🔁 ETA Friday: Answering your distributed team questions

Welcome to ETA (Edited to Add) Friday. Every Friday morning we’ll rehash a previous newsletter. Why? There’s always more to learn, and leadership practices are ever-evolving.

My take:

Managing a distributed team is not super straightforward, nor is it easy! After sending Tuesday’s newsletter reviewing how I approach managing my team spanning from California to India, I got some really great questions, including:

1. I'm on a team that is remote, but other departments are returning to office. How do I, as an IC, make sure to not get lost in the shuffle?

2. How can I build relationships with my in-person colleagues if I’m treating everyone as remote?

3. Curious if you have thoughts on running hybrid meetings. Should folks who are in the same building share a conference room?

Today’s ETA Friday answers these questions.

Let’s dive in.

Before digging in, let’s recap Tuesday’s newsletter in 3 sentences.

• Leading a distributed team requires learning the cultures of where you're hiring, treating even partially-distributed teams like everyone is working remotely, and getting your peers on board with your communication approach.

• Effective leadership of distributed teams involves building trust through regular video check-ins, setting clear goals with shared OKRs, and managing time zone differences intentionally.

• While leading a distributed team requires intentional work, it offers limitless opportunities for bringing in the right talent regardless of location.

I highly recommend reading the full post here if you haven’t done so already. As always, it’ll take you less than 5 minutes to read. Go on, I’ll wait :)

The post sparked quite a few questions in my inbox and across social media. Here are three of the questions that really stood out to me:

Return to office (RTO) rarely looks the same across an entire organization - especially a larger one. Even at Spot AI we aren’t technically fully remote, and folks who live near our Lehi or San Francisco offices are being encouraged to go into the office more frequently.

It’s easy to feel like you’re on the outside when others are meeting in-person. If the company is not going to advocate for you, you’ll need to advocate for yourself and for the others who are working remotely and may feel similarly. What does this look like in practice?

• Ask teams to make sure they’re sharing notes from discussions that may happen in-person in a public Slack (or similar) channel. Just like you miss context when folks are talking within DMs, you’ll miss context when they’re talking face-to-face without you around. Help them build the muscle to share discussions that may happen in passing.

• Speak up when you feel a decision was made in a room where you should’ve been present. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but I get that it can be uncomfortable. Don’t know what to say? Copy this: “I was catching up on the conversation you had regarding X topic where Y decision was made. I have important context that impacts this decision, and I would appreciate you including me in these discussions before a decision is made in the future. Can we get on a call to discuss this further?”

• Accept that there are going to be interesting things that happen without you present and make the most of your own space. I miss out on happy hours with my colleagues in SF, for example. When they have a scheduled happy hour, I intentionally put something on my own calendar to make sure I’m having fun even if it’s not with the team. I know it’s not the same, we can only control so much.

To treat everyone as remote doesn’t mean you can’t build individual relationships with those who are physically close to you. Treating everyone as remote means you’re bringing the entire team along as if you were operating in a remote environment. I still encourage you to foster your local relationships how you see fit: lunch, coffee, etc.

If you’re building stronger in-person relationships, make sure you’re spending time intentionally nurturing the relationships outside of the office, too! I only have one person on my team who I can get lunch with, but I make sure I keep my 1:1s with everyone else who isn’t local.

It’s perfectly fine to share a conference room when others are joining in remotely so long that the conference room is equipped for a hybrid in-person/remote meeting. This means everyone in that room can be seen and heard clearly by those who are joining remotely, and you’re sticking to an agenda that keeps those who are jumping on from a remote location engaged in the conversation.

It’s easy to slip up and get caught up in face-to-face conversations when there are folks who are sitting on a Zoom or Hangouts call just watching a conversation happen, not being able to get a word in. (I’ve been that person!) If you notice this happening, put a stop to it and bring the conversation back to the broader audience.

I hope you find me expanding on these questions to be helpful in rounding out your understanding of how to manage a distributed team!