Strategies for Managing a Mobile Team

I ran across a great document put together by Terrence Gargiulo for Makingstories.net. Mr. Gargiulo discusses what he feels are the top ten strategies for managing mobile workers. His full document is a very good read because he also discusses things such as risks and issues to consider when managing mobile workers.  You can access his full document here.

I’m sharing this here because so many times as project managers we are overseeing the work of a very geographically dispersed team. In the past three years I’ve only managed one project with a team that I could see on a daily basis. Dozens of others involved remote workers all around the country.

Here are Mr. Gargiulo’s Top 10 Strategies for Managers of Mobile Workers as described in his document.

Top 10 Strategies for Managers of Mobile Workers

1.    Focus on building relationships

You are now in the business of managing relationships. Once a quarter audit your time. How much time are you spending engaged in activities meant to foster stronger relationships with your mobile employees? Rate each relationship on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is weak and 10 is very strong. Craft a strategy for continuing to develop your strong ones and triage the weak ones. Ask yourself why they are weak and what you can learn from them. Avoid finger pointing and hold up the mirror to reflect on your own opportunities for improvement. Extreme cases of under-performance do not warrant time or effort. These however are few and far between.

2.    Streamline communications

Consolidate and prioritize communications. Use email and IM (instant message), texting, blogging, threaded discussions, etc. for relationship-driven communications (i.e., staying in touch and being personal). Communications of an important nature should be cohesive and never delivered in fragmentary pieces that have to be cobbled together by the receiver. Mutually assess the communication preferences of yourself and your team members to develop a communication plan. Avoid assumptions and revisit your plan on a regularly basis especially when the nature of the work is about to change.

3.    Incorporate less didatic forms of communications

Determining the right amount of detail and when to provide detail is an ongoing responsibility of a manager with a mobile worker. As a general rule, less is more. This leaves bandwidth for the times when lengthy, explicit instructions and information are essential for the work at hand. Try working with more story-based forms of communications. Sharing tidbits from the field and office in the form of stories, anecdotes, case studies (use cases), jokes, innocent productive gossip, and even metaphors will relay context, encode key pieces of information, and give mobile workers a sense of inclusion.

4.    Spend more time listening

Obvious, but counterintuitive. When you are out of easy reach and you are tasked with managing the performance of others it’s easy to get sucked into the trap of needing to transmit lots of information. In most cases the opposite is what is most productive. Make listening a priority. This is the hardest and most tiring aspect of managing others. It is also the single most important thing you can do accelerate the development of strong relationships. Listening is not enough. Keep an open mind. Be present and try to enter the perspective of the speaker. This will help you ask effective questions and identify what direction to go with your own needs and agenda. You’ll be surprised at what emerges.

5.    Let mobile workers define communication and reporting practices they want to follow

Structure is critical. Adopt rules of engagement that place people at the center of their own decisions. Managers provide the boundaries and constraints but let employees define the working and communication styles, tools, and processes that will help them perform at the best. Set expectations on two fronts. First, treat these employees’ defined practices as privileges that can and will be modified if key performance metrics are not hit. Second, let employees know there will be times when a projects or work require less flexible, employee-driven communication and reporting practices.

6.    Manage deliverables, not activities

Lots of project-oriented work is well suited to mobile workers. Even roles that are more task driven can be effectively managed if they are broken into deliverables. For mobile workers this may mean collapsing some of the activities of a business process or workflow that had manual checkpoints and controls associated with them into deliverables. Automation where possible can be used or batching activities into larger groups can transform task oriented jobs into deliverables. Realize that there can be many facets of people’s jobs that need to be adjusted to accommodate a mobile work style.

7.    Engage in more frequent and informal performance management activities

When you manage mobile workers, relationships are at the heart of your job. Performance management does not need to be a loathsome, “administrivia” obligation. Designing some unstructured, informal ongoing dialogs with mobile employees about their performance goals and personal development plans is a great way to strengthen communications, and shows an active interest in employees and relationships. This might look and feel very different from one employee to the next. This is another tangible way managers can adapt their style to match the needs and preferences of employees. It works best when the performance management conversation flows in both directions.

8.    Give complete trust until given a concrete behavioral reason to do otherwise

According to a recent survey conduct by HR.com and ic4p, listening and trust are the two most important factors to virtual and remote teams. Without trust, relationships are bankrupt. Abuses of trust can always be found but these occur in spite of whatever systems we put in place. Mobile workers thrive when managers give them complete trust. In some respects managers of mobile workers have no other choice. Use trust to create strong relationships. When some concrete behavior and not just someone else’s word of mouth shows that trust has been violated, then take it away, but not until then.

9.    Use adaptive management styles tailored to individual workers

Every employee is different. Mobile workers make it easier for managers to take a more personalized approach in how they work and interact with members of their team. It takes more work and effort on a manager’s part but the results can be phenomenal. Understanding what enables each employee to perform at his or her best is the most important responsibility of a manager.

10. Leverage technology

Technology drives and supports managing mobile workers. Using technology well is not as simple as it appears. Standard models of communication and transaction should not always be mapped in a simple one-to-one way. Communication and collaboration technologies offer new and exciting models. These need to be purposely exploited in order for organizations to realize the full extent of benefits these wonderful new capabilities and features offer.

