Now that the Covid-19 pandemic has evolved into a new stage, and the constraints around in-person events have been loosened up, I thought it was appropriate to reflect on what’s happening in the world of office work and share some observations I have about being a people manager in this new world.

Some context:

  1. I currently lead a team of 6 product managers (2 player-coaches and 4 individual contributors)
  2. My team is spread across the world (Paris, Eastern Canada, Los Angeles, and New Zealand)
  3. These 6 PMs work with roughly 60 software engineers & data scientists, a product marketer, and 2 designers, who are spread across France, India, New Zealand, California, & Seattle
  4. I’ve met 2 of my direct reports and ~15 of the engineers in person; the rest I haven’t

Like many managers during the pandemic, I’ve found it difficult to build and maintain a strong team culture that resembled the teams I’ve led in the past. We’ve had global teams and remote employees before the global shift to work from home, but people were often connected to some kind of regional office where they had all-hands events, regular happy hours, team lunches, and other rituals that brought people together. It wasn’t just the managers driving these connections. It was cultivated by employees at every level.

This new challenge we face, post-2020, requires a new capability we all must build if we want to lead outstanding teams: designing a team with high “cultural magnetism.”

A metaphor that comes to mind is that of satellites orbiting around a planet.

(shameless plug for my former employer)

  1. The people on your team, including you, orbit around this planet at different distances and speeds.
  2. The speed of each person is based on their career aggressiveness (ambition / propensity to embrace change).
  3. The gravity pulling your team closer together is based on the overall mass of the planet (what I’m calling here “cultural magnetism”).
  4. If someone on your team picks up too much speed, and they aren’t close enough to the planet, they risk falling out of orbit and leaving for another opportunity.
  5. Those who are a less aggressive in their careers can sustain an orbit that is a bit more distant without falling out of orbit.
  6. Too much gravity can be a bad thing. A team that operates like a cult (“we’re all family here”) can be difficult to escape, too intense, filters out good people, suppresses individual differences, and can come crashing down on itself with a load of drama.

Remote office work has changed the equation here, making it harder to keep people in a sustainable orbit. You have to try harder to engage people, and more of the work of creating and driving this culture falls on the managers than ever before. The “Great Resignation” or “Great Reshuffle” is driven by many factors—rising wages, low unemployment, demands for flexibility and better work conditions, etc., but we shouldn’t discount the effect that remote work has had on the cultural magnetism of our organizations.

So what should we do? How do we overcome the forces that lead to employees drifting out of orbit?

  1. Invest in mission and purpose
  2. Develop a repertoire of asynchronous communication methods
  3. Foster matrix relationships across teams, functions, and geographies
  4. Add a personal touch that isn’t only about fun activities and team outings
  5. Let it go sometimes

Invest in mission and purpose

A distributed team has some of the same challenges of a distributed family. You have to work harder to get together. You have to find things that keep you connected when you’re not together.

One way to build greater cultural magnetism is by consciously investing in mission and purpose. This might mean taking the time to reflect on your long-term goals, discuss your big vision, and even creating a team playbook together to co-author the principles and practices that make your team unique.

A team fueled only by accountability and pressure from authority is one where leaders will have to bear the weight of constantly pushing their team, 24/7, 365. A team that can align around a clear purpose is able to operate with intuitive, sound judgment and natural convergence without the constant pressure of leadership.

Develop async communication methods

You’re not all in the same room. You’re not all working at the same time. You don’t “have to” bump into people spontaneously in the office. And you don’t have to make everything into a Zoom call.

The best teams are respectful of people’s time and use a blend of recurring, synchronous meetings and a wide range of asynchronous flows of information, from Slack/Teams messages to weekly newsletters and my favorite—short, recorded videos where someone shares an update, commentary, or insights for others to view at their own time.

I’ll make a prediction here: the absolute best leaders in large organizations will all start to master this skill in the next few years. They’ll put out short, mobile-friendly videos to their teams on a weekly basis. They’ll record mini-podcasts to share their ideas and vision, or host a conversation with another colleague. They’ll run mini town halls and AMAs to make themselves accessible and re-engage their teams. You see these things done sparingly today. They will become indispensable in the new world of work. Mark my words.

Foster matrix relationships

The office gave us water cooler talk and it created spaces where people from different functions would come together into neutral, social spaces. Salespeople would get to know engineers. Product managers would get to know support staff. Silos still existed, but there were designed, intentional practices in offices that tried to mitigate that effect.

As a leader in our new world of work, you have to deliberately try to foster matrix relationships for the people on your team. You can create cross-team syncs that bring two groups together once every month or quarter. You can encourage members of your team to schedule their own 1:1s with cross-functional colleagues and diagonal reporting relationships. You can actively teach and coach people in stakeholder management, so they understand that part of their job is to balance the needs of many different parties throughout your organization.

A team without strong matrix relationships is fragile. It is hyper-dependent on the leader, and if the leader leaves the organization, or is offline for an extended time, the team becomes vulnerable to sudden change and more isolated.

Add a personal touch

One of the interesting experiences we all went through early in the pandemic was the novelty of remote fun team events. Teams would play games together, or do a virtual wine tasting, or hire a magician or comedian, or do a virtual escape room. Some of these can be pretty fun, but by year 2 or year 3 of the pandemic, they’ve lost some of their luster and many of us are looking around for other ways to keep things light.

I’ve seen a few good ways that teams have added a personal touch that doesn’t require someone to organize a paid outing.

  1. Schedule a standing lunch every week or two that people can pop into and casually chat while they eat. Eating on video chat is only weird when you’re the only one.
  2. Create space for personal stories in your recurring team syncs. “What’s one fun thing you did this weekend?” “What’s a great new show that someone is watching?” “What is everyone looking forward to this summer?” It doesn’t have to be structured, but if you don’t create space for these kinds of conversations, people will feel guilty bringing things up or wasting meeting time, and they might not ever open up about some of the little things in their life.
  3. Share knowledge, articles, and insights in team channels to foster conversations and more context. Your team will see that it’s okay to do this and they’ll often follow suit. Sometimes it’s not always strictly about what you’re working on, but maybe it’s something broadly relevant and worth talking about.

Let it go sometimes

The last piece of advice I’ll give is that sometimes, you have to let it go.

What I mean is, you can’t expect every person on your team to be 100% all-in, super engaged, and full of team spirit every day. Especially in large organizations, people go through waves of engagement. People get busy or stressed with their personal life. Motivation waxes and wanes. The best you can do is try to lay a foundation that is inviting, inclusive, and well-aligned so that people have opportunities to co-create a culture together. You have a new, harder job as a leader in this new world of work, but you’re not alone.

Building a Team with High Cultural Magnetism
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