Extending your reach

by Ralph Poole / Sep 23

For most of my career, I have traveled, sometimes 50% of the time at other times almost 100% of the time. One day, when I was home working on the dining room table with my laptop and my mobile phone, my daughter asked me: “You talk on the phone, do IMs and write emails. That’s what I do. Why do you get paid for doing that?” At that point in my career I was working for a global company with 90,000 people. To keep my team of 12 people in 12 different countries coordinated, motivated, and informed I wrote lots of emails, talked on the phone, did conference calls at all times of the day and night, and used IM for immediate conversations.

My sense is that a digital nomad can work anywhere and with discipline manage teams that is geographically diverse. For example, I rarely went to Australia where one of my team members worked in a local office, but we talked several times a week and emailed each other frequently. To prepare for her review, I interviewed the head of the Sydney office and several of the people she worked with to get performance feedback. For several years I gave her reviews, participated in salary discussions and managed her work. For this to be effective, however, I found that I almost had to double the time I talked to people. I scheduled weekly calls with the entire team. I made a point of talking to each person a minimum of once per week individually, so I could answer questions and give guidance. As collaborative workspaces became more acceptable we moved some of our conversation to virtual work rooms, but the lack of personal interaction diminished the effectiveness of working this way.

A digital nomad knows how to use time. Sometimes you go fast and other times you purposely slow things down. I make sure that I tell people how I will manage them and when I think we need to accelerate or be more deliberative. Working in a virtual environment requires that you actually explain your style and method of interaction very explicitly, so people do not get confused. Often, I stop and have the person tell me what they heard, so that I am confident that I communicated clearly. When something has to go quickly we shift to a virtual war room, so that everyone can participate and so that work gets distributed around the world fairly.

I recently have developers build a complex knowledge sharing application. We used the Agile methodology and team programming. However, the team was in Nicaragua and Boston. The programmers did team programming using Skype and sharing screens. This technique saved a lot of money and increased the quality of the code produced. Digital Nomads know how to organize work so that it can be done anywhere anytime.

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