What your Dislocated Teams need the most right now

Empowered managing matters more than ever

Work from home (WFH) is far more impactful than you think, damaging the fabric of connection that makes an agency feel like a family, and also destroying a key mechanism that teams rely upon: co-location. Many organizations do and will still function, despite less-skilled management, because people are awesome at working and being together; as in the American sitcom The Office, they persevere despite the lack of skills above them.

But today, peering out from postage-stamp windows during an endless barrage of Zoom meetings, teams have become diaspora. They have been dislocated…like a shoulder or finger wrenched from its normal position, they struggle to feel and function as a team. This not your typical work from home problem, this is not remote work, it is something much more challenging.

Now more than ever, managing matters. Poor managerial style is prevalent in our industry where up-and-coming firefighters get battlefield promotions despite a lack of managerial skills and training. Many of the worst managerial behaviors, like dominance and in-group preference, get amplified in a dislocated workplace, marginalizing and disempowering others.

Over the last couple weeks, we’ve heard legion stories of these challenges, and while many of them are similar, some organizations aren’t struggling like all the others. Those that have created empowered teams, and the flatter structure that enables team self-management, tell us, “…we pretty much run the same as we always have. The change was easy.”

Every challenge can also be viewed as a learning opportunity — better managing is learnable, given understanding and the tools to do so. To paraphrase Drucker, managers can only manage what they see. Understanding teams in a deeper way is a key first step to that mastery.

Teams are not Remote Workers

Teams are at the center of how most businesses operate, but “team” is often used loosely — a group of salespeople will incorrectly be called a “sales team” because are selling the same products. True teams have interdependence of work and activity. Team members need to align and coordinate with each other to create results. Research says that the quality of your teams function is one of the most important levers of your business, driving loyalty, engagement, productivity, quality and profit.

While articles tout the massive growth of remote work (75%+ growth), the numerators are quite small — only about 4% of all workers are remote workers, predominated by a few professions, like software development or consultancies where, people can operate largely independently.

The other 96% — certainly a very large percentage of them — are not remote workers because people work better together. There’s a reason that Apple and the other industry titans have campuses; businesses do better when their people work together. The more interdependent your work and teams, the more this is true.

The Three C’s that matter for Dislocated groups & organizations

The difference for the empowered organizations is that they’ve mastered how to deal with six key factors, three of which apply to groups and organizations.

• Connection — one of our most basic human needs is to be with each other. Many things can suffer when we lose ambient sense of connection in a workplace, especially trust, a fragile commodity for many in a contracting economy. One of the biggest challenges is how to create the positive non-work experiences that are lost, like the brief chat while making coffee.
• Culture — often misunderstood as a sort of “aesthetic”, culture is your the organization behaves. Dozens of simple interactions need to be replaced and normalized across groups. Simple things, like when best to comment in a group conversation are challenging when you lack visual-physical cues; introverted people, some of our best thinkers, get left behind.
• Capacity — the focus, time and skills possessed by the team and its members. With the shift to WFH, come new distractions and disabilities, along with noisy, competing priorities. Team-based capacity is even more challenging than individual capacity — teams can only work together when their capacity and availability line up.

The Three C’s for effective and empowered teams

The above factors impact an organizational wellness beyond its teams. But the next three are key, as they enable the vital team functions of alignment (understanding things in the same way) and coordination.

• Conveyance — the first step to alignment, is the ability to convey information accurately to the team and between the team, stakeholders and clients. In-person “project briefing” is notoriously weak, relying upon the band-aid of frequent inspection and discussion. Communication quality drops with WFH, so briefs get worse and recovery is slower and time-costly. Managers then overreact to their seemingly clueless people with stress-filled responses or by just taking on the work themselves.
• Convergence — the second step to alignment, is the ability of the team to combine their thought into solutions. In-person teams rely on rich mix of visual, auditory and kinesthetic forms of communications, enabling a creative tension that yields divergent thinking and hybrid approaches. In a video setting, the power of the team devolves into the weakness of the loudest.
• Coordination — the ability of the team to understand priority, status and intent of its members, enabling our deeply-wired talent for mutual adjustment. As plans change and work progresses, teams need to sync — like a football team, to enable higher performance with each successive play or iteration. Effective coordination frees managers to operate on a higher level with clients, stakeholders and each other. The almost effortless fluidity of in-person coordination disappears with WHF.

These six factors can be huge in terms of their impact — in our eight years of working with over 100 agencies, mastering these factors creates in-person performance improvements as high as 50–100%. For those with no mastery, the likelihood of dis-improvement from WFH can be large.

Curing the effects of team dislocation is the new managerial challenge. Our data suggests that it is also an opportunity — mastering the empowerment techniques for dislocated teams should yield additional benefits once WFH ends. Managers must help teams discover the new ways of working together despite our having to stay apart.

Jack is a recovering client services executive, former senior analyst at RAND, and the founder and CEO of AgencyAgile, a productivity training and coaching firm that helps agencies, marketers, and other complex service organizations.