Question
How do you manage distributed teams? What methodologies do you use? What tools?
Answer
This is a huge topic, and hundreds of people weigh in every day with thoughts ranging from book-length to tweet-sized.
I have read far too much of it. For a long time I took the topic seriously and looked for substantial ideas, models and theories. I found none. And I couldn't make up any myself either. So I concluded: 99.99% of things written/said about this topic are complete dreck. Here's why.
Managing distributed teams is a subdiscipline of managing teams of any sort to begin with.
Most people who ask or try to answer this question skip the more basic step of becoming good at management first. Most of them are terrible at it.
So face-to-face or distributed, they fail. But if the situation happens to be distributed, there is a convenient situational factor to blame.
People management involves a dozen difficult psychology problems. The fact of a team being "distributed" is basically irrelevant. It is just another situational variable to deal with, like limited budgets, annoying executives, depressed reports, disruptive team members, bad software and so forth.
If you've learned to think your way around all the other age-old parts of management, "distributed" is just another logistics problem to solve. There's nothing particularly unique or new about it.
So why has this topic attracted so much attention in recent times?
Two simple reasons.
First, there's a lot more of it happening, with mobile and virtual workers all over the place. If there's a lot of something happening, it must be important, right? There's a lot of Lady Gaga going on right now, so she must be important.
Second, a lot of people have tools and technologies to sell that solve technical logistics problems (hearing the voice or seeing the face of someone on the other side of the world). One way to sell these tools is to talk far too much (and way more than necessary) about the supposedly "unique" problems of managing with these tools.
In my experience, given 2 unique people management problems, one face-to-face and the other distributed, if you assess the top 2-3 problems of each team, the chances are very low that being distributed (or not) is actually a causal factor. It is simply an irrelevant variable most of the time.
I mean, think about it. The Rothschild brothers ran most of Europe's banking with a "distributed team" that ran entirely on letters and couriers. Did they whine about the problems of distributed teams? Cardinal Richelieu ran a formidable spy network across the continent. Did he worry about how managing through invisible ink was different from managing face to face? Or did he focus on the basic people problems?
That said "distribution" does have a lot of significance, but not to management of teams. The impact is at a much more fundamental level, having to do with the relationship between people and organizations, and the future of organizations themselves. A lot of people are realizing they don't need traditional employment models at all. Being virtual helps them realize that. They start to orbit away from their traditional relationship with organizations and may decide to go free agent for instance. That's a macroeconomic trend that is too big to influence with management practices. In other words, distribution and virtualization make "managing teams" in the traditional sense moot, because their main effect is to make traditional teams slowly disappear.
So the right question in a sense, is not "how do you manage a distributed team?" but "how do you manage a team comprising people with very non-traditional employment relationships to each other and to the organization, if there is even an organization anchoring the relationship."
I have read far too much of it. For a long time I took the topic seriously and looked for substantial ideas, models and theories. I found none. And I couldn't make up any myself either. So I concluded: 99.99% of things written/said about this topic are complete dreck. Here's why.
Managing distributed teams is a subdiscipline of managing teams of any sort to begin with.
Most people who ask or try to answer this question skip the more basic step of becoming good at management first. Most of them are terrible at it.
So face-to-face or distributed, they fail. But if the situation happens to be distributed, there is a convenient situational factor to blame.
People management involves a dozen difficult psychology problems. The fact of a team being "distributed" is basically irrelevant. It is just another situational variable to deal with, like limited budgets, annoying executives, depressed reports, disruptive team members, bad software and so forth.
If you've learned to think your way around all the other age-old parts of management, "distributed" is just another logistics problem to solve. There's nothing particularly unique or new about it.
So why has this topic attracted so much attention in recent times?
Two simple reasons.
First, there's a lot more of it happening, with mobile and virtual workers all over the place. If there's a lot of something happening, it must be important, right? There's a lot of Lady Gaga going on right now, so she must be important.
Second, a lot of people have tools and technologies to sell that solve technical logistics problems (hearing the voice or seeing the face of someone on the other side of the world). One way to sell these tools is to talk far too much (and way more than necessary) about the supposedly "unique" problems of managing with these tools.
In my experience, given 2 unique people management problems, one face-to-face and the other distributed, if you assess the top 2-3 problems of each team, the chances are very low that being distributed (or not) is actually a causal factor. It is simply an irrelevant variable most of the time.
I mean, think about it. The Rothschild brothers ran most of Europe's banking with a "distributed team" that ran entirely on letters and couriers. Did they whine about the problems of distributed teams? Cardinal Richelieu ran a formidable spy network across the continent. Did he worry about how managing through invisible ink was different from managing face to face? Or did he focus on the basic people problems?
That said "distribution" does have a lot of significance, but not to management of teams. The impact is at a much more fundamental level, having to do with the relationship between people and organizations, and the future of organizations themselves. A lot of people are realizing they don't need traditional employment models at all. Being virtual helps them realize that. They start to orbit away from their traditional relationship with organizations and may decide to go free agent for instance. That's a macroeconomic trend that is too big to influence with management practices. In other words, distribution and virtualization make "managing teams" in the traditional sense moot, because their main effect is to make traditional teams slowly disappear.
So the right question in a sense, is not "how do you manage a distributed team?" but "how do you manage a team comprising people with very non-traditional employment relationships to each other and to the organization, if there is even an organization anchoring the relationship."