Over the past six years of my career, I got to build and support distributed teams across the globe. While it’s been an opportunity that I’ll forever be grateful for and I got to work with fantastic people, it’s also challenged me as a leader and manager.

Much less happens organically through osmosis, or at the literal watercooler, but at the same time many of the challenges all teams face, like communication and collaboration, are exacerbated when we’re distributed across locations and time zones.

The common ways of building and leading teams just can’t be applied easily. That means as leaders, we often need to get much more creative.

Despite being co-located we can still create stronger, more deliberate distributed teams and produce the same, or even better results, than teams that share the same lunch table.

In this piece, I’ll share what I’ve learned about improving teams based on three key “C” pillars: connection, communication, and collaboration. Whether you’re managing teams across the world or in the same building, these approaches can help you become more strategic, communicate better, and build highly aligned, well-connected teams that deliver great products.

Three Cs for leading high-performance teams

Creating a high-performing distributed team is fundamentally about inclusion: making sure that everyone has equal opportunities to contribute by leveling the playing field and removing barriers to doing so.

It’s impossible to replicate the exact same working experience for everyone — and I don’t think that should be the goal. Instead, we should make sure everyone is able to contribute in meaningful ways and do their best work.

As leaders, we’re like the mortar between the bricks: We connect structures, teams, and people.

We hold them together. Our work as leaders isn’t supposed to be about us. It’s about the people and the teams that we support. We build structures to help others shine.

Connection: Working together with purpose

As humans, we strive to be connected with a larger purpose. But we also seek to feel connected with other people around us. When we’re in the same location as our teammates, we pick up small signals about them. We see their body language when they walk into the office in the morning. We know if people are tense or if they’re relaxed, or may recognize when they’re having more coffee than usual.

Those small signals get lost remotely, which means other things become much more important, like understanding people’s varying energy levels. When my colleagues in San Francisco start their workday, they’re high-energy and excited. But it’s 5 pm or 6 pm for me in Berlin, and it might already be dark out if it’s winter. In cases like this, it helps if all of us in a conversation are sensitive to the other person’s state of mind, and where we are in our workday.

Make space for humanness. When I joined CircleCI in 2018, I met with everyone in our engineering organization because I wanted to get to know the people we were working with. During one of those conversations, one of our engineers said to me, “I need to meet my team in person every once in a while to remind myself that they’re actual people.” The sentiment struck a chord with me.

When we mostly interact with people in the shape of pixels in video calls or icons in chat apps, it’s easy to forget that there are humans at the other end of the screens.

When we center in on each other’s humanness, we go beyond teammates’ domain expertise. We need to be curious about who they are as people, and know what drives and motivates them.

Communication: Creating clearly defined expectations

Define expectations, and surface what matters. As leaders, it’s our responsibility to make sure that our expectations are always clear to everyone on our team. That’s one of the many reasons why weekly one-on-one meetings are the backbone of our communication, as well as with our relationships with our teammates.

One of the things we did at CircleCI was to create an engineering competency matrix, and communicate it to our teams. It’s our career-growth framework for engineers. This matrix is now woven into everything we do, from hiring, to structured feedback, to performance reviews. It helps us hold everyone to the same standards, and clarify expectations as we scale.

Once we’ve set expectations for growth and performance, the next thing we need to do is communicate these standards and hold each other to them. Praise is a really beautiful way to both connect and communicate as a team. In our company Slack, we have a channel called #gratitude in which people share their appreciation for others who have helped them.

Grow together. An even better way to connect and communicate as a team is by helping each other grow through constructive criticism. In distributed teams, this can be really difficult to do well. When we mostly see each other on screens, it becomes difficult to have harder conversations.

I have a template I co-opted from the book Feedback and Other Dirty Words by M. Tamra Chandler that I often use as a starting point. I’ll ask my team to discuss our feedback preferences in this format, then discuss the responses as a group. We use what we learned to give each other much more meaningful and specific feedback.

Collaboration: Making space for others

Stay humble, and make space for others. Just as we try to connect in many small ways, there are small ways we can become better collaborators throughout the work day. For example, we can avoid dominating conversations, even when they are written communications. Think about the times when you’re sending teammates walls of text, or when you bury documents in comments. When we’re in meetings, or when we have discussions in chat, we need to ask ourselves, “How much space am I taking up right now?”

Combat hero culture and fix structural issues. “Hero culture” describes a culture where organizations reward very talented people who consistently go the extra mile to get seemingly impossible tasks done by themselves and under lots of pressure. Many companies reward this kind of heroism through promotions, or increasing influence, compensation, or visibility. Hero culture is still incredibly common in our industry, and I’ve seen it have disastrous effects on teams and organizations.

