detectivegibbles

Sales Director

Remote leadership...

I've been recently asked to begin leading a remote team as I am one of the only remote sales team members within our organization.

It's my first taste of leadership and frankly, I'm not sure where to start seeing as I'm remote, the new team member will be remote and leadership from afar can be tricky.

Any advice? I tried browsing previous threads but nothing jumped out in terms of remote leadership. Feel free to link any previous posts I may have overlooked!

-Detective

PS. I've been a ghost the last few weeks. Hell of a december for me between personal life and work items. Forgive me! Excited to be back and active in the community.

🏋️‍♀️ Leadership

6 comments

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CoorsKing

WR Officer

Retired King of the Coors Knights

I am an IC, but every member of my team lives in a different state from one another, including our manager. The general topics are no different than if we were in the office, just structured slightly differently over zoom.

The biggest thing is personal relationship building. Whether it is QBRs or to onboard a new rep, our manager makes a trip out to visit each rep in person once a quarter at minimum.

The other thing I’ve noticed was at first we had meeting overkill - every update was a 30 minute meeting. Being virtual anyway, the RVP has learned that a TON can be communicated over slack without clogging the calendars.

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

The good news here is they are learning and adapting. Better than the same forecast call every morning at 8.

Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

I'm currently working with a manager who is all the way across the company and that I've never met. I'm not a manager, but a remote employee of a remote manager, so here's my perspective:

So, what I've noticed management doing to help:
You have an open channel, whether it's Slack or Teams, and you are reachable.
There's a Sales Channel as well, where we can all connect on things.
Our manager has weekly 1:1 with us, 30 minutes for anything and 30 minutes on deal review/SFDC updates and hygiene in prep for her finance meeting the next day.
The manager is always open for meetings if we need to review anything outside of the scheduled 1:1.
When I first started, I had onboarding from operations, I shadowed colleagues, but I also brought my manager into my prep meetings, ran through the slides with her, worked on the specifics so I was good to go.
We have monthly team meetings where we get enablement on new products, updates from marketing, etc.

What management doesn't do is schedule meaningless meetings - they're not on us daily or micromanaging. And it works.

Hope this helps!

Diablo

Politicker

Sr. AE

I am a remote employee having a remote manager. None of us have met him but we share great relationship.

Couple of things he does apart from great onboarding is 1-on-1, team meet one to discuss business - one for fun talks, many other bi-weekly sessions - team training, challenges, opportunities, career growth etc.

TennisandSales

Politicker

Head Of Sales

I have the belief that being a remote manager, or a remote employee is GREAT......unless your the only one.

idk how I would feel about the other managers not being remote. that feels like a great way to MISS things, the small talk, the pre meeting conversations, the stuff that really seems to matter when you have a hybrid team.

maybe im just jaded.

ChrisSellsHisSoul

Fire Starter

Owner

Find little opportunities for one-on-ones with your direct reports where you don't talk about work. Also find time to talk about work.

Figure out when a 5 minute phone call is preferable to a 30 minute meeting.

Try to instill in them in a tempo where you're open to each other and you can meet without wasting large amounts of each other's time.

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detectivegibbles

Remote leadership...

6 comments

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