In today's episode, I answer a listener question about whether or not it's possible to lead a team from a remote office. We go pretty in depth on this topic, and it will run over to a second part.
In today's episode, I answer a listener question about whether or not it's possible to lead a team from a remote office. We go pretty in depth on this topic, and it will run over to a second part.
Can you lead someone when you live thousands of miles away from them? That's the question that we're going to answer in today's episode. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and you're listening to Developer Tea. I'm excited to jump into today's episode, which is actually a question from a listener who requested to remain anonymous and partially because this person is thinking about a career change. Of course, you can ask questions to me and if you want to remain anonymous, I won't reveal who that question came from. So that's exactly what we're going to do today. We're going to cover this question and I'll go ahead and read this email. Obviously, it's been changed slightly to remove any identifying information. So let's jump straight into today's episode. Listen to Right Send and says, I've been thinking a lot about the future path for my career. And I came to the conclusion that I'd like to become a tech lead or at least a senior with his own responsibilities. That includes mentoring and personal care of my co-workers and especially juniors and trainees. The concept of remote positions or even completely remote and distributed teams and companies seems to be quite strong in the development industry, but I can't grasp how a personal culture and especially a personal mentoring or things like peer programming and standup meetings might work in a remote scenario. That's most likely because I never had any direct contact to a distributed software company or talk to anyone who was employed remotely full time. So here's my question. Is it even reasonable or feasible to plan to be remote, to interview for remote positions with my career plan? One company even explicitly offered me a home office as the day-to-day default when offering me a product tech lead position, but I don't see how this would work out. This cannot be working only via Slack and Skype and phone, can it? I know you've talked about remote work before, so I hope you can find some enlightening words for me, thanks in advance. Signed Anonymous. Well, first of all, let me start by saying you have your head in the right place, personal involvement with the people you are leading is incredibly important. And having empathy and respect for the relationships themselves, that's where leadership begins. Servant leadership isn't just a buzzword, it's how leadership works. It's what leadership really is. So now let's talk about some of the questions more in depth and discuss scenarios where remote work could work out for leadership. And that's really the first answer, go ahead and ruin the rest of the podcast. If you're hanging on a thread here wondering, can I be a leader and be a remote? The answer is yes, it is possible. There are definitely teams that have remote leadership. And on top of that, there are teams that are 100% distributed, 100% remote. There are companies that are 100% remote. So we're going to talk about some of this stuff, but I want to dive into a few of the things that you mentioned in this question. The first thing that you mentioned, software development is one of the most remote inviting industries in the world. And that's for a few reasons. Obviously, talent is distributed worldwide. There are people all over the world who have talent as software developers. Thus, the hiring pool is necessarily worldwide. If you're looking to build a team of people who are truly talented, then opening up your possibilities to the whole world, or at least to an entire country, for example, that can greatly increase the quality of the workers that you have on your team. Finding talent, especially if you're looking for specialists rather than generalists, finding that talent is much more likely, you're much more likely to find a fit if you select from the worldwide or even a nationwide audience. In many cases, it is directly more cost effective to hire someone remotely than it is to hire them and also pay for them to move. There's a lot of reasons for this. Some of them have to do with cost of living. Some of them have to do with the actual relocation costs. A lot of times, people are going to be willing to take a different salary if they can stay where they are. There's a lot of reasons for this. For example, you may not want to uproot your entire family if you have a family and you find a job in a different city. Moving your family to a different city can be an emotionally and financially stressful process. If you can stay where you are, that can be hugely beneficial to your family life. Of course, friends and culture make a huge difference on these metrics as well. There's a lot of reasons why people personally want to stay where they are even if they find a job in a different city. That can make it financially beneficial for the companies that are hiring remote. Transferring the work itself, the actual code, is nearly instantaneous. That's part of the reason why software development is one of the most remote and inviting industries in the world because transferring the work from one person to another, you don't have to wait on it to ship across the country because the transferring is all done digitally. It's incredibly powerful because this type of work lends itself to distributed companies because it itself, the work itself, is distributed. It makes sense that software