Top Tips for Managing Projects and Teams Across Offices

by Amanda Borichevsky & Denisha Stevens, VOLLMER Dallas and more!

For more than a dozen years VOLLMER has served as the Agency of Record for the popular online travel site, Travelocity. During this time both VOLLMER and Travelocity have grown and founded offices across the country.

Today the collective team includes Travelocity domestic contacts in New York, Dallas, El Paso and San Francisco, while VOLLMER team members reside in New York, Dallas, Indianapolis and Houston.

So, how do we manage to stay connected, work efficiently and keep the creative juices flowing? Following are tips from the combined Vollmer / Travelocity team on working across multiple offices in a truly dynamic industry:

• Don’t Hang Your Hat on Email - It’s important not to forget the value of voice-to-voice communication when you work in a long distance environment. Communicate major directional changes and deadlines via conference calls and reserve the minor details for e-mail, otherwise things can get lost in translation.
  
• Watch the Clock - Take time zones into consideration and determine prime times for conducting team conference calls. You want to be fair to everyone and avoid having calls that require team members to stay late or work through lunch. Also, it can help you catch everyone at their most productive time of day.
  
• Creativity Through Competition - Before conducting a brainstorming session, give team members background information and ask that they come to the table with at least one starter idea. Then, tap into everyone’s competitive spirit by seeing which office contributes the best ideas. For us, there’s nothing like a little East Coast vs. West Coast rivalry to get the creative juices flowing. Of course, for those of us located in the middle, we always have an edge.
  
• Divide and Conquer - Take turns leading initiatives so everyone has a chance to flex their leadership muscles. Even better, let individuals from different offices partner together to lead special projects or initiatives. In addition to creating a sense of camaraderie between offices, it gives everyone an opportunity to learn how to lead teams long distance.
  
• Be Accessible – To avoid endless games of phone tag when coordinating with colleagues in other offices, make it a point to set aside time each day to check in, answer questions and catch up. Before long, it becomes a natural part of your day and it seems like they are just down the hall.
  
• Share Water Cooler Talk – Important updates and new ideas often are shared through hallway conversations, so it’s all too easy to leave out your long distance team members. Don’t forget to keep everyone updated on the little things.
  
• Give Everyone a Voice - Make sure everyone gets a chance to voice their opinion on group calls by creating an agenda in advance. There’s nothing worse than participating in a call and feeling like you can’t get a word in. If this is a consistent problem for some team members, just put them in charge of leading the next call or give each person a section to lead.
  
• Remember the Fun and Games - It’s important to get together a couple of times a year to have a little fun and get to know each other. Over the years we’ve attended happy hours, New York musicals, spa days, Vegas shows, team dinners and Halloween costume contests. We’ve even given out silly awards and pulled pranks on one another. These shared experiences have helped form relationships that enable us to function as a more cohesive and productive team.
  

Ten Leadership Attributes from Doris Kearns Goodwin

This comes from Doris Kearns Goodwin, noted historian and author - should be a must read for any presidential candidate. The original article appeared in Parade Magazine:

1. The capacity to listen to differing points of view, to let his advisors argue with him, question his assumptions. He created a climate in which people felt free to disagree without fear of consequences.

2. The ability to learn on the job, acknowledge errors, profit from mistakes, withstand adversity, come through trials of fire. Everyone is broken by life, Hemingway said, but some are strong in the broken places. This ability, Stephen Covey argues, literally turns failure into success. It is not our mistakes that hurt us most, but our response to those mistakes.

3. He showed a ready willingness to share credit for success, creating what has been called “an emotional bank account, a reservoir of good feeling. Harry Truman once said: You can accomplish anything in life so long as you do not care who gets the credit.

4. Even more striking than the ability to share credit was his willingness to shoulder blame for the failure of his subordinates.

5. He possessed an acute awareness of his weaknesses which allowed him to compensate for them. Forming a team with his opposite Stanton.

6. He was able to control his emotions. Ritual of writing hot letters hoping if he put it aside he would cool down psychologically and never need to send it. If he did lose his temper, he followed up with a kind gesture immediately.

7. He understood how to relax, replenish his energies, shake off anxiety. Theatre and humor.

8. At crisis moments, his immediate instinct was to go to the battlefield, walk amidst the soldiers, visit the wounded in the hospitals, bolster morale, assess the situation directly. Equivalent to managing by walking around. Indeed, he never lost sight of the people he represented. His White House was open to ordinary people. Sensitivity to currents of opinion allowed him to become a master of timing.

9. He possessed a quiet but steely resolution to stick to his long term goals even at moments when his own popularity was at stake.

10. He had a remarkable ability to communicate his goals to his countrymen, with stories, everyday metaphors, as well as with a beauty of language.