Dr. Aaron Brown 0:01
Welcome to the Center for the advancement of virtual organizations podcast episode 51, how to be an enabler of virtual teams and not a micromanager. I'm Aaron Brown, Assistant Professor of business and finance at North Central University. And today we're joined by Carl monello. Carl is a senior leader for process improvement and program management. Today, our discussion will focus on virtual teams, and how to generate clear deliverables for team members. Welcome, Carl. And thank you so much for taking the time to come and chat with us.
Carl Manello 0:40
Well, thank you for having me here. And I'm very excited to be here.
Dr. Aaron Brown 0:43
So currently, in previous episodes, we've been talking about things unique to businesses and organizations operating remotely, or entirely virtually. Now, more than a year out from the global shift to the virtual workplace, people have become more accustomed to video conferencing and zoom and other platforms. But as we explore returning to the office, and hybrids of in office work versus remote environments, it seems to me that I hear more questions around how to hold team members accountable. So with that said, Carl, you serve as a senior leader for process improvement and program management. And today, you're here to share more about forming virtual teams. But to get us started, can you tell us just a little bit about yourself?
Carl Manello 1:34
Sure, Aaron, I'm currently a senior consultant with transforming solutions. And I've got over 30 years of experience as both a consultant and as a corporate employee, in individual contributor roles as well as senior roles. This is I think, my fifth tour of duty as a consultant. And I jumping back and forth between consultancies in corporate America, I've worked at five different corporations. I've had the benefit of leading numerous local teams, but as well as teams that have both national and international footprints.
Dr. Aaron Brown 2:09
Hmm, wow, wow. So just to dive right in. I've never interviewed anyone for a role in an organization. And that interview, he said, You know, I could really benefit from some good old fashioned micromanagement. I really think that's a management style I've been missing out on so you know, I say that tongue in cheek, but in your leadership via virtual teams, what are practical steps you utilize to manage instead of micromanage virtual employees in order to do what is right for the organization?
Carl Manello 2:43
Yeah, that's an interesting point, Aaron, no, but nobody does want that. I believe what most employees want is to do the right thing. And as a born pragmatist, and maybe a little bit of a skeptic, I think even that was hard for me to come to understand is, for the most part in the workplace, we've got mature, skilled, capable adults who want to do the right thing. What it boils down to, for my perspective is engagement and enablement in engagement is helping a team feel that they're involved, that they have a voice, they can make a difference, and that they're valued. enablement about giving them the tools and the backing, they need to get their job done. micromanagers don't do that. They're there to be task managers oversee you, usually with a whip rarely with the carrot, and make sure you're doing what you're trying to do. I didn't enjoy that. And I've tried very hard in my roles, whether it's virtual or on prem, to treat my teams with with the respect by providing the engagement enablement they need.
Dr. Aaron Brown 3:45
That's awesome. So it sounds like what I'm hearing, you know, for those of us who geek out on leadership theory, it's it's a transformational approach to virtual teams, as opposed to a transactional approach to virtual team management.
Carl Manello 4:01
Yeah, I think that's well said, I, I'm not sure I could definitely align with any one of the academic approaches. But I think it's, uh, let me use the word holistic, I think it's a holistic approach to getting work done, as opposed to the minutiae of micromanaging and getting involved at the transactional level. So yeah, that's awesome.
Dr. Aaron Brown 4:21
So obviously, the move from in office productivity and management mood virtually due to the pandemic. You know, again, nice little joke, somebody was talking to me the other day, and they said, Yeah, you know, with COVID-19, I was like, Whoa, what's COVID So, just wanted to give them a hard time because, you know, nobody's oblivious to this, but some studies demonstrating increase in productivity. Since more work has moved virtually or remotely. In your leadership. What are the methods you incorporate to ensure productivity is both of high quality and productivity or to use your words engagement and enablement.
