need to contact you are aware of this, it gives them a way to wake you up as needed but avoids you being woken up by every random 3am call.

Beyond the basics tools like Whatsapp and Slack are very useful for keeping teams connected but be aware they will become much less useful when teams are in wildly divergent timezones. If you are like me your default behavior will be to join every potentially relevant chat group but there is nothing that will make you want to delete a chat solution faster then waking up to 150+ unread messages every morning. I have found that setting the norm that I will be on all the chat solutions in use but that staff need to tag me on anything they want my attention on works well.

Enforce Standard Toolsets - Everyone has preferred solutions that they feel make them more productive. The problem arises when half the team wants to use one solution and the other half wants to use another. In my experience people are happier when they can choose their own tools but strict norms need to be put in place that each project chooses one and only one solution. So if a team has decided on Trello and Slack for a given project that is the tool set for that project. This model makes it a little difficult for people who are assigned to multiple projects but in general those people should be rare anyway and will be senior staff who are comfortable with a variety of approaches.

I hope these tips are helpful if you're just taking on managing a global team and want to chat feel free to reach out.