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For Love of Team™ is THE podcast where Leaders Simplify Teamwork, helping you: SURROUND yourself with others doing work they LOVE. Business mentor and strategist, Winston Faircloth believes that it is your love of TEAM, and not just your love of products and customers that sets you apart in the marketplace.
Our ability to have focused time to work within our gifting, our purpose, whatever brings the greatest value to the company is competing with incessant notifications, unwritten expectations from everyone in the organization, not just our managers and leaders. Hey there, it's your host, Faircloth, and this is For Love of Team. This is the podcast dedicated to helping you grow a team you love, multiplying your impact, income and freedom in business. Unlocking the what and why so essential to attracting and keeping A plus team members. So in today's new work of remote and hybrid teamwork, I want to share a hard earned lesson from my time several years ago leading a team of 30 people distributed across four different time zones.
Winston Faircloth:Namely, how to streamline communication in a hybrid working model. Many leaders grew up in a world where line of sight management was revered. That meant that people were rewarded for physically being available at the office between eight a. And five p. M.
Winston Faircloth:Or later for chance encounters in the working areas or hallways and these random encounters could lead to a spark of inspiration or collaboration. Now a popular acronym from the time I was coming into the workforce was MBWA. MBWA. Have you heard of this term? Well this is a practice traced both to Toyota and Hewlett Packard back in the 70s and 80s and it became popularized with a classic management book by Tom Peters in 1982 called In Search of Excellence.
Winston Faircloth:MBWA referred to a practice of leaders wandering around the office, often in an unstructured manner, at random, to check-in with employees, equipment, or the status of ongoing work. And by doing so, they would get a more accurate picture of what was really happening with their teams. So what is this mysterious acronym? MBWA Management by Wandering Around. Now isn't that a funny term?
Winston Faircloth:Management by wandering around. Well, I once had a leader who combined MBWA with line of sight management, and he loved to wander the halls, sticking his head into the different doors around the office. And yet when he saw you, he had an insight all right. He remembered or created another task that he needed your help with. And because he was the CEO, this took precedence over anything else on your list.
Winston Faircloth:Now we used to joke with some of my peers and I, we used to joke that whenever we saw them coming down the hall, we needed to hop into an empty office, a bathroom, or conference room just to avoid another project. MBWA and line of sight management. Well decades later, leaders are still hanging on to this principle that your physical presence for a set number of hours per day sets your value for the company. And while it is better for the leader to initiate connection and communication with team members, generally it comes at a really high, I'd say huge cost. One of the great benefits of the work from home era is that it has dramatically reduced the number of interruptions by MBWA by both leaders and team members.
Winston Faircloth:MBWA style leaders feel more constrained and they're now they're pausing before interrupting someone who's not physically present. But there's been an ominous trade off to MBWA and I call it OCD, omni channel demands. We have in this work from home world, we sense this unwritten expectation to always be available in real time, nearly around the clock and in multiple places, whether it's email, text, instant messaging, Slack, Teams, Zoom, the list just goes on and on and on. And we are we have this feeling that we are to be always available in all these different channels. That's why I call it OCD, omni channel demands.
Winston Faircloth:And what was once an annoyance in the office has become an even more chronic situation when we're working remotely. Our ability to have focused time, to work within our gifting, our purpose, whatever brings the greatest value to the company is competing with incessant notifications, unwritten expectations from everyone in the organization, not just our managers and leaders, but our peers, and anyone in the organization to respond immediately. Otherwise, there's this feeling that somehow you're ghosting disrespecting or annoying me. How come you didn't get right back to me? This is a box of our own construction.
Winston Faircloth:This multichannel always on immediate expectation omni channel demands, OCD. I think we're becoming OCD in the remote work style. And no wonder we're so exhausted, even when we've given up a crushing commute for the opportunity to work from home. Now, back when I was leading this team, we struggled with this too, because we were covering many different time zones. We had a core team at our headquarters, but our vast majority of our team worked from home, isolated from unplanned MBWA opportunities that I as the leader was trained in and was used to.
Winston Faircloth:So we had to figure out a way. We navigated a way out of this chaos by collaborating on some communication guidelines across the team. And with every significant change in an organizational culture, there's initial resistance, right? Why is that in this case? You would think this is a pretty simple strategy of saying, hey, we're going to set up some guidelines and hope that everyone will get on board with communicating in a consistent way.
Winston Faircloth:Well, everybody has their favorite way of communicating and collaborating with team members. With so many different options today, it's almost impossible to keep up with all these different ways. And yet by letting everybody do their own thing, it becomes more and more challenging to keep up with the waves of communications coming at us from a variety of different methods. And it's respectful to communicate back to the person in the way that they communicated with you. It shows respect and honor, but it's exhausting trying to keep up with all these channels.
Winston Faircloth:I was remembering, you know, I got pinged by someone and they made a request of me and did that come in by email? Did it come in by text? Is it in Slack? I can't remember where they pinged me. I know I need to get back to them.
Winston Faircloth:It's exhausting trying to find this needle in a haystack. And you know, that's a one to one communication. When you get a one to many communication, know, the person that initiates it has their favorite way of doing it. And now all of us have to be subject to that way of communicating back. It's really easy to get annoyed with all of this.