Beyond email, IM and phone, Web conferencing plays a key role in virtual team enablement. Take an inventory of “stuff” you need to collaborate on with your virtual team. If the list includes Word docs, spreadsheets, software applications, or anything else on your desktop, Web conferencing will be critical for collaborating in real time. You’re projects will lag if you can’t be on the same page with mobile workers.

Leading and Following in a Hierarchical Organization

I’m a fan of the show Criminal Minds. Very intense, very intriguing, slightly disturbing. Recently, due to a situation with a very personal case, Thomas Gibson’s character Hotchner, had to relinquish leadership of the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) to another character, Morgan. In preparation for this, Hotch started to give Morgan some paperwork-type tasks that Morgan felt was menial. Morgan thought he was being punished when, in fact – as he would later find out – he was just being prepped for his new role. Those paperwork items were things Hotch always had to do, but no one else knew about because he ‘just did them.’

Just Say NO to Busy Work

Leadership of any kind comes with costs. What all organizations must do is understand how much of that extra ‘paperwork’ is really necessary for those that they are asking to lead. Busy work should never – repeat NEVER – be required of a project manager, or any leader for that matter. In fact, many organizations ask that their successful project managers operate with little to no direction and give them quite a bit of autonomy in their jobs. If there’s a PMO in place, then a once per week meeting with all the PMs as a group to go through any company news and specific project-related issues should be sufficient.

Everyone Benefits from Standardized Reporting

The idea is that your PMO processes and your project management policies already in place will mean that you have a somewhat standardized status reporting process already. And those standard reports should be sufficient information for the PMO Director to see without requiring tedious other reporting information or mechanisms. I believe that a PMO Director should be always trying to clear paths to success for his or her project managers.

Never should they be requiring project managers to create extra reports in different formats to satisfy their own reporting needs. Figure out a standard report on project status that fits all needs and ask that PMs use that as a general template as they move forward in their projects…then just have the PMs cc the status report to the PMO Director every week as they deliver them to the team and the customer.

I’ve been a part of organizations and PMOs that seemed to want to load down employees with meaningless paperwork and reports. Micro-management has no place in organizations I work for…it drives me crazy. That’s probably why – self-admittedly – I’m sometimes not the best person to have as an employee. I’m an independent thinker and hate doing things that get in the way of doing what is right for the project…meaning what is best going to serve the project, my organization and my customer. Am I stubborn…yes. But I also feel that stubbornness and independent thinking are two very critical characteristics organizations should be looking for in their project managers.

Summary

With all this rambling, what exactly am I trying to say? Basically that project managers who are part of an organization – either in a formal PMO or distributed throughout the company – are always asked to lead and often asked to follow (such as with a PMO Director). We’re responsible for a lot – sometimes it seems like the world – as project managers as we try to satisfy the customer, our team, and our company leadership.

The key for the PM is to be a good leader and a wise and efficient follower. Do what is expected, but protect your team, your project and your customer. Therefore, if you’re seeing processes that do not make sense…question them. But when you do question them, also come with a proposed solution. Think proactively. Processes within organizations seem to cycle through significant changes every 2-3 years. Be a change agent for efficient processes within your company…everyone will benefit.

Review: 42 Rules of Employee Engagement

Susan Stamm’s new book, 42 Rules of Employee Engagement has some good suggestions for creating engagement with new and existing teams.  As project managers, it’s important to make sure that people feel connected to the project and each other in order to foster good working relationships.  I particularly liked the advice on being a low-tech communicator and not relying on email.  There is also some good advice on fostering good working values – regardless of what the corporate statement on values is, some things are applicable to all workplaces, and Stamm covers off the key things that every manager should be demonstrating: sincerity, reliability, enthusiasm and honesty.  Stamm writes:

The new challenge is simple: ‘how do I get people to do what I need them to do, when I have no power over them?’  Management struggles with how to adapt to the new realities of fully utilizing and energizing the human side of their enterprise.  The key is no longer merely satisfying or attempting to keep employees pacified or without angst.  It is tapping into the core values and beliefs inherent in every individual.  Creating a passion, rather than just providing tasks, is the key.

Stamm is president of The Team Approach, which is “a team development firm dedicated to helping people play nicer at work.”  It all sounds rather fluffy, but creating engagement often does, as quantifying the results is so difficult.  However, there are some basic strategies in this book that are very easy to put into place, like supporting team members when they need it and building self-esteem.  If your team is struggling, or workplace morale is low, or you just can’t work out what you need to do to get the best out of people, then this is a reasonable place to start.

The book isn’t just written for teams that are too unengaged.  Rule 14 is ‘You’re Still the Boss.’  If your project team is run in a highly collaborative way and that is becoming out of hand as you can’t get decisions implemented due to endless discussions, you might want to start with that one!

It appears to have been written mainly as a book that could accompany one of Stamm’s company’s courses.  Although you can read it by itself it’s very short, with less than 90 pages outside of the appendices.  I personally don’t like books printed in sans-serif fonts as I think it makes them hard to read.  I also didn’t like the fact that some of the endnotes have footnotes.  This is hugely unnecessary, and the references to Wikipedia could do with being removed as well.

It is not too difficult to overlook those failings.  It’s a neat book that fits easily in your bag, and short is good when it comes to the subject of team engagement.  What project manager has loads of time to study loads of complex detail?  Read this on your commute and when you get to the office put something that you have read into practice.