The Importance of Setting Context When Managing Remote Teams
Henrik Johansson, Global Head of Growth at Crypto.com
How do you manage a remote team?
This is one of the key challenges companies face when expanding and entering new markets. Local teams are often far away from HQ, both geographically and culturally, and setting those local teams up for success requires the right kind of leadership.
Who would be better equipped to answer this question than Henrik Johansson, Global Head of Growth at Crypto.com?
Henrik has tremendous experience managing remote teams globally from his time as the Head of Global User Growth at Spotify as well as his current position where he manages a global team while being based in Japan.
In his opinion it comes down to one thing. As a leader you have to set the right context for your team and empower them to be successful without you.
Here is what he means.
This article is based on a video interview we did with Henrik. Watch the full interview here.
Setting Context
When managing a team that is remote from HQ, your biggest responsibility is to set the right context. You are basically a stage manager. You have all these props, costumes, lights, audio, etc. to create a wonderful stage where your actors can perform their best.
Managing a remote team is pretty much the same.
Your job is to set the right context and show your team members the bigger picture of what they are working on. You have to spend a lot of time talking about the long-term goals and constantly remind them of the following.
Why are we doing this?
What is important to us now?
If we think 3 to 5 years out, what will be important to us?
Your team needs these goal posts in the future so they know which direction to go. How they will get there will look differently for every team, where they are located and the environment they operate in. But the bigger goals must be aligned.
Your job as a leader is to explain the general direction of the company. You shouldn’t be spending too much time on working out the details.
If your team knows where they are heading and why it’s important, they can make a lot of decisions on their own without checking in with HQ all the time.
As their manager, the last thing you want to do is to micro-manage or be involved in every single decision. This will only slow down the team and lead to a downward spiral. They will get less secure and will check in with you for every decision, making their work less effective and overwhelming you. Ultimately you will become the bottleneck because the team is waiting for your decision. Over time this will lead to a weaker organization because delegation stops functioning.
Another thing to keep in mind is to repeat your message over and over again to the team. It’s not like they don’t understand but they have a million other things on their mind. Constantly reminding them of the bigger picture will help everybody stay aligned and not lose sight of the goal.
“One guiding principle is that you want to be constantly surprised with great results by the team.”
This is especially critical when managing a remote team.
When you are sitting together with the team in an office, you will be more involved in the decision making. It’s not micro-managing but a matter of overhearing conversations, sitting in the same meetings, working closely together and spotting something on the screen etc. This just happens naturally.
One guiding principle is that you want to be constantly surprised with great results by the team. That means your team is not relying on you to make the decisions, they have the right context, they are working on the right things and prioritizing correctly. When it happens it’s a delightful surprise for everyone.
You and everyone in HQ must understand that members in a remote location don’t have any of that natural context that you have in a bigger office location. If you don’t give your local team the right level of context, they will only see one small piece of the puzzle. They will be a lot less effective.
Don’t replicate the old ways
When we talk about managing remote teams we have to understand it’s not just about offices located away from HQ anymore but also about the new world of hybrid work shaped by the pandemic.
Remote work is not the exception anymore but the norm and everyone has to adapt to this new way of working.
But a lot of people don’t.
The biggest mistake is to try to replicate the old ways of working in the new age of remote work. A lot of managers still schedule and run meetings the same way, manage calendars the same way and share priorities the same way. They don’t recognize the opportunities that come with remote work but only see the challenges.
“If you want to attract, retain and empower young talent, you have to step away from these ingrained ways of working.”
There is a completely different level of asynchronicity between teams and different ways of sharing information. The teams that are successful in this transition are not the teams that try to replicate what worked well in an office environment but the teams that come up with new approaches.
They have to ask themselves:
If we start from zero now, how do we disseminate information?
How do we prioritize together with the tools and technology available to us?
The good thing is the past few years of the pandemic have created a whole industry for tools for remote work.
It requires you to think a bit differently and it might be scary in the beginning, especially for organizations that have a set way of working. But once you embrace it, it can be incredibly empowering.
This is especially important if you work in the tech industry or the startup environment. These companies attract a lot of young people and they have different expectations than older generations in the work force. They are digital natives and not used to “our” ways of working. So, if you want to attract, retain and empower that kind of talent, you have to step away from these ingrained ways of working.
Conclusion
In order to successfully manage a remote team you have to set the right context. Your job is to make sure everyone understands the company vision, long term goals and what is expected of them. Next, you empower them to make their own decisions. As a manager you provide your team with all the necessary tools and give them the autonomy to work on their own. Only then will they be successful.