development would be distributed. If leadership is primarily a personal and relational endeavor, how can one be a leader when working in isolation? This is really the email summed up. If leadership is primarily a relational thing, if it is primarily how I can get to know you as an associate developer, then how can I do that? How can I develop good relationships, deep relationships remotely? Well, first we have to start by identifying the fact that there are many different expressions of leadership that you will take on in your career. There's different times where each of these expressions is going to be more important or more pronounced than the other. For example, technical executive leadership. This is the most common type of leadership for lead developers because really all we're talking about here is actually reviewing code and developing the standards that your team is going to follow, deciding what types of frameworks or what languages you're actually going to use, the actual technical leadership making decisions, making executive decisions in the technical space, writing and talking about those standards, about those decisions, and justifying why you chose those things. These are all parts of leadership that are not necessarily directly relational, but they may be a large part of your job as a technical leader. You can absolutely execute these things remotely. There's nothing to keep you from evaluating a tool remotely. Another type of leadership you will encounter, group dynamics leadership. This is when you are leading the structure of a group, managing the interpersonal aspects of, for example, team pairings, pairing two or three programmers together, pairing a programmer with a designer or pairing a front end programmer with a back end programmer, putting the right people on a project together. While this requires a pretty extensive knowledge of the personalities of the people on the team, the practice itself is equal parts, managerial and relational. So a lot of what you do when you're managing a group you can do remotely. Another type of leadership that you're going to encounter is principled leadership or leadership by example. This is setting forth ideas that others elect to follow without necessarily developing a personal relationship with them. This is pretty much never because you don't want to develop the relationship or because it's a hassle, but rather it happens when companies scale. Leadership may not necessarily have a direct relationship with all of the associates in the company, but their examples and the values that they subscribe to, the things that they do, those values will have a cascading effect on the people that they lead. You can see this when you have a company that has multiple locations and still has a leader that stays in basically one location. My guess is the person who sent this email in, my guess is that you're not going to get into this scenario anytime soon, but that may be eventually kind of a model of leadership that you will follow is developing patterns, developing values, developing examples that you can lead by example, you can act out what you want the people that you lead to do in their own careers or to do with, for example, the code they write. Another type of leadership, and this gets more into their relational leadership that you're talking about, is one-on-one mentoring. Mentoring is a huge topic that we can't cover in one episode. Mentoring is not just having a relationship with someone who you think is better at something than you are and having coffee every other week with them. That's not the totality of mentorship. Mentorship is a much more involved topic than we can cover in a single episode. One of the most important parts of mentorship is reasonable and predictable access. We'll talk a little bit more about this later on in today's episode, but that simply means that those you are mentoring have a way to be personal with you on a consistent and predictable basis. If you are a mentor, if you are leading another developer directly, if you have a relationship with another developer, you need to have a consistent touch point. You need to have a consistent time where you are spending one-on-one energy with that person. Whether you do this remotely or in person doesn't always make a huge difference in the quality of those meetings. We're going to talk a little bit more about how a remote mentoring relationship would look like in a secondary episode, a follow-up, episode to this episode. Again, this is a huge topic and we can't cover it all in one episode. There's all these different types of leadership or styles of leadership, aspects of leadership that you're going to encounter as you move forward with your career, especially if you want to become a leader. Often when we think of leadership, we forget one of the things that I listed above or perhaps we only focus on one of the things that I listed above. In fact, it is all of the above and much, much more. It's important to understand when and how different parts of your responsibilities as a leader will be affected by your physical location. There are times when it will be and there are times when it won't be. For example, a lot of the technical work that you will do as a leader is relatively unaffected by your location. Assuming that you have some kind of cloud-enabled version control system that you and your team use on a regular basis, you probably have access to the code you need and you can push it to the servers for others to have access. It's likely that that process is followed no matter where you are if you're in the office or out of the office that you follow the same practice of pushing to that remote