Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Chief Learning Officer Magazine leads with an Executive Briefing that quotes a report from the Center for Creative Leadership.. It looks at the challenges of managing a global workforce and comes up with the startling conclusion (!): the leader needs to communicate more. Here is their conclusion:
leaders should stay in touch with remote employees by scheduling regular phone meetings and also send e-mail updates with corporate office news
I bet you are startled! Keeping in touch with remote employees by phoning them. I must tell my friends.
It is so common now for leaders to have remote colleagues; not necessarily in different countries but certainly in different towns or states. Building a team takes more than the odd phone call. How about a networking site for all the team, so that ALL the news can be shared and team access to project notes or reports. Mass one to one email is not a good way of doing much apart from reinforcing the barriers and making sure all communications come through the leader. That is a terrible way to build remote teams.
Think about team conference calls every Monday at, say, 9.45 which everyone joins in wherever they are and what ever the local time zone. Just 20 minutes to check-in understand the issues and say hi.
There are two key things to remember: trust those people to do their work, you can’t really check up on them anyway so do not ask them to file weekly activity reports or logs of when they are online or off-line. And share everything as much as possible so the remote relationships build up and multiple exchanges develop and networks emerge.
Just forget email and one to one calls as a way of leading a disparate team. CLO Magazine you can do better than this!