MBWA is a critical part of learning what an organization really is, and not what you think it is. An organization is composed of people, and people are complex and mercurial. That’s what makes all this fun and interesting!
Leadership from a distance is different, it relies on different skills. The valuable hallway, microkitchen, and water cooler check-ins aren’t available to you! Like all things it takes time to build the skills required to be effective remotely. We’re always bad at new things, and for many managers this is a very new thing (especially during COVID-19). Here is what I have learned to manage by walking around, when I’m hundreds of miles away from the people I work with.
Constantly gather sentiment, then check it. You’re probably wrong.
When in an office, the natural time that most people do MBWA is when they’re already walking. This is as they dash between meeting rooms, sometimes taking a bit of a detour, and looking around and observing people. When we can’t do that anymore, this sudden inability to see is acute and powerful. This is true even if people didn’t realize they were consciously MBWAing.
The most effective use of my time between meetings is to prioritize it carefully, by either checking for urgent emails or checking on individuals. Through the day, I use Slack’s search feature to see the things people are saying and where. This isn’t to spy on them, it’s to get a quick check to see if there is anything surprising to me. It’s the same as if I were walking through the office and seeing someone with their head down and looking frustrated. Those are signals to prioritize who gets attention. I have limited time and energy, and using this method ensures I can effectively identify and help out people who need support.
It’s risky to assess sentiment by reading what people are typing, usually quickly while focused on another task. What may be a clearly aggressive statement may just be due to being in a hurry. It’s human nature to overestimate our ability to guess how other people feel, and feels weird to push against that default sense. Combining that with knowing how awkward it is to bluntly ask someone how they’re feeling, it’s easy to just not do this. The burden is on you, the manager and person that needs to understand these feelings, to make it feel like a conversation. Avoid a ham-fisted, “You seem sad. Are you sad?” question but a simple, “How are you feeling?” message. Rarely do people get asked, “How are you feeling?” by someone who is genuinely interested in the answer. These quick check-in conversations can take a while to get good at it, but we’re supposed to be bad at new things.
Focus on your focus
There is no benefit to helicopter-managing on Slack, just like hovering around a physical space would just freak people out. As a manager, a lot of the best work happens when you aren’t paying attention. I have found it very helpful to just set explicit norms. I don’t check Slack during meetings, in between meetings I prioritize notifications so if I need to see something, either DM me or start a thread and do “cc @jshirley” so I can see it.
This is a case where it is better to have some small failures, missing information, and then adapting rather than spraying yourself with a firehose. I would even guess that spending so much time focusing on consuming all of Slack causes someone to miss more important messages.
The value of uninterrupted time cannot be overstated. These interrupts contribute more stress and frustration, as we typically try to make up for it by working faster. We rush through, hurrying, introducing more stress in an already stressful situation. We also tend to complete fewer things.
Make liberal use of the /dnd command. Tune your notifications. Use Do Not Disturb modes. They are your notifications, and they can either help or hurt your productivity and stress levels. If I’m not focused on how I’m focused, I get too reactive and it comes at the cost of being proactive and mindful of my work. That exhausts me, and the quality of my work suffers. It isn’t enough to leave it there, though. Advertise this with other people!
When I set my visual status to /dnd, I’m not saying “don’t send me messages” -- it’s the opposite! Send me messages, but I’ll be delayed in responding but will read as soon as I can. The last thing I want is someone to wait until I’m “available”, since they’ll just forget to send the message. This requires active conversations, you can’t just assume people will think this way. People are nice, and they don’t want to interrupt. Maybe we should really just rename “Do Not Disturb” to “You Won’t Disturb Me”?
Quantity First: Talk with more people more often
When I joined Stripe, I aimed to prevent a repeated problem where I was slow to build my network. At first, I tried to get recommendations and make each conversation be relevant and topical. I spent a lot of energy finding the right people to talk to, about the right subject, and then I just flailed. I had to adapt in order to be successful in my goal, and leveraging a practice which is readily available in an office was the key. While I can’t roam the office and encounter random people, I can approximate it by just picking people at random and hope for the best. Over time I’ve refined the randomness, and the process works well.
When working remotely, you lose the serendipity that comes from seeing someone in the hallway. Those are the moments where people are reminded of that super important thing they wanted to talk about. MBWA relies on chance, MBWA while Remote has no opportunity for success by lucky chance. Be methodical and find your own process. I use Google Tasks, with a dedicated “Follow up” list and set pretty aggressive reminders. This is effective and it also has a recurring task feature. Setting cadence for important check-ins is a super power, because it keeps the relationship going well.
Often, though, you don’t know the right person to talk to. To do this you have to cast a wide net and introduce a degree of chance and coincidence. Leverage company directories to pick people to talk to, and then reach out. I call this my Chat With an Interesting Person (CWIP) and set a weekly target based on my calendar availability (I am for 2 a week, when I’m not too busy.) This also means that I believe every person at Stripe is quite interesting. My process is super simple, but a bit nerdy: I run a script that queries our employee directory with some criteria and picks a person at random.
curl http://yourcompany.dev/api/people | jq ‘.’I then send a quick email or Slack message (depending on timezones, etc). The invite typically looks something like this:
Hey there, we haven’t met yet! I’m the Remote Hub Site Lead and would love to learn more about what you’re working on and your experiences at Stripe. Is it ok if I put 30 minutes on your calendar in the next week or two, and do you have a preference for morning or afternoon chats?
After just initial introductions, my favorite question to ask is, “What makes your job harder than it should be?” I am always fascinated by the responses to this question. An added benefit is that people naturally try to tailor their answer to what they think I’m focused on, which gives me a good signal as to how effective our document conveys what we do. I learn a lot about my own team, and the whole organization, based on this one question.
I do all of this walking around without leaving my desk, and I am always surprised by how much I learn.