repository, for example. But there definitely are other aspects that can be affected by your location. I want to cover when does remote leadership work well? In another episode, as a follow-up episode, I'm going to talk about what you need to do to be a great remote leader. We've got some really practical tips that will come in that follow-up episode. First, let's talk about situations where remote leadership can possibly work. The first type of situation is if the distribution, if distributed work, is already a part of the DNA of your team. Let me say that again. If your team is already distributed, then it makes sense that your leadership is distributed as well and the team is already primed for this concept. You're going to notice that a lot of this is about psychology. It's about the pre-existing conditions of your team. It's important to understand what your position in that team is relative to what that team is used to. If you come in and you're very different from everyone else, then obviously that's going to be perceived as a change and you're going to have to deal with some of the side effects of change. If distribution is already a part of the DNA of your team, if most of the relationships on your team are not co-located, then presence is not short-circuited. In other words, in the context of their professional relationships, if you can maintain equally present relationship to those you lead as they already have with their other co-workers, it is much more likely that the quality of those relationships can be retained. What are we saying here? Basically, we're saying if you are going to be remote, it's going to be easier if everyone else on the team is already remote. If you imagine a scenario where everyone else on the team is already co-located and you are the only remote person and you also happen to be their leader, that's going to be a little bit more difficult to deal with most likely. Again, remote leadership works well when distribution is already a part of the DNA of the team. One example of when remote leadership can work well is in contractor-heavy leadership roles. This is very practical. In contractor-heavy leadership roles, if your team is made up primarily of remote contractors, in other words, the working period that they're going to be working with you has a set end date. If they have a contract that has a set end date, and if contractors are coming in and going out of projects with your company, it's likely that your relationship with those contractors is going to be shorter lived and the goals of the relationships will be different from a longer-term scenario. If you don't have a wide open door into the future with the people that you're leading, then it's going to be a lot easier. This happens a lot of the time with freelancers, with contractors. They come on for a short period of time and then they move on to a different project, perhaps, with a different company. The leadership role in these scenarios is less about relationship. Don't get me wrong. It is still about relationship, but it is less about relationship than when you have a much more involved longer-term relationship like you would in a non-contractor environment, like you would with a developer who has a salary employee on your team who is looking to learn from you, who is perhaps early in the industry and they're looking to build their relational capital. These are all scenarios where working remotely is going to have to have a lot more investment and a lot more intentionally from your part. Working remotely with contractor-heavy leadership roles, those situations are a little bit easier, a little less energy for the remote leader. The third and final situation that we're going to talk about where remote leadership kind of naturally works well is in teams that have a well-defined rhythm. Really this is kind of the theme of the follow-up episode, but in teams that have a well-defined rhythm, a large part of leadership and really anything dealing with any type of relationship is consistency, predictability. If you are inconsistent as a leader, it is extremely difficult for the people you lead to build trust in ultimately a sense of homeostasis, a sense of safety. When an employee feels a sense of chaos, closeness becomes even more important. If things are kind of out of whack, then closeness becomes really important and closeness is harder to accomplish remotely. However, when an employee feels a sense of steadiness and predictability, remote communication tools can often stand in the gap well enough to build a strong leadership relationship with those employees. Here we're going back to what we mentioned earlier, the predictable access that you should have if you are going to be a remote leader. This is going to be incredibly important for teams that want to develop a consistent rhythm, a well-defined rhythm. That means consistent access to you as a remote leader. We're going to talk more about this topic of remote leadership in the next episode. Thank you so much for sending this in. Once again, the sender was anonymous. Thank you again to sending this in. If you have a question for me that you'd like for me to answer on the show, please reach out. Go and check out the other shows on spec. Go to spec.fm. The show notes for today's episode and every episode of Developer Teak may be found on spec.fm. But more importantly, there are other incredible shows, for example, does not compute. Orthogonal, design details, tons of other great shows that you as a designer or a developer or somewhere in between would definitely find interesting. Go and check it out. Thank you again for listening to today's episode and until next time, enjoy your tea.