WLP315: Effective Manager Mindset for Global Virtual Teams

Today’s episode is a bit different. Pilar is joined by Theresa Sigillito Hollema, who specialises in leadership for global virtual teams. They discuss how Pilar’s article Key Mindset Changes for the New Remote Manager , written in 2020 to help those suddenly working from home, can be adapted to the global context.

PROFILE PICTURES OF CO-HOSTS

Theresa Sigilito Hollema joins Pilar for another conversation! 

She’s the author of the book Virtual Teams Across Cultures, and an expert in global teams. You can find out more about her, what she does and her book on her company’s website.

Both Theresa and Pilar took part in a conference in June 2022 at the CAVO conference, all about Optimizing Virtual and Hybrid Work. During the conference, Theresa ran a panel of leaders of global teams, while Pilar ran a session the mindset for the new remote manager. With the diversity of how remote teams operate, going back to mindset is the only way of serving a wide range of team leaders. 

Pilar based the talk on her blog post, and Theresa recognised the bullet points as a framework that is also applicable to leaders of global virtual teams. And so this conversation is about applying that framework, based on the remote manager mindset, to leading global virtual teams.  

(We already had episode 267 in April 2021, with guest Mark Kilby talking about the framework.

Having listened to Pilar talk about the framework, Theresa is curious to know where the framework came from, this is something that usually takes time to form. Back in 2016, when she started looking at leading remote teams, her main “message” was that leading a remote team was not different to leading one co-located, after all, we’re dealing with people. 

But the struggles are slightly different, so the framework stems from that. It’s a synthesis of what Pilar has observed that managers struggle with. The idea is that we get our heads around these five points, other things come into place that make our job easier. 

There haven’t been many academic studies and research done about remote work as we know it now. Hopefully, more research will come out soon, but hopefully not about remote work during the pandemic!. 

12.00mins 

The five mindset changes are: 

1) Adopt a coaching mindset.

This becomes more difficult when we are apart from each other, because traditionally we’ve associated coaching with long conversations, whereas in the online space, you tend to have faster interactions eg through text, and it’s difficult to find these coaching moments. This needs a time investment by both leader and team member, but hopefully it will result in rewards for both.   

Adopting a coaching mindset means that things will take longer, and these coaching moments might interfere with the daily rhythm.  

Theresa likes this because there is this idea of “enquiry” with the intention of helping the individual to reflect. She gives the example of one of the guests on her panel, who said that the role of the team leader is to “check the mental models of the team”. When working in a global team, due to the different contexts and cultures, we bring different assumptions with us. Having coaching conversations that help us to unpack our mental models are very useful. 

When we’re dealing with such diversity, taking a coaching approach ensures that the solution to problems, for example, makes sense to the person. Theresa has found that the best advice about giving feedback in global teams comes from Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, along the lines of “assume you don’t know the context, and they’ve acted in a way that makes sense to them”.

A coaching mindset also shows you believe in the other person, which can be quite powerful if we are physically distant from each other. (Pilar refers to Phil Hayes from Management Futures.) 

And in a global team, adopting a coaching mindset can also help the leader itself to learn from their people and the different global contexts, even from sitting in your own location. 


22.35mins
 

2) Embrace delegation, avoid interference (and nurture leadership). 

If you fully embrace the online space, making workflows, work and conversations visible etc, the opportunities for interference increase a lot! Plus, even with all the information, in global teams, they might feel the distance and want to be more in control. 

Theresa would go further with this one, through the concept of shared leadership. The research shows that the leader recognises they can’t be everywhere all the time. But they have team members that can take on roles that you usually attribute to the team leader eg rotating chairmanship of meetings or that a person in the location is responsible for all stakeholder management in that location. 

To the practical mind, it makes sense to nurture others to take on leadership roles, to the holistic mind, it makes sense to move more towards self-organisation. 


29.00 mins

3) Get intentional 

In the remote space, developing relationships needs a more deliberate approach and having rituals to fulfil the team’s needs, and having a team agreement on how we communicate. In the global virtual team context, being very intentional about how you care from a distance. In Theresa’s panel, there was a team leader who was very intentional about building psychological safety in a team situated over three locations. 

He recognised that the team was not connected, so he spent time creating a team identity; changed the content of the team meetings from reporting to topics the team wanted to talk about,  he set up one-one conversations, to understand the uniqueness of each individual. He was intentional about showing his own vulnerability, welcoming comments on his own ideas and  acting upon them, and also sharing when he was struggling, to show that he also has highs and lows, and it’s part of being human.  

This is all about deliberately expressing yourself in the online space things that would be picked up by others if we were colocated.  

Woman holding a monitor to her body.

34.10mins

4) Make friends with your technology

This is something Pilar has seen many managers resist - how much we warm to technology to connect with others is a personal preference. Maybe instead of technology, we should talk about “environments”… As all pieces of tech are different environments where we interact. 

For Theresa, the key point is not to let the technology drive how you work but make it work for you by learning how to use its feature eg notifications, so that it works for you as an individual, as well as for the team. How to engage with technology to be effective without letting it lead you is key in a global team, as it’s their main way of communicating. 

Learning to communicate asynchronously, using video and audio as well as text presents an opportunity for global teams to feel more aligned and connected.  Even if you are stuck in one environment in the organisation, you often have a choice of the technology you use. And this will affect the way of working, as well as your team culture. It could be a whole job in itself to understand this environment, but treating it as a “friend” makes it easier. Theresa reckons “we don’t need to have all the friends at the party”.

38.37mins

5) Don’t make yourself indispensable 

This is something to strive for in any kind of set up. But in the online space, we can share all the information that managers often hold in more traditional ways of working.  

In a global team, with timezone differences, this becomes even more important. Maybe effective global leaders have more need to “crack this one” (Pilar’s words) than those in same timezones. 

So, is this something to be embraced by the leader, or it’s just the reality of the team?  The practicalities make self-sufficiency a necessity. 

Seeing as Pilar wrote this post while there were still restrictions during the pandemic, Theresa wonders whether Pilar had people going down with Covid as a reason for them addressing this last point. Well, kind of, she’s always thinking of what would happen if you got run over by a bus. 

While the leaders’ role is important, the mindset of “I don’t need to be involved in everything, but there are places where I am indispensable” is what comes to Theresa’s mind with this last point. In global teams, people are quite self-sufficient and feel like they can move things forward without needing to get approval from the team leader all the time. 

Maybe managers leading their remote team, in the working from home set up could think about whether they would be able to operate across timezones… it might throw up some issues and ideas.

Finally, Theresa reminds everyone of the opportunity for people working in global virtual teams of finding out about other locations and countries, sometimes from the comfort of your own home. 

Remember that Theresa’s book is  “Virtual Teams across Cultures” and if you want to hear more around the remote manager mindset, check out episode 267.


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