Carl Manello 5:07
I think one of the first challenges actually Aaron is, is to define productivity and quality. Before I joined my last company in a senior it leadership role, the team was happily functioning, they had been around for a long time before I showed up. And there were no measures, there were no metrics that could define quality or productivity, they just didn't happen to have any gotchas that came up and got them in jeopardy with their business partners. But I think to create the environment of engagement and enablement, I laid out a map for them where we could benchmark our quality. And I asked the team to kind of fingerprint it, put it in place, make it their own. So instead of coming up with the answer, I came up with a guiding framework and said, go build this. So it works again, trusting in them as mature, capable adults wanting to do the right thing. We measured what we did, we showcased it, whether it was good news or bad news, and we shared that with our business partners. And I worked to ensure that those internal customers knew the value that they were getting from the team. I think having that backing enabled the team and made them feel that they could be more self fulfilling, because they knew they had air cover if and when it was needed.
Dr. Aaron Brown 6:30
So you said so many good things that caught my attention that I really want to do a deep dive into. But one aspect that you mentioned was benchmarking and trusting the team in place to create their or identify their own performance metrics are their own KPIs. What were some of what are some best practices around guiding a team, as they're developing their own benchmarks, metrics and KPIs.
Carl Manello 7:04
I won't go so far as to say their best practices. But what what I put in place with the team was kind of a laying of the land that said, Look, we need something to demonstrate to our internal business partners. what it is we do, and we can put all kinds of metrics in place, is it geeks, we could have said X number lines of code per day, that would not have been a good measure, because it wasn't meaningful to our customers. But if we could explain to our business partners, that we kept the systems up and running 23 and a half hours a day, that's probably not good enough. That was then a meaningful metric to them. So with the guidance of we need to establish meaningful metrics for our customers, I asked each of the different groups within my team to find out what was meaningful to their customers, and then see if we could come up with objective measures around that.
Dr. Aaron Brown 7:59
I'm just taking notes here, Carl, this is good stuff. So with everything that you've just laid out, we might ask the question, well, then how would you balance risk, cost and value in the benchmarking the metrics, the KPIs, your internal customers? What are some methods that you utilize to balance that risk, cost and value?
Carl Manello 8:26
Aaron, it's funny that you say that because that that was an underlying principle that our CIO used to mention to us all the time was balanced, cost, risk and value. So it was kind of drilled into our heads, I think the way that we tried to balance that was looking at the effort it would take to measure quality. One of the things that we did from a productivity standpoint was measure our time. And that was the productive time that we put into solving problems for the company, we could have measured that down to five minute increments. But that would have taken a lot more work would have been distracting for employees and probably wouldn't have added a lot of value to our internal customers. Instead, we chose half hour increments easier to measure probably a little bit more meaningful for our business partners. So whenever we looked at something, we wanted to make sure that perfection didn't get in the way of good enough. And that helped us to assess how much effort we wanted to put into solving a problem or challenging a risk versus the value that we'd get out of it.
Dr. Aaron Brown 9:31
Okay, excellent. Excellent. So, I want to circle back just a little bit to what might be some might consider leadership and company culture ideals. Specifically, how do you empower virtual employees to be thoughtful and purposeful in their work activities.
Carl Manello 9:55
I think one of the first things I did was I made sure to treat the room Folks the same as the on prem employees, everyone had a job to do. Everyone had their daily, weekly, monthly to do list. They had skills and capabilities that that's why they were hired. So kind of going back to engagement and enablement, if they felt that they were in charge of what they did, and they had buy in to the vision and strategy that I had sketched out, they felt part of the organization, wherever they sat. They weren't just a cog in the wheel, but they were a valuable part of contributing to our success. They were empowered. And it I think it kind of got rid of location, location was no longer concern. So I was in the middle of the country with team members in Texas, New Jersey, and in Ohio. And it began to go away, it didn't matter. We certainly had technology to support us. And this was before the pandemic. But I think it was the underlying, I'm going to keep going back to those two is kind of my mantra, the engagement and the enablement. Got them the empowerment to do their job.
