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Asynchronous relationship building

Writer's picture: Meg BearMeg Bear

Updated: Jan 13


The other day I was asked a question that gave me pause. It’s one I’ve been asked a lot in my career but I think given my sabbatical I’m more pensive about my response. The question was about building and growing remote teams in India. Something that most leaders in tech will need to do at some point in their career.


I realized that a lot of what is important to this topic lies in the non-verbal part of my cognition. I find myself coming to suggestions that sound very hand wavey – you need to try to meet in person, you need to care about the human, you need to show up and be human first. Yes all of these are true but how exactly do you do that? Well that is both obvious to me somehow and something I can’t really break down for others – a textbook description of a unrecognized strength.


My background processing brain has been scratching at that thought to try to understand where are the 10k hours behind this strength and why have I tossed aside their memories?

As I have been been connecting with more people in this vacuum time I am learning and I am also beginning to process a lot about myself – it’s tough. I have to be honest, I don’t get very far digging into the messy stuff (yet – NB, I had no idea this was out there either, sometimes I love the Interwebs) but I’m collecting a lot of data.


Where it began


I began asynchronous relationship building at thirteen when I moved states, leaving behind friends and family. I’m sure just by saying I was thirteen, it is clear how I felt about this move. I was lonely and miserable and full of angst. I found a lifeline in the letters I exchanged with my friends and family back home and I was lucky to discover one was a really great writer. Creative, thoughtful, funny. I learned a lot about friendship and trust in that relationship that I carry with me today. I also learned how to freely write my own thoughts and feelings.

[For all my youngsters this was 1984 – long distance phone calls were expensive and in my world the internet and email didn’t exist. We did have family feud of course.]


When I began work in the early 90’s, I was delighted to have email and chat (I seemed to have skipped the chatroom phase but did embrace the listserv). As I began co-development projects with India, my disinterest of working graveyard shifts and my recognition that people needed time to process/understand my feedback, caused me to lean on a pattern of write it down first and then call to discuss. I’m not going to say Bezos stole it from me or anything, I’m just going to say that I got there earlier.


People frequently comment to me about how much I’m inclined to engage with the content of others. I do it because I find their ideas interesting and I learn by observation. A skill that has been a big part of my life, likely the result of being first generation with a dose of childhood trauma mixed in for good measure.


The thing I think I actually do is less about the commenting, and more about the seeing. I want to understand people and I want them to know that they have been seen. This requires investment, taking a series of small data points and putting them together over time to create an [admittedly imperfect] understanding of the person. This is the gift I am paying forward. I do this on purpose because it brings me joy [or as Amy Wilson says, rightly, “Meg is a lot nicer online than she is in real life” 😎].


This is why the how is both easy and hard, and the tactics are less important, the intention is everything.


So back to the question – “how do you build culture and relationship with remote teams".


You do it by investing the time to get to know the people. You do it by caring about what they uniquely bring to the team and you do it by going first. Offering them access to the understanding of your own strengths and imperfections.


You focus first on the why – the how becomes much easier when you understand what success looks like.



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