A clip taken from our "3 Things" Webinar Series exploring the importance of Proactive Leadership in a matrix organisation, along with some practical tips for how to get started on this track with a focus on collaboration.

​Watch time: 20mins
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We’ve been supporting the development of geographically spread teams for years; global project teams, functional teams spread throughout a region, and teams located in one office whilst the manager is in a different city.  And now we have the enforced remote working team; the team that signed up for jobs in an office, with plenty of human interaction and opportunities for spontaneous connections, and who now find themselves working remotely.  And not through choice.

Between our experiences pre-Covid 19 and what we've been through in these past 6 months, we are seeing that there are teams who are really struggling with the shift to remote working, some who are hit and miss, and around a third who are really getting it right and thriving.  Below are the five things the thriving remote teams have in common, and do really well that we can all be learning from.

1. Get aligned on your new operating principles 
The successful remote teams we've worked with understand that how your team will be working together remotely is going to be different to face to face. So how we collaborate, communicate and resolve conflict will all need to be done differently.  The risk is that we each have our own ways of perceiving how those elements should happen, so the role of the charter is to do the one single thing that can set your team up for success the most.  Make sure the team is aligned in a very clear and explicit way on how they think they should be working together in this ‘new normal’.   All teams should go through this process – from the C-suite down.  And the good news is that we have continued to work with teams and functions across many industries who understand this, and have been proactive with resetting the ways of working.  The ones who are thriving have completed this step, and are doing a combination of the following steps.

2. Optimise how you work between teams
Work still needs to get done between teams – and for companies who have struggled, this is one of the forgotten aspects of converting a face to face business to a virtual business as the focus has tended to be more on how ‘a’ team works.  So there is a piece of work that successful virtual teams have been doing that simply mirrors the principles of the first point, and provides a means for the leaders of teams to connect, share and be clear on expectations regarding priorities, eg; what business objectives are more important or how shared resources should be deployed.  It also allows the team leaders to create some rules of engagement for how collaboration, communication and conflict resolution happens between teams.  This is underpinned by the team charter, and the common feedback we get is that it allows guesswork to be replaced by real work!

3. Train and be coached for working in a virtual team
One team we have worked with in particular identified early on that working and leading in a virtual team would require a different set of skills and mindset.  Their ability to understand and work with uncertainty and ambiguity, manage stakeholders remotely, build and maintain relationships and collaborate all require different development to that in face to face structures.  There's no point training to ride a bicycle when you will be riding a motorbike!  And this applies to everyone.  Good remote working training combines behavioural skills with a focus on connection at a values and relational level.  But we also know that on a deeper level, there are other factors that enhance or reduce our ability to be effective in a remote team; our confidence, need for recognition, cultural background and personality (eg; rigid vs flexible).  Our rate of coaching has remained steady as there are leaders who have self-identified (or the company has identified for them!) that working  and/or leading remotely doesn't fit who they are (yet!).  But teams who have leveraged the capability development provided by their organisations, or those who have taken it upon themselves to get development for their teams, are doing well.  And it is usually combined with the next point.

4. Things Change - so talk, review and make change if needed
This point comes into its own in these times of rapid change.  The really good virtual teams look for opportunities to reinforce a culture of collaboration by using this as an opportunity to come together and to work on the team, and continually update their preferred ways of working.  And when things are changing so quickly, you can’t afford not to be reviewing the way you work together.  We are working with a handful of leadership teams, who are using this step as a an opportunity to pull out of the day to day management stuff, to take a helicopter view of their teams and functions and to make smarter and more strategic decisions.  If you don't have an Agile mindset in you company, this is a nice step to implement that will help you move in that direction.  The best thing about this step?  It enables proactive conversations, that enable a more controlled response to change in a highly volatile and uncertain business environment.  We are working with one leadership team who is working in an extremely volatile environment - on top of Covid-19 factors - and it is the ritual of regular team catch ups, in person, that is allowing them to extract themselves on a fortnightly basis to focus on themselves, the business and their people, in a more objective manner.

5. Culture Matters. 
Successful remote teams are recalibrating their team culture to reflect the remote working environment. The really effective remote teams that I’ve seen acknowledge that the culture that got them here, may not get them there.  A simple example of this is the shared thinking around how open and approachable we should be.  In a face to face environment it may be ok that a new team member needs to work a little harder show how they fit in and being slightly more closed between teams may be acceptable.  But in a remote setting that unspoken way of thinking won’t fly.  One function we have worked with recently has decided to make their culture more explicit, and part of that was through the creation of a new team charter. But this function, also understood that culture is needed to drive the execution of strategy which is a critical point when we consider that plenty of strategies and plans have been revised and in some cases completely re-written.  So, it makes sense that even at the level of the virtual team, a conversation be had around how the culture may need to be shifted to help them execute a little differently on their team objectives.   

We often hear the term 'flying below the radar' in global organisations.  It’s a catch cry that tends to originate from the non-HQ countries in multi-nationals who don’t necessarily see the benefit of doing what HQ is asking of them and so they go rogue…fly under the radar…and get on with business in a way that makes sense to them.