Dr. Aaron Brown 11:12
And kind of a question to go along with that is, you know, in the past 1020 years, the importance of mission and vision, with any type of organization, whether it be for profit or nonprofit, has always been at the forefront. And so what are some ways that you keep not just the company policies, but the overall goal of the organization in front of virtual employees,
Carl Manello 11:46
I think it's taking it out of the idea of the corporate mission, and really decomposing it or digesting it down to the level of the individual contributor. So it's, it's practical, it's tactile, it's something they can really get their head around. And that became a challenge for a technology team when when a corporate goal was meeting the needs of our customers. So these were insurance policyholders, it's hard to explain to a programmer that they actually can contribute to policy owner wellbeing. Once we cracked that nut by showing them the intricate path backwards from policy writing to an application to the system that enabled them to login to the code that they were building. contributors, again, regardless of where they sat, could align themselves to a personal goal that then supported the corporate goal. And again, I think that kept them engaged because they understood how they aligned to the corporate mission and vision.
Dr. Aaron Brown 12:48
Fantastic, fantastic. One last question. Again, it's it's a cultural question around leading virtual teams. But we briefly touched upon transactional versus transformational. And I understand that you may not necessarily put some of these experiences in those terms, but how would you? Or what would you recommend to other leaders of virtual teams, what would you recommend, maybe one or two actions to help foster an attitude for to ensure the business partners or clients success?
Carl Manello 13:29
Well, you just use the keyword air and i think that's that's attitude. And and one of the things that I did was put down on paper and kind of asked everyone to print it out and stick it up on their bulletin board at home or hanging in there cube was some values and key assumptions for the organization. And let me just give you a hint at what those look like because I think they were really important for the people to understand the culture we were facing as a distributed team values, we're do what's right for the company.
And that sounds easy to say, and it took a lot to peel the onion on that and determine how one could implement that concept. But it was important that that was our number one value as a team. Another one was focused on quality. And what that meant is regardless of where you sat, regardless of your specific job quality needed to be top of mind, again, these are high level concepts that I think give people the backbone and the degrees of freedom to go do their job. assumptions that I published work, asking questions is okay, and it's expected. Back to your concept on micromanagement.
Nobody wants a micromanager but they do know they do want to know that they have a leader they can go to and safely ask stupid questions. That was an assumption I put out to the team that anytime they needed to ask, there was no downside to asking questions. And the last one I'll highlight though this, they weren't. This was an all of them is Mistakes will happen.
And being wrong is okay. And I think that goes back to your cost value and risk, we weren't going to overwork ourselves to prevent all mistakes, we certainly didn't want to celebrate having them. But when we did, what was important for the team to understand is how they responded to those mistakes. And it these assumptions and values enabled a very distributed team that was national, to come together and work in a unified way that got us to be very successful with our business partners.
Dr. Aaron Brown 15:31
That's awesome. That's awesome. I love those answers. One thing I say from time to time is that if you were virtually It feels like the metaphorical or proverbial water cooler is missing in the workplace that you don't know exactly who you can walk down and waste your time at the water cooler with and ask questions, you know, foster those relationships. So I think these steps are phenomenal for people who are working in a virtual environment. So with that said, Carl, you've given us a ton of great information today, that points us in a great direction with virtual teams, are there any additional pieces of advice or bits of wisdom you might leave with us today that would pertain to managing virtual organizations?
Carl Manello 16:25
I think the key takeaway Aaron is the challenge is really incumbent on the leader to understand, provide trust, and try to treat the virtual team just as they would an on premise team. If they wouldn't be walking the floor every five minutes looking over people's shoulders on prem, they probably shouldn't do that to a virtual team either. So as much as possible, if we can treat remote workers the same, or virtual team the same as an on prem team, I think that'll help the leaders understand their approach better.
Dr. Aaron Brown 17:00
That is phenomenal advice, and you've got the gears in my head turning with everything that you've shared with us today. Carl, thank you so much for joining us in support of this center for the advancement of virtual organizations. We greatly appreciate your insights. And we know that our listeners are going to do nothing but benefit from your experience. Thank you so much.
Carl Manello 17:23
Awesome. It was my pleasure to be here. Thank you.