Here’s a situation that might sound familiar if you manage teams across multiple locations, especially when some of those teams sit in a different site from you.
Let’s say that back in January you visited one of those sites, and while you were there, you agreed that every team leader would start having monthly one-to-ones with their people. Nobody objected, so you assumed this would be implemented without any issues.
Now we’re in August, and you’re back visiting that particular location. You ask those team leaders how the one-to-ones have been going, and within seconds it’s clear that they never really took off. Worse, a couple of them, including the site manager herself, look at you like they’re hearing about it for the first time.
And you’re frustrated, because your other two locations have implemented this system without any pushback. So you feel blindsided, and, frankly, a little disrespected.
What’s happened here is that at some point after you left in January, whoever is in charge of that particular site decided that your instructions were optional, and everyone else followed their lead. And by the time you find out, seven months have gone by.
So, this article is about how to make your decisions stick with teams who hardly ever get to see you in person.
Who this applies to: managing multiple locations with direct authority
What I cover next only applies if you have direct authority over your teams. In other words, where you’re the one who sets the direction. You’re the one who decides who runs each site, and you’re the one responsible for enforcing standards. I make that distinction because it’s a different situation from working across a matrix.
The situation I’m describing is one where you have plenty of formal authority, but your physical absence makes it difficult to know when and how to apply it.
For example, let’s say you run three different teams. One sits in the same building as you. A second team in a different location that you get to visit every couple of weeks. And the third one, located on a different continent, you see twice a year if you’re lucky.
Now, you might think video calls have taken care of that, because you can drop into any location in seconds, and that does help. But a video call only gives you access to the information your local team chooses to share with you on camera. It won’t give you access to the more informal corridor conversations, and it won’t let you gauge the vibe on the floor, or get a feel for some of the interpersonal problems that are brewing in the background. So even though you may have very regular contact with your team via email, Slack or video, your read on what’s really going on down there can still be pretty thin.
And that’s probably why you find yourself swinging between over-using your authority on your ever-so-rare state visits and then under-using it all the other days in between. Calibrating that swing requires a certain amount of, not only self-awareness, but also political awareness.
Because a team that rarely experiences you in person is quite likely to follow its own agenda. Your physical absence gives them room to run things their own way, and set priorities you haven’t necessarily agreed to.
Of course, the fact that each of your teams has their own unofficial way of doing things isn’t a problem in itself. You can argue that local problems call for local solutions, and at your level you shouldn’t be micro-managing how your teams deliver their objectives anyway.
But it is a fine line you’re walking between giving your teams enough room to run their own show, but also keeping enough of a grip so that they continue to follow your direction. And most of the time, walking that line is a persuasion job rather than a directing one. You have the formal authority to instruct people, but you’re mostly not in the room to use it, so you end up relying on influence instead.
Here are six tips to help you better walk that line.
1. Agree clear communication rules with each site manager
Especially for those locations or branches you can’t visit very often, whoever heads up that local team is your direct line for everything. So setting clear expectations on what good communication looks like matters more here than for your own local team, or the teams you visit more regularly.
And there’s a political point here, not just a practical one. Your manager controls most of the information flow and what you learn about their site. These communication rules will get you a decent flow of information from that person, but they won’t be enough on their own to give you an insight into what’s really going on in that place. That’s what the next tip is for.
But before I go there, here are three things you need to absolutely agree on with each manager when it comes to communication.
The first is rhythm. That means having a regular slot in the diary, weekly or fortnightly, that happens come what may.
The second is about which decisions you need to be informed about before they’re made, which decisions you’re happy to be told about afterwards, and which decisions you don’t want to be told about at all. Without that clarity, you’re either going to get a manager who wants to run everything past you, or one who tells you absolutely nothing.
And the third thing to agree on is for your site manager to tell you the bad news as early as possible, while things are still fixable. So rather than waiting for problems to be bad enough to surface on their own, use those regular video calls to ask a direct question: what bad news do you have for me this week?
2. Build a second line of sight into each location
The communication I described in tip one runs through one person, which is your site manager. That’s a single source, and it leaves you rather dependent on one individual’s judgement about what’s worth passing on. And this is dangerous.
You need a wider lens that goes beyond whatever the site manager wants you to see. But you need to create that lens in a way that’s quite transparent, because if it looks like you’re creating backchannels, you’ll undermine the trust between you and your site manager.
Start with that fortnightly call you set up in tip one. Rather than it always being you and the site manager, ask them to bring somebody different along each time. Do that for three months, and you’ll have heard from four or five different people at that site instead of just the one.
