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.”

Many great companies start out as family concerns – yours might be one of them.

Mars, now Masterfoods, is a huge and successful example which grew out of a home-based sweet making buiness founded, in a small kitchen in Tacoma, Washington by Frank and Ethel Mars back in 1911. And S.C. Johnson, inventors of the Ziploc bag, Pledge, Glade and Windex were founded in 1886 by Samuel Johnson who invented a new floor polish to go on the parquet flooring he was installing in those days. I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of Marsians over the years (I don’t know what the SCJ people call themselves – answers on a postcard) and they did stand out from the rest of my clients. More than any other group they seemed to be fiercely proud of their heritage and of the company’s products. No matter where the person worked they seemed to have a very detailed knowledge not only of  production methods but also of production values; to be let loose on the line as a young manager at Mars was to be trusted with the crown jewels – it certainly was not seen as lowly work.

And there are numerous other distinguishing features I could list which defined them as ‘different’ such as their unusual way of opening ‘product’ (Marsian for ‘sweets’) which was to peel the wrapper along the seem so as to reveal the production details (line number, date and time of manufacture, sell-by-date etc. etc.) Aside from all of this, the people from Mars seemed to act as a cohesive group, I hesitate to say for fear of sounding corny, as a ‘family’ group; there seemed to be an extra layer of fabric keeping everyone together.

But is it feasible to reproduce the kind of bonding fabric found in a company like Mars or cabury or in a well-functioning family, within an ordinary company manufacturing ball-bearings or tomato sandwiches? Or would it be found that the product was too mundane, the company too new, the people too ordinary? I suspect that those elements are really nothing to do with it. And I also suggest that there are proportionally just as many badly functioning families as there are badly functioning companies so that just trying to be more like a family probably won’t make a bad company, better. However, I do believe that there are some things that a well-functioning family can pass on to the leaders and members of a mediocre company; this view is in some way borne out by the words of a leading psychologist who was once asked at interview whether being a psychologist had made him a better father. He replied: “No, but being a father has certainly made me a better psychologist.”

So what is the definition of a psychologically healthy family? The literature on the subject suggests that it is one where the roles shift and swap according to what circumstances demand. Sometimes the father leads, sometimes the mother makes the first move. Sometimes the children are told what to do and other times the parents pay attention and act upon the children’s ideas and wishes. Sometimes the parents come up with the solutions, at other times the children spot the problem and the solution before the parents have even got out of bed. As the children grow in years so the relationships are allowed to move on; the children are encouraged to assume greater responsibility for their actions and the parents relinquish much of the control of the organisation and leadership of the unit in acknowledgment that the troops are now more than capable of organising and handling life’s events. By this point the parents have assumed a new role as mentors, advisers-in-the-wings whilst the children have gone on to create their own ‘companies’ with their own particular feel and collection of values and traditions. This all assumes, of course, that the parents have got their psychological act together in the first place, that is to say, that they, to some degree, understand themselves, their own insecurities and needs (especially in terms of needing to be needed) and that they have the courage and judgment to enable them to be flexible as well as consistent at enough of the right moments.

P.S Thanks to you Robert for the great cartoon you did for us. Click here to buy this very cartoon from him!