Helen Brown Group

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So you’re managing virtual workers now…

Picture of the door to the Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy, Manchester Museum

Chances are pretty good that you didn’t expect to be where you are right now, managing people who are no longer sitting within 100 feet of you. I will admit that when I started this company and hired my first two virtual employees, I got really lucky. Both were (and are) self-motivated people with a sense of responsibility and respect for their teammates.

I had never managed a virtual team before, and back then there really weren’t any examples for me to copy. We just sort of made it up as we went along.

There have been a few hiccups along the way, but thankfully not too many, and in that time we’ve learned a lot. I wanted to share some of the best lessons I’ve learned personally, as well as some I’ve gotten from some expert advice along the way to help you be successful in the weeks (and months?) ahead.

The ship is rocking. You are the stabilizer.

You’ve hired good people. One of the best things you can do now is to avoid micromanaging them. Everybody is figuring out this new world of working from home, and there are going to be bumps in the first few weeks for your staff – and for you personally. Factor in wiggle room while people are getting settled in.

Also, remember that this is just a very unsettling time, and people are going to react to it differently. Some will just “keep calm and carry on” (or maybe that’s just what they’ll project to the world). Others will be overwhelmed as the primary caregiver and salary earner. People that have always been a calming force on your team may suddenly become unreliable as they have difficulty processing what’s happening. And the normally unreliable one may prove to be a huge sense of comfort or laughter when you least expect it. People will settle down, but probably not for a few weeks.

Your demeanor as a supervisor will really matter now, too. When times are unsettled, people long for normalcy and they appreciate steadiness. I’m not saying that you need to memorize Churchill speeches or become someone you’re not. But right now is the time to be that leader you’ve always wanted to be.

You’re going to have to be flexible

If you can, extend non-critical deadlines. Although someone used to be at their desk at 9:00 on the dot, if they’ve got kids that are not in school that’s probably not going to be the case anymore. Other workers might be more productive from dawn until mid-afternoon. As a manager who wants to keep and motivate your team, you’re going to have to find your zen about this. When there are non-moveable deadlines, be sure you’re crystal clear about them.

Trust, but verify

To help your team manage their time, and enable you to spot trouble areas before they happen, you and your team may need to start using and relying on tools like Toggl for time management and project management tools to stay productive, even if you haven’t tracked staff time before. Most of your team are going to be conscientious, but some will find it harder to concentrate at home and you’ll want to pick up on that quickly and figure out how to help them be successful. This will also give you key data points if you eventually need to discipline someone.

Make sure you set clear expectations. “I’ll need to see that soon” is not a useful deadline anymore (if it ever was). You can’t just drop by someone’s desk to see how things are going with a project. Communicate specific deadlines in email so there is a(n electronic) paper trail.

Transparency is really important

You might want to start a Google doc or have a document on your shared server with important dates or deadlines that everyone has access to. We use a group calendar to track meetings, medical appointments, and vacations and we also have a shared document with everyone’s contact information in case of emergency.

We use Zoom Projects for managing team-work, and we log all completed work in a shared spreadsheet when it’s complete. Anything that you can centralize and make transparent for everyone, do it now. For example, in order to ensure that everyone is aware of resources, handbooks, or deadlines that are important for your team’s success, you may want to put them in a shared document. Those sorts of documents are helpful for new employees starting, too.

This is a great time to be on the lookout for new ways to work

One person on our team is designated as our Efficiency Lead, and he is constantly looking out for ways of improving our business practices. Now might be a good time to appoint someone or even create a small committee to be an advocate for the team and to recommend better ways of working. Be open to work processes evolving on the fly.

Communicate lots more now

It’s a thin line between not bothering people/just letting them do their work, and trying to reach out and be supportive and available for them. That said, even the most introverted member of your team will be glad for increased positive contact right now. The extroverts are already pinging you.

Most experts say to check in daily with your teammates. This is easy to do if you use something like Slack or Zoom where you can start or pick up conversations as a group or one-on-one anytime you want. While we use Zoom for group and individual chats, each of the three HBG managers also have weekly individual check in phone meetings with the people they supervise. We also meet as a full group twice a month in a video chat. It’s always nice to see each other, Brady Bunch style.

While that has always been our normal way of communicating, we now have a new normal, so last week as schools closed we created a new Zoom chat room just for the parents on our team so they can share ideas and kid activities with each other. We may even have two new junior HBG pen pals as a result! It’s important to keep tabs on what your team needs now to be productive, and understand that those needs are going to evolve.

This isn’t forever

This may not be forever, but we’re also not going to quickly forget these days. There are long-held “truths” our organizations had that we’re going to learn really weren’t true at all. And also it’s inevitable that we’re going to develop new, innovative ways of working, and that part is genuinely interesting and even exciting.

Those of us who help re-envision leadership (whether from the front or from the middle) and those who pull together are going to be the most successful in this new brave new world. What are you doing now to manage your team remotely? Share in the comments so we can all benefit and learn!

Next week: what we’ve learned about hiring virtual staff

 

 

 

 

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Leading from behind – part 2

Last week I started this mini-series about Tom Kalil’s thought-provoking article, “Policy Entrepreneurship at the White House; Getting Things Done in Large Organizations.” Before I go on, I’d like to reiterate: don’t let the long title put you off reading it, nor make the mistake of thinking that it only has value for people in behemoth-sized fundraising offices.

