By Janus Boye
Remote and distributed teams are getting more normal, but to make it work for everyone, you need to go back and understand the practices that foster engagement and responsibility in a team. What are the challenges? How do we overcome them, allowing more autonomy for such teams?
Looking at the employee experience through the eyes of different personas, the needs and expectations clearly vary a lot. In her talk at the Boye 19 Aarhus conference, Maren Christin Hübl of SAP described the pattern she sees as she is actively practising leading a remote and distributed team herself.
Maren is based at SAP headquarters in Germany with about 30% of the team working remotely plus 3 onsite locations. In this posting, I’ll share her perspective on the crucial elements of leading distributed work, such as conscious decision making, virtual facilitation and reliable structures.
Maren Christin Hübl from SAP presenting her story at the Boye 19 Aarhus conference
What’s the goal of your team?
In her conference session, Maren made the participants think by asking them to discuss this relevant question:
Who develops the strategy in your team(s)?
As you have the conversation about goals and direction with your team, you might need to change assumptions. It’s not unusual if the perceived goal is simply to make money.
So many teams don’t have a clear and articulated goal and while this might be manageable when you meet in person all the time, it is a sure recipe for disaster in remote and distributed teams.
Finally, on goal setting, Maren encouraged a quarterly review to track progress, continuity and to capture lessons learned.
Strategy as an evolution
The key strategic questions which Maren encourages you to keep asking are:
Where do we need to move to?
What are the blockers?
What actions do we need to take?
Your answer will most likely change over time and to make things happen, there are many different types of decisions required
Maren used the below diagram from Leading with Life to illustrate the tradeoffs when it comes to speed and quality in different types of decisions.
Leadership in a remote setting
On leadership Maren quoted Ken Blanchard, author of the One Minute Manager:
“Leadership is not something you do to people. It’s something you do with people.”
With a clear goal in place, you still need leadership to make remote and distributed teams work, but not the old-school type of leadership.
Maren touched on servant leadership and in this context specifically focused on:
Giving directions with informed decisions about goals
Serving people in achieving their goals and remove barriers
By sharing a day-to-day story from SAP, she outlined how responsibilities were not fully clear for an important part of an internal process.
Her first step to solve this problem, was to better understand the problem in one-on-one conversations. With a solid understanding, she then collected all tasks and requirements and bundled them to roles. The role concept was then presented in a virtual meeting, but then how do we make decisions on roles required as a team? Maren uses consent as a technique, where if there are no objections, a decision is made.
Finally, she asked people which roles they wanted to take. By using the pull technique, the aim was to both foster responsibility and that colleagues would take more ownership rather than if they were pushed into specific roles.
To some, it felt a bit like extra overhead with many roles, but the benefits were also clear as individual contributions became more visible, also from less experienced colleagues. Making everything explicit is a key take away to make remote and distributed work.
Lessons learned
To summarize, here’s the key lessons from Maren’s experience on leading remote and distributed teams:
Co-create new structures: don’t impose them (e.g. goals, roles)
Make work transparent
Make everything visible
Conscious decisions: allowing consent, feedback, veto
A majority vote is the worst quality. It means that things are only black or white. No concerns can be raised
With thanks
To Maren for making the trip to Aarhus and openly sharing her story and to the Future Workplace conference track leader Andrew Pope for sharing his handwritten notes as a supplement to the slides
Learn more
Maren recommended the following books in the sessions
The servant leader
Management 3.0
Work together anywhere
Managing for happiness
On the topic, you might also enjoy this interview with John Eckman from 10up on How To Make Remote Working Successful