But are they really going rogue?  And could the notion of 'flying under the radar' really be a misplaced assumption that does more damage than good when seeking to build stronger global approaches to working?

To make sense of how this could happen (either the assumption or the reality), and therefore be positioned to make some different decisions, we need to get to the heart of why we feel the need to fly under the radar.  The answer could be simpler than we realise; not that it may make it any easier to deal with in some circumstances.  In the book Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, (Hofstede, Hofstede, Minkov: 2010), there are many ideas offered that shed light on the topic; in this article we will look at two of them in brief.

One Size Does Not Fit All
Management policy, techniques or directives formulated in one country, through a particular cultural lens may not be so suitable for all countries in the network.  How often do we see it that a single way of working (or conducting business) is identified, and then combined into a nice looking booklet or powerpoint presentation, and then massed produced and pushed out to all countries in the network, sometimes accompanied with training and additional resources.  Not long after frustrations tend to surface due to lack of take up, or we suspect that the whilst the dashboard or metrics may look good, we are hearing that this isn’t really what’s happening on the ground.  In these situations two things tend to occur.  Either we push harder and force people to explain show what they are doing (think forcing a square peg into a round hole!) or we review the way the initiative was implemented, in most cases, through a change management lens.  And whilst this provides some insight, there is an additional lens that we often fail to acknowledge that could have positively impacted the implementation.  National culture.

Let’s use an example most of us can relate to; annual performance objectives and appraisals.  Management by objectives based approaches may work perfectly fine in cultures where it is culturally acceptable to sit down and explore – or even negotiate – with your manager around what your objectives will be throughout the year, and then in the annual appraisal be given a voice and a right to reply regarding your rating.  In other cultures though where the reliance on hierarchy is significant, and top down leadership is the accepted norm, there isn’t an accompanying mindset or in many cases a developed skill set to make an approach like this work. Not that there’s anything wrong with this; it just isn’t a natural (or in some cases known) way of working.  So it makes more sense to fly under the radar; offer up some lip service to HQ and tell them that the new way of doing appraisals is working, and then just get on with business as usual.  Whilst I’m using the example of appraisals here, there have been many other situations I’ve seen over the years relating to global standardization of business processes where the ability to fly under the radar becomes a refined art form, and perhaps an unspoken means of survival in the network.

Enabling Cross-Cultural Interaction
The second element is the way in which things are communicated from HQ out to the countries in the network.  Again, our cultural lens plays a role in how we communicate a message.  Is it from a top down position, or a more collaborative, or ‘on the level’ position.  Are we providing the right amount of detail or too much detail?  Just as importantly, is how the receiver would prefer to receive the message so that we enable them to respond.  Think about your culture and natural ways of communicating; how will this style be received in a different country?  Just as we think about the influence of our individual personalities on how we communicate within our teams or with colleagues, the same principle applies with intercultural communication.  The key is as much about understanding who is sending the message, as it is who will be receiving the message.   

To highlight this point, you only need to think of those times when you have felt a deep sense of discomfort with what is being asked of you.  For those in a culture where hierarchy, power and collectivist thinking are accepted pillars of society, being asked to challenge up line, provide negative or critical feedback will not come easy; not because there isn’t any independent thought on the topic, rather, the means to offer such feedback may not be as well developed as in a more egalitarian society where debate and challenging the norm is culturally accepted.  This leads to flying under the radar from a compliance and respect perspective; not wanting to offend and to save face.  It is likely that it could also be originating from a position of wanting to maintain harmony in the relationship with HQ.  

If we reverse the above example, and the communication originated from a country that holds hierarchy and societal power to be core cultural elements, there will still be a measure discomfort and an increased desire to ‘fly under the radar’ in more egalitarian and individualist countries, however more from a rebellious perspective.

What’s important to understand is that neither of these approaches are better than the other; they both have advantages and disadvantages; but understanding a little bit about the cultural ways of being will help tremendously when working out a change or communication strategy for more than one country.

In the above examples I have only considered two or three of the six dimensions researched and created by Prof Hofstede and other intercultural experts that are available to us when exploring how we can improve performance between countries and reduce the instances of ‘flying under the radar'. 

Yet immediately it is possible to start seeing how one way of thinking doesn’t translate into all ways of thinking.  We also have the generational impact to consider, as we do the fact that there are always outliers in any system or culture.  This simply reinforces the importance of understanding who will be receiving your message; building a rapport with your audience on both the relational level and around the message you want to send.  When we remember that the way we think drives our behaviour, then it makes sense that purely focusing on the behavioural and aesthetic aspects of implementing a large scale initiative will not be enough to drive the change or engagement you are looking for.  

The good news?  In my experience, taking some time out during the design phase of a new initiative to understand the countries and cultures who will be receiving the message, and therefore the way in which they would prefer to receive the message, can save you a lot of bother down the track.  In global organisations there is an inevitability that faux pas’ will happen; this is almost a given.  However a couple of hours exploring, and seeking to understand more about the cultures and people from which we want something, tends to yield greater tolerance when things go wrong, along with heightened engagement and performance.
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