Kalil puts forth 12 maxims that he and his colleagues found to be true for getting things to happen, and I’ve seen evidence over the years that each of these recommendations have been true for fundraising shops that are achieving strong results.

In most fundraising shops, the research, prospect identification, operations, and relationship management teams don’t tend to be located on the bridge of the ship. But that doesn’t mean that leadership can’t come from those areas, and – I’d argue – it’s important that it does.

So if you missed last week’s installment on how the first six maxims apply to our work, go take a look – I’ll wait here. When you’re back, just start below to catch up.

Maxim 7: Find and recruit allies

Kalil encourages us to develop and collaborate with a network of allies, including “idea people;” the assistants and chiefs of staff for the powerful in your network; “Doers” – people who follow up when they say they will; people with a lot of social capital; and people who are eager to make an impression or further their career.

It’s never a bad idea to build a collaborative network when you want to create change, and thinking strategically about who might want to help you in your endeavor – rather than going it alone – is always smart. Build up a network of supportive champions to help, especially when you may be rowing against the current.

My addition to Kalil’s list would be to include people that you trust to tell you the truth if a plan needs more work (or is just a bad idea).

Maxim 8: Think of the end at the beginning

I laughed as I read this, because I really think this should have been Maxim 1. Think of every time you’ve done a successful wealth screening, or planned a multi-stage project that worked, or been involved in a database conversion that actually went live on time. It was probably because your asked yourselves thing like:

What do we want our campaign reports to look like? That helped determine the fields you needed to populate in your database and the information you needed to know from donors and prospective supporters.

What do we want to learn from our wealth screening? Thinking about that first guided you in what records to send to the vendor.

How many prospective donors at what levels do we need to meet our goal? Imagine not having thought of that before planning your capital campaign!

Success isn’t ever guaranteed, but it’s certainly a lot more secure if you think of the end result first, and then back-fill the details for how you’re going to achieve it.

Leadership from the top, the middle, or from the lowest rung means that you’re helping think about these details for your department or for your specific position.

Maxim 9: Save the world one document at a time (or “write it down, make it happen).

Sometimes things become important – or accepted divisional policies – simply because they’re written down. They become codified and made routine. If a policy or series of activities are important for your department’s (or your entire division’s) success, consider creating a step by step manual, or road map for people to follow.

I can think of all kinds of ways I’ve seen this used in successful fundraising shops, from prospect research and prospect management manuals and user guides, to “Research For the Non-Researcher” links pages, to gift planning fact sheets, to gift processing manuals, to internal podcasts and presentations on key topics.

These documents can become especially helpful when there is a transfer from one person to another, or to solidify a process for doing something.

Maxim 10: Make the schedule your friend

Indefinite deadlines are the enemy of getting things accomplished, and in this maxim Kalil outlines the benefits of creating an event (or, sometimes, an artificial deadline) to move things along.

Certain people are brilliant at setting (what some might consider false) deadlines (say, for example, for when a profile is needed), but the fact is that setting a deadline – even if it’s a made-up one – is brilliant. Sometimes that deadline just a dart-throw at the calendar – “I would like the information on this date, but I could take it later if I needed to” and no one should ever feel bad about asking if a deadline is set in stone or moveable.

Creating false deadlines for yourself is also not a bad move if there a task that you wish would go away. Getting it over with by creating a deadline for yourself to move it off the schedule frees you up for more creative work after.

Maxim 11: Use standing meetings effectively

Many of us know the experience of Death by Prospect Review Meeting. Tom Kalil shares 4 direct questions to help you never have a 6-hour meeting again. (or maybe it just felt like six hours…):

  • What are you trying to accomplish?
  • Have you worked to “pre-sell” your position to key participants in the meeting?
  • Should you bring a document to help shape the discussion and signal your interest in the topic?
  • Are clear next steps and assignments coming out of the meeting and captured in minutes?

Answering these questions yourself well in advance of each meeting will help you provide efficiency and leadership that everyone in the room will appreciate, and your preparation will mean that your goals will have more of a chance of being met.

Maxim 12: Have a large and constantly growing “toolbox.”

This maxim hits me right in my core, because two things that I strongly believe in are continuing education and understating the context within which we’re working. As you’ve heard me say many times before, prospect research is a field where we have to take responsibility for our own learning – whether it’s advocating for our place at the table or our seat in a conference chair. It’s only through understanding what the tools are and how to use them that we will succeed professionally – and help our organizations succeed on a collective scale.

It also means taking ourselves out of our comfort zone to shadow a fundraiser or attend an event or read a book that informs our work. Or to look outside our normal wheelhouse – a White House, for example – to get ideas on how to be more entrepreneurial and serve as leaders, no matter where we sit on the org chart.

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Leading from behind – part 1

Hierarchically speaking, fundraising intelligence doesn’t usually sit at the top of any nonprofit organization’s organization chart. In fact, the most junior member of the Research team usually inhabits one of the boxes at the bottom of the chart, in my ongoing study.

But I’ve also known for a while that org charts can be deceptive. It’s the culture of a place and the specific people in the boxes that are usually the drivers of who has the ‘power’ and who doesn’t. Certain people, regardless of box geography, are able to reach beyond borders. [Read more…]

ABOUT HBG

The Helen Brown Group was formed in 2002 with a goal to be different.

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