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We’re several emails into trying to book a meeting with people in Europe. Everyone involved agrees the meeting should happen. So it’s not a case of will. All parties are on board but, so far, we haven’t made it happen.
The European afternoon is our morning and that should be survivable. Anything less than 8 hours of time-shiftedness is generally workable. But it’s August and most of the continent is out on holiday. So every time we send an option that could work, it’s met with an OOO. A week later someone replies to say that time (now in the past) won’t work and could we please send some alternatives. We consult the World Clock website, account for various Daylight versus Standard adjustments, say a small prayer, and hit send on the email.
The World Clock prayer of the globally distributed workforce is one we know well. Our very first jobs out of undergrad were in global orgs. Johnathan worked for IBM, a company whose worldwide employee base is larger than most small towns. And Melissa worked for Edelman, privately held with a mind-blowing 36 offices worldwide. This was pre-Zoom. Pre-Skype. Pre-SIP.
By the time we joined Mozilla in the mid-2000s, globally distributed work had come a long way. New telepresence robots meant remote workers could roll around the office, say hi to colleagues, and get stuck in the elevator when the wifi cut out. We also had portals in the kitchens of various offices so you could talk to far-flung colleagues in the event that your 8am and their 9pm coffee schedules lined up (spoiler alert: they mostly didn’t).
And while collaboration tech has improved considerably over the past few decades, the tech is only part of the story. The single hardest flavour of management is still the one where you are remote, time-zone shifted from HQ, and the rest of the organization is all together, in the office. We don’t have a magic incantation that makes this hard thing easy. But we have three things that might help. None of them are software.
YMMV.
You have to be one part athlete
It won’t help you to pretend that this is not a physical gig. If we’re honest, most bosses would do well to recognize how much their physicality plays into their effectiveness. Obviously sleep impacts your decision making. Obviously hunger impacts your mood. Obviously you need air to think. But however important this is for bosses — for people — across the org, it goes triple for you.
First of all, you’re gonna be travelling. Even when the team is ready to meet you where you are on remote work, there will be off-sites. There will be customer conversations. There will be plenty of capital-R Reasons why you’ll need to travel. And beyond that, the lowercase-r reason you’ll end up doing it is to spend time with your people. When they’re all together and you aren’t, no amount of hilarious memes in the team slack can make up for time spent together. It matters for team cohesion, it matters for spotting disengagement and conflict early, it matters for your own intuitive context on how things are going.
You can probably make it work at one week in six, but in our experience most execs end up drifting to more like one week in four, plus special cases. That much travel is hard on your body. It messes with your sleep and your diet and your internal clock. Dries out your skin and your eyes and your social life.
Even when you’re home, it’s still physical. Because the inescapable reality is that overlapping, synchronous time with your peers and direct repots is really valuable. That might mean your days start at 8am, or 5am. It might mean your days start late, but also end late. Is that awesome? Is that a balanced and integrated life? Well, that’s a you call. But the less overlap you have, the harder it is to do this job well. An hour is better than none. Four hours is better than one.
And so you have to start to think of yourself like an athlete. Not athlete like you need to go run an ultra-marathon. Athlete like your work is physically demanding and it’s important to show up in good condition to tackle it. Sleep, exercise, food, mental breaks, flexibility, outdoor time in daylight, intentionally investing in social connections instead of hoping they happen spontaneously. Maybe other people can punt on taking care of themselves, but to be an effective remote leader: you can’t. And speaking of taking care…
You have to be one part ER nurse
You will need structure to support this work. Perhaps this feels obvious. All work benefits from structure. But being a remote leader when most of the team is together requires a different level of baseline. Your work is more prone to emergencies and miscommunication and dropping the ball on high-stakes stuff. It is a complex game of telephone. And without a clear path to ensure the right information reaches you at the right time with the right level of detail, you’ll be left to make sense of “purple monkey dishwasher” and what that means for next quarter’s targets.
Get very skilled at handoffs. The ER is a 24-hour gig but (ideally) no one is working a 24-hour shift. So handoffs between the folks coming off shift and the folks coming on need to be tight and structured. And while your work may not be a matter of life and death, there’s a lot you can borrow from a work environment where it is. Let the format and cadence do the heavy lifting. Start simple. This is a daily practice for you and for your team. It can be a rotating responsibility or one you hand to a trusted lieutenant. In practice, the first version may look like:
Good morning! Here’s what you’re walking into today. The biggest thing that’s changed since you signed off last night is ________. The place we most need your answer/reply is ________. Team vibes are __/10. Cross-team vibes are__/10.