Winston Faircloth:So we ended up deciding upon some rules of the road for our work from home communications. I'm going to share these guidelines that we came up with over a decade ago. I'm going to update it for today's environment with some of the tools we have today. And I'll just give you some examples to consider. So think about this, if you had a blank sheet of paper, meaning a new organization without these norms in place, would you consider something like this?
Winston Faircloth:And if you were to implement something like this in your own organization, how much would it free you up mentally, emotionally, spiritually in terms of being and knowing how we're all going to work together. So here you go. Internal email. We used internal email for long form communications, mostly as background or information. And we said, hey, there's no response needed for at least twenty four hours.
Winston Faircloth:And if we do need a response after twenty four hours, we're going to spell that out in the subject line. So there's no mystery on whether response is required, but we're not expecting anything for twenty four hours. Again, is more background and informational base. External email, this is more tricky because now you're dealing with clients and prospects and external collaborators. So we began to take the opportunity to set blocks of time with our out of office notifications, even when we were in the office.
Winston Faircloth:It let people know that we were not available to reply to the email immediately and let them know when we were coming back. I just saw a really cool example from Doctor. Christy Goodwin who not only has her approach defined in an out of office reply, but also in her email signature. Check out this response. I think it's very respectful.
Winston Faircloth:She says, Please note, I check my email twice a day and try to respond within twenty four hours between Monday and Friday. I love that. That's very clear. And it sets an expectation upon me. If I don't hear from her right away, it's not any big deal.
Winston Faircloth:It's not a sign of disrespect or disinterest. And I've respect her approach so much I've just invited her to be a guest on an upcoming For Love of Team episode. We're going to dig into digital distractions, especially in a hybrid work environment. So I'm looking forward to Doctor. Christie joining us here soon.
Winston Faircloth:Slack. Now we use Slack as our internal communications hub. It's almost like our water cooler. Here we're able to share updates, questions and links into our project management or document hubs into specific topic channels which notifies some team members and not others. It saves us a ton of time and email.
Winston Faircloth:But even with Slack, even with the Slack tool, we go dark for big stretches of time during the business day so that we can get work done. Again, we think of Slack as our MBWA office water cooler but with a lot more focus and purpose and intentionality. Text and instant messaging. We use this for a quick response, mostly asking if someone's interruptible for a conversation. Immediate response is not required.
Winston Faircloth:If we don't get an immediate response, it means the person's busy. And they typically text or I'm back when they are available for a quick hop on a phone call or Zoom. Zoom we use for group work with a policy or guideline about cameras on for collaboration and problem solving and cameras off for updates and information sharing. There is such a thing as Zoom fatigue of being on screen all day. So cameras on for certain things and cameras off for other things that we do that universally across the group.
Winston Faircloth:And then finally phone. This is an ancient tool of communications. Not everyone likes to use the phone these days but we use phone for deep collaborative conversations and the occasional hair on fire situation. Hair on fire, the way we define it, is make an outbound call after leaving a message, call them back. Two calls in a row usually means I need to speak with you right away.
Winston Faircloth:There's something that's super urgent. We rarely do that. We protect that for the true emergencies. But a lot of times our phone calls are pre scheduled. So if somebody's calling in pretty randomly without a scheduling, it's usually a pretty urgent situation for our team members.
Winston Faircloth:And again, not everyone is comfortable across all these different channels. We all have our preference in terms of the way we'd like to communicate out and how we'd like to be communicated back. But understanding and appreciating that having a set of guidelines helps us all to be more effective in our communication strategies is a big gift to your team. And you know, the other thing we all have to acknowledge here too, is that each individual team has a different rhythm in terms of how they do and produce deep work. And so this kind of approach honors people being different in their peak time of day for deep work.
Winston Faircloth:And it allows them to have a ton of respect, gives all of us across the team a ton of respect to get our best collective work achieved. Now, again, these aren't policies, they're not rules, they're just guidelines. And our approach is to communicate these guidelines from time to time so that we both honor our different work approaches while staying connected in meaningful ways. And as independent collaborators on our team, it's our individual work coming together that has the greatest impact for clients and prospects. So to recap, here's our guideline, our guidance in terms of how we do things in the team.
Winston Faircloth:Internal email is background only. Response, if any is needed, is defined at least twenty four hours out in the subject line. External email, we're beginning to become better at communicating expectations to our clients on review and response time, both through out of office messages and signatures. Slack is our water cooler style thread, updates, links where we go dark from time to time during deep work and not on Slack 20 fourseven or even during the workday. Text an I'm are you interruptible?
Winston Faircloth:And a very short response needed. Zoom cameras on for collaboration and problem solving all for updates and information, and telephone for deeper collaboration and the rare hair on fire situation. And that's defined as two consecutive attempts to reach you on the phone back to back. So my question for you, how do you tame the OCD in your company, omni channel demands? How do you tame that within your team and your client base?
Winston Faircloth:I'd love to hear your suggestions and things that you're trying out in your team. So visit forloveofteam.com and give us your feedback on this episode or any of our episodes in the past. We'd love to share some of your insights on an upcoming show. And remember, your client experience will never exceed the ceiling of love and respect you show your team. For love of team as a leading indicator of your future success, multiplying your impact, income and freedom in business.
Winston Faircloth:Be blessed friends. I'll catch you on the next episode.