It is quite normal now for us to be working daily with people we rarely meet face to face, with people of different cultures mother tongues. Inevitably problems arise just as they do with people with whom we share a workspace and culture.  But toss in geographic and cultural boundaries to the usual list of obstacles we encounter when things are getting tense around the single location organisation and you have a much increased potential for situations to get out of control. In the absence of eye-contact and of the comfort blanket of shared culture we surely must rethink, in fact, really work at ‘making contact’, bridging gaps between the different people involved in the enterprise.

A few days ago I invited Tom Buehlmann to join me on PEC’s monthly teleseminar. I wanted someone there who had done the whole managing scattered teams for real. This Bulletin is largely a report of the nuggets of that conversation.

Tom has managed teams across multiple geographies for about 25 years for brands like Procter & Gamble, Lindt & Sprüngli, the famed Swiss chocolate maker and Catalina marketing, the company credited with the invention of the now ubiquitous card loyalty scheme.

I began our conversation by asking Tom what sort of scale of operation he had dealt with in the past. A few hundred here, fifty there, three hundred over there. Big, then. And here is the first mistake that Tom has encountered time and again. He started life with Catalina with twelve direct reports, scattered across half a dozen countries. Far too many he laments, “I ended up with seven in the end – much more manageable.” So first lesson. Keep the number of direct reports down. Seven – tops.

I then ask him about his top tips for managing long-distance, aside from the cultural stuff which we will come to later. “I’d prefer to think of it as a list of mistakes I made the first time – so what I would do differently next time is…

1. Don’t assume it’s easy managing at a distance – it’s not. It takes a conscious effort to get to know people and not just the business.
2. Don’t assume that a solid reporting line on the org. chart means that you have a relationship with that person. You don’t.
3. Don’t try to do everything – prioritise and let them do their jobs.

I am curious to know what a conversation between Tom and a direct report might sound like when things are going wrong and the person is hundreds, if not thousands, of Kilometres away (Buehlmann is Swiss). He asks me to quantify ‘going wrong’. I reply, “Not catastrophic but bothering you a lot, over a few months”. He needs no time for reflection, “When can I come and see you?”. He adds, “you have to be prepared to get into your car, train, plane or whatever and get in front of them – fast. It is time-consuming but you have to do it. Spend as much face to face time with them as is feasible and desirable – on their home territory where they feel safe and at ease”.

According to Buehlmann, when communication is not face-to-face, different methods of communication have a different effect on the dynamic – specifically changes in power and intimacy levels. According to Buehlmann, different methods carry different messages too. He goes on to specify: “A personal, hand-written note is very special, very powerful, very personal”. A text is about as impersonal as you can get – it’s about the worst. No, actually email. I really don’t like it. It is so open to misinterpretation.” The message is: choose the medium for the message carefully. If in doubt: talk or travel.

I want to get an idea of how to tackle situations where cultural boundaries are being crossed and I ask him for a top tip on what to do when you are starting out in this new territory of working across national boundaries. He sighs: “I learned a lot from working in Japan. For me the number one thing is to try to understand the local codes and rules.” I prod him for a little more detail. “When I first went out there I just turned up to the regional office and met with all the people at the top of the org. chart for that country. I asked all the right questions and thought I was doing just fine. Then I found out that I had terribly offended the Chairman of the company. He didn’t appear on any chart but what I should have done was to get off my plane and get in the car straight to his office. I would only have needed to spend twenty minutes with him. Word would have gone round very fast that I had done the right thing. My visit would have shown that I had manners – that knew how to behave. Big mistake”, he frowns and shakes his head in self-criticism.

Buehlmann tells me another story, this time about his former top manager in Japan. When Buehlmann first arrived in Japan he recalls that he was keen to show the manager and his own Board colleagues back in the U.S. that he was managing the global business, getting things repaired, helping to make the Japan operation profitable. But after months of doing business with his No.1 in Japan, endlessly going out in the evenings for meals to discuss the business and to get to know the local problems, the manager out-of-the-blue, over dinner one evening, suddenly tendered his resignation. “I was really shocked. I’d had no warning at all. I asked him, of course, what was wrong. He replied with words that I will never, ever forget: Tom-san, you don’t even know the names of my children.”

But not all cultures are so extremely removed from our own Western European way of doing things. I suggest to Tom that there are mistakes to be made much closer to home. He agrees. “France is a good example. In France there is a formal and informal organisation. The informal is arranged according to where you went to university – where you grew up intellectually, really. There are strong bonds between people who share educational experiences and backgrounds. You have to get to grips with these unspoken links and relationships before you can really figure the rest out and get things done easily.”