And then if you’re the person signing off last, remember that you being online means the rest of the team can enjoy their dinner hour, spend time with their friends or families, and know that if something urgent comes up, you’re entirely on it. So your reciprocated note might look like this.
Hope you had a good evening! I’m signing off for the night. Biggest thing that’s changed since the end of your workday is ________. There’s a huge thread with a major customer but you can skip to the end and archive it. It’s been resolved. Yay. There’s inbound interest from a European prospect and that’s your ball as it will require local scheduling. Best focus music on my playlist today was _________.
Get very skilled at escalations. To make sure the right information reaches you at the right time, your team needs to know what that information is and what counts as the right time. When do you want us to copy you on an email? And when do you want us to call your cell phone? And is one of us designated to call your cell phone in the middle of the night and have it breakthrough sleep mode? If that’s a thing you can anticipate needing, then we gotta plan for it. And if you don’t want that, have you knighted the person who can make decisions on your behalf if shit goes off in the middle of your night? Every person in the ER should have an answer for how to access senior expertise when they need it. The same is true for your org.
Nobody loves structure for the sake of structure. But one read on that structure is that it’s overwrought and slowing us down. And another read is that it’s the lattice for how our work happens, an amalgam of everything we’ve learned to help dodge the worst downsides. You don’t need to be at ER-levels if that doesn’t make sense for your org or your work. But if you don’t have anything in place, don’t be surprised that your work feels like one rolling emergency.
You have to be one part fancy-pants
Look, everyone loves a leader with authentic humility. Someone who isn’t afraid to roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty, solve their own problems. Mmm, that’s good stuff. If that’s (authentically!) you, that’s a righteous thing to be and we love you for it. Annnnd… if you want to be effective at the remote-leadership thing, you’re going to need to build a new skill set. Because there are places where that approach will not work.
When work is happening in places you aren’t, the context shifts without you knowing. Hallway conversations, and desk-side decisions. Vibe shifts. Someone crying quietly at their desk. Someone suddenly never at their desk at all. A major part of being an effective leader is that you reliably make good decisions, and it’s impossible to make good decisions without context. Trade-offs. Prioritization. Promotions. These can all go really wrong, and your humble self-possession can’t get you the context you don’t know to ask for.
When we work with executives, one of the hardest pills for them to swallow is that they need to structure their team around themselves. It feels so self-important and pompous. But your org hired you to do a job. A senior job, making decisions that impact a lot of people, and either drive, or undermine, the success of the whole organization. Your people are doing their jobs, but they need you to do your job, and you can’t do your job without knowing what’s going on. So what do you need for that to happen?
If you need a daily check-in first thing when you get online, in order to appropriately steer your early-caffeination attention, then say that. If that call has to happen while you’re on a treadmill, then say that. If you need a designated someone as your eyes on the ground, then say that. If you need to pull your team together and say, “Any time I’m surprised by information one of you could have given me, we’ve failed to prepare me to represent our team, and we need to build systems to ensure that doesn’t happen…” then say that.
However big your org is, imagine one 10x as big and you’ll intuitively understand why you’d need this. No one expects the person running a giant org to carry all the context in their heads at all times — their team helps them, front-runs things, pulls together summaries and backup details in appendices just in case. That’s not pompous, that’s just a smart way to do that job thoughtfully and repeatably. Now ask yourself when precisely, between now and 10x, that is supposed to magically appear.
YMMV
Leading from a distance is hard no matter what. Any high-frequency business traveller will tell you, Super Elite airline status is not so much glamour as a consolation prize. And then they’ll tell you about the chapstick they bring on the plane, and which park they go to in London to reset their brain before heading to the office, and which taco trucks are open late in Palo Alto.
We’ve been those bosses, and if you’re living it now and it helps to hear it: it’s not just you. It’s genuinely a knock-down, drag-out job. It certainly kicked our asses, so you’re not alone. But if you stick with it, you’ll also learn a ton. Yes, how to pack for 7 days, 3 climates, and a wedding in carry-on luggage. But also how to take care of yourself, how to communicate and coordinate and lead across cultural difference, and how to ask for help. That counts for something.
(The answer is obviously St. James Park, in London. Say hi to the ducks for us.)
— Melissa & Johnathan