Also get some time in with the people below the manager, and put that in the diary months ahead. Ideally you can make that a fixture, the same weeks every year, so everybody can see it coming. Because if it’s a fixture, then nobody reads anything into it. But if you set one up out of the blue, everybody assumes something’s wrong.
When you do visit, protect the unstructured time. Spend some time on the work floor, in the canteen, or in the twenty seconds waiting for the lift. That’s where you’ll hear the most useful chatter.
And do this for every one of your locations, including the team sitting in the same building as you. Partly because it’s worth doing everywhere. But mainly because a site manager who knows you do the same thing with all your teams doesn’t have to read anything into it.
3. Put the right person in charge of each site
For those teams you can’t be physically present with, your biggest decision is who you put in charge. Having a site manager who works against you in a place you visit maybe only once or twice a year could cause you a lot of problems.
That doesn’t mean you necessarily need to let go of some of them. For example, I have one client who successfully decided to restructure a local team, keeping the head of that team in place but moving some of their responsibilities to someone who was less of a blocker.
My client changed the power dynamics within that team, and that certainly took courage, because it involved him applying his authority in its most direct and also most uncomfortable form.
And that discomfort is why most managers under-use their authority. Restructuring a team, moving someone or changing their responsibilities, can feel heavy, and there are often practical and legal obstacles too. But it’s not nearly as heavy as trying to work around a manager who keeps blocking you, or who needs constant propping up. So make sure you have the right people in place.
4. Never undermine your local site manager in front of their team
When you finally turn up on one of your state visits, be aware that your presence changes the dynamics in that team for as long as you’re there. People will bring things straight to you, over their own manager’s head, because you’re in the building and they know you can move things forward. But if you let that happen, you’re telling that team that the way to get a decision is to wait for your visit and go round the person in charge.
So when someone brings you a problem that sits in their manager’s remit, ask whether they’ve raised it with them first. You have to send things back to the manager.
Also, remember the cardinal rule. Always agree with your manager in public, but save any disagreement for behind closed doors.
And spend some of your visit talking up your managers in front of their team, because that’s the fastest way to add to their standing, and to build more trust and goodwill between the two of you.
5. Pick your battles when you’re managing at a distance
What I mean by that is at any given moment you should be able to name the one or two things per site you’re actually prepared to fight over, and let go of the rest, at least for now. Because when you operate at a distance, you can only push on so many things before people stop listening to you. If you try and put your foot down in too many areas, you’re going to dilute your authority, and you won’t get people’s focus and attention for what really matters.
So how do you choose those one or two? Ask yourself: will this initiative happen without my active involvement anyway? If your local manager has both the authority and a good reason to implement one of your initiatives, then that’s clearly not a battle you’re going to have to fight.
The real battles are the things nobody at that site has any incentive to do: anything that costs them locally and benefits somebody else, and anything that means telling one of their own people something they won’t want to hear. So start there and pick no more than two initiatives.
Then push those one or two relentlessly. Just like in the example I gave at the start, a team that hardly ever sees you isn’t going to think something is a priority if you only mentioned it once in a meeting. But if you mention it every single time you communicate with them, they’ll quickly understand you mean business.
And if you’re pushing one location on something and not another, be explicit about that from the start, because your site managers will no doubt compare notes.
So yes, pick your battles, but don’t pick more than two at any given time.
6. Decide beforehand when to use your formal authority
As I said earlier, most of the time, when you’re managing teams from a distance, your job is more about persuading than about directing.
But sometimes persuasion is not enough, and that’s the point when you have to become a bit more forceful and directive. What that point looks like is best decided beforehand, when you’re calm, and not in the middle of a disagreement.
In my view, there are three triggers for stepping in. One is bad faith, when it’s clear that someone’s purposely working around you rather than with you. The second is a safety or compliance problem. And the third is when a change you’ve been pushing for has gone past a firm deadline you set, which is what happened in the example I opened with.
When one of those lines is crossed, the time for persuasion is over, and it’s time to be more directive and decisive. And you say so plainly.
A final thought on proximity bias and promotion
Those were my six tips on how to make it easier to manage teams in multiple locations. I’ll leave you with one last thought, which is about promoting people.
There’s a known trap in leadership called proximity bias, where we tend to rate and promote the people we see most, whether or not they’re the ones doing the best work. That means that a team member who’s a few desks removed from yours is more likely to get the credit than someone you only catch every so often on a Teams call.
I say this to remind you there are people in some of your teams who are doing a brilliant job and aren’t getting much of your attention. So when you decide who to promote, make sure you correct for that, because you’ve probably been giving the most airtime to the people who happen to sit nearest to you.