It seems from my time with Tom Buehlmann that what we say we do and value is not always played out in the office even by someone whom I regard as a seasoned international player; someone who really gets the people bit. Talking about the value of relationships is easy and it’s in all the books. Resisting the temptation to focus one hundred percent of one’s attention on the running of the operation is the tough part, it seems. Buehlmann: “Developing human relationships is critical. No one wants to be a name in a box, a human resource.” It’s an obvious but illusive point: developing relationships is an essential part of keeping people with you, especially when you don’t see them often. They will forgive all sorts of cultural and linguistic transgressions if you have gone to the trouble to get to know them, to show them respect as people. Buehlmann concludes: “Talking about business all day is not developing relationships. That is done separately.”

7 golden possibilities (we don’t like rules).

1. Planning for success

What do you want? What do they want? These questions need to be answered in terms of emotional, attitudinal and behavioural outcomes. Try to wean yourself off purely business objectives because that’s rarely where your focus needs to be. Running meetings successfully is mostly about managing feelings, not facts.

2. Getting their minds on the right stuff

Sometimes a meeting can take a while to find its focus because people arrive from another meeting with their heads full of the old topic, unprepared, tired, under fed or caffeined up to the eyeballs. Consider some sort of transition device. One we use a lot is called ‘baggage check-in’. We go round the table and ask participants to check-in (mention/let go of) any distracting thoughts. All sorts of interesting things can turn up and people seem to enjoy the chance to decompress a little before being asked for more rigorous, intellectual engagement. All the leader needs to ask is “what’s on your mind?” or “what do you want to check in?”.

3. Handling the ‘big personalities’

We call these people: loud, pushy, talkative, chatty, bossy, show-boaters, big mouths etc. The trick (not really a trick, more of a point of recognition) is to involve these people as much as possible and at the same time to be prepared to protect the space of the less voluble participants ruthlessly. Golden rule: involve potential disrupters as you do your most co-operative participants. Keep everyone fully occupied. And the rationale for all this? People mostly kick up trouble when they feel left out or powerless. Kevin Holligan of Meeting Magic suggests partitioning time and attention by using devices such as sharing thoughts using Post-It Notes or giving the group other short tasks where everyone is allocated an equal voice. Probably most important of all – avoid the labels I’ve used – people aren’t born ‘pushy’ or ‘loud’ – we help to make them that way. And we can help them to not be that way too.

Inclusion not control

4. Keeping to time

Leaving a meeting on time is a rare event these days. People tend to put far too much on their agendas. Be sparing and respect your participant’s time boundaries. If you are realistic about how you plan the time slots within the meeting for each discussion point the people will be able to reward you with their attention. Meeting Magic suggest 12 minutes is the attention span for an adult. Sounds about right to me. To give yourself an even better chance of finishing on time… begin bang on time, do not wait for stragglers; they will soon get the message – even if you are as nice as pie when they come in late.

5. Involving the quiet ones

People who don’t say much in meetings behave in that way for a number of reasons. The meeting leader, and the other participants, rarely get to find out those reasons. One result of letting things continue without finding out the causes is that you always end up with the same result: the same people talk and the same types of outcomes come to pass. Another result of not involving the whole group is that unhelpful group beliefs have an opportunity to take root: “She’s a bit quiet, a bit shy…not much help really.” “You’ll never get a word out of him in the first hour… he’s a bit lazy… takes him a while to get going.” and so on. We think the key here is to identify who is likely to stay quiet and then ask their advice, before the meeting, about how they would like to be involved. Get to know them and how they like to be managed before it becomes a distraction for the group. If this opportunity does not arise then it can be helpful to go around the table at the beginning asking people to say a few words about the minimum that they want to walk away with at the end. This then gives you the excuse to keep checking that each person is getting what they wanted.

6. Getting things done afterwards

Meetings often get a bad reputation not because of what happens within it but from what is expected from participants afterwards. You might run the greatest meetings but if you get the reputation for weighing people down with long lists of To Dos your meetings (and you) will lose popularity. Meeting Magic’s advice here, and we agree, is to force people to prioritise before the meeting ends – set a group rule for the number of take-outs and encourage people to stick to it. Kevin Holligan also suggests giving people the chance to make a group start on the critical tasks. That way when people leave they have a head start on the task.

7. Helping other people’s meetings go better

But what if it’s not your meeting that is going wrong – what then? Do you just have to grin and bear it? We don’t think so. Here are three common problems and our suggestions on what you can say to nudge things along:

1. Help the other participants to regain perspective when they are getting buried in endless detail. Consider saying: “I’m finding the level of detail informative but I am starting to get lost in it – is that a problem for anyone else?”
2. Help the chairman who is losing his/her grip regain control by saying: “As the outsider I’d be very interested to hear what you (indicating the chairman) has to say.”
3. When the meeting shows no sign of ending and you either need to get away for another meeting or for your own mental health. Consider saying: “I have found this meeting really useful but I have completely run out of time.” Then watch three other people sigh with relief as they start packing their papers!