Hero culture is even more pervasive on distributed teams because of the disproportionately high visibility of this type of work compared to other work: “hero tasks” such as single-handedly fixing an issue at times that one normally wouldn’t work often come with high visibility, whereas the hard work around sustaining a team and supporting teammates in the background often goes more unnoticed.

Hero culture not only weakens teams, it also sets up the heroes for failure by putting pressure on them as the only people who can solve problems.

Building our team continuously

There’s one more “C” pillar that’s important to note here: continuity. Building great teams is a lot of work — and the process is never done. We all constantly grow and change, and the organizations we work in are ever-evolving and full of surprises. This is one of the main reasons why I love working with people so much.

Building teams is a continuous process every single day. No matter where you are in your team’s development – and no matter if your closest teammate sits across the table or across an ocean from you — focus on strong connections, intentional collaborations, and conscious communication with your teammates. Continue building your team every single day, one pixel at a time.

3 business lessons from the ‘90s that deserve a comeback

As our world becomes even more fast-paced, technologically driven and, frankly, uncertain, nostalgia can serve as a helpful coping mechanism. Reminiscing about simpler times by watching throwback TV shows or resurrecting past fashion trends can provide comfort and even inspire comebacks.

While nostalgia is typically reserved for such consumer-facing things, the tech world can — and should — tap into it, too.

Sure, technology has changed in nearly every possible way since the dot-com days, but startups and even more established companies could benefit from revisiting some of the business fundamentals that reigned supreme in the ‘90s.

Too often, today’s founders are starting companies by creating culture first and believing (rather than confirming) that their ideas will attain marketability. A couple of interesting ideas and a cool employee lounge with bean bag chairs and ping pong tables don’t make for a successful, long-term business, however.

Rather than chasing the latest quirky employee perks or letting a thirst for vague buzzwords like “disruption” distract from treating employees, customers and products with real attention and care, I’d urge companies to take a walk down memory lane and embrace the following three business lessons from the good old ‘90s:

Trust

Trust wasn’t really an issue when tech companies in the ‘90s were launching products — it was just implied. Today, though, mistrust in tech companies and the products they deliver runs rampant.

Given how complex technology has become and understandable concerns about data security, now more than ever companies need to prioritize earning customers’ trust through action .

If you promise a specific feature by a certain date and don’t deliver, trust will instantly be destroyed. If you consistently underpromise and overdeliver, however, trust can be earned and the elusive concept of “delighting” customers can actually be realized.

Also, don’t forget about the value of accumulated trust, because things can and likely will go awry. Even the best-intentioned companies aren’t always able to deliver what they promise, so it’s critical that a healthy level of trust is established as a baseline via regular and honest communication.

( By the way, when things do go awry, make sure you communicate a “get-well plan” as quickly as reasonably possible with your constituents — that’s how trust is maintained!)

Product vs. service (it’s just semantics)

All tech companies sell and develop products, whether it’s a product that’s a tangible thing or a service that lives in the cloud. When you create something that someone else wants and is willing to pay for, the semantics of how you describe what you sell really don’t matter.

What does matter is making sure you’re selling something the market truly wants , rather than something it simply doesn’t have.

A company will never be successful if they develop products that address lower-priority challenges and then chase markets to sell them to. So, focus on uncovering the urgency and pervasiveness of an industry’s major pain points to gain a solid understanding of the potential market for an effective solution.

Also, make sure you understand the importance of developing products that are good versus those that are just okay, or worse, not so good — this is the cornerstone of building successful, lasting companies.

Empathy

One of the most common reasons why companies fail is because they make too many business decisions without considering their employees and empathizing with their values. You can’t claim to value your team but only do it when it’s convenient or affordable.

This is probably the most important “walk the talk” principle in any business in any decade: treat people the way you know you should and the way you’d like to be treated.

As a founder or leader, listen to what’s important to your employees and what they’re passionate about, and deliberately factor in those values to the mission of your company.

It’s a simple truth: successful businesses are perpetually focused on their market, product, customers, and employees.

They understand that a sustainable culture grows out of innovation (rather than the other way around) and they never incubate a company in a way that resembles a Hollywood pitch meeting, with people throwing around ideas and picking whatever sounds likely to have a killer opening weekend.

As a founder or leader in the ever-turbulent 2020s, look to the ‘90s for sound business guidance and inspiration. Bury the notion that companies can make people happy by delivering half-baked promises and products, and recognize that lasting success requires a genuine commitment to mutual success — of customers, employees, investors, and the company itself.

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Did you know Sharmadean Reid, the author of this piece, is speaking at TNW2020 this year? Check out their session on ‘Business by women, for women’ here .