--- title: "Ten Things Distributed Team Leaders Should Do" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/ten-things-distributed-team-leaders-should-do.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/ten-things-distributed-team-leaders-should-do.html" published: "2011-10-03T09:01:50.943000+00:00" updated: "2011-10-03T09:34:48.943000+00:00" tags: ["Distributed"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Ten practices for leading a distributed team, from shared Skype chat and honest status to virtual standups, code reviews and direct customer access." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Ten Things Distributed Team Leaders Should Do This turned up in one of the LinkedIn groups I'm part of - what practices should you have as a team lead in a distributed team (assuming people work from home, for example)? - Have a shared skype chat for the whole team, and always have someone senior enough available to answer important or administrative questions. - Get the team together once every x days/weeks, and in that time, make people work as much together as possible. - on skype, show your true status, so people know when you are or are not available. When you are available, answer. if you are not, set status to busy. - Set fixed times when people are expected to be working. These times should be acceptable by everyone. Don't Ask people to work in crazy hours because that is what you do - If you are not going to be online for a few days (such as vacation), mention it clearly, when you will be away and for how long. - Let people know when you come back..! - To keep people focused and not stuck, it's good to have a virtual daily standup meeting when everyone is online. - If that is not possible, have daily one on one on skype for a few minutes about today's and yesterday's progress with each team member. - Hold code reviews on commits to make sure quality is up to par. If you are not available to do code reviews, make the time to do it, and teach others how to review code, so you don't become a bottleneck. - Give people access to ask questions directly with the customer if possible. If it's not possible, and you are the only contact to the customer, make sure you are not a bottleneck, or at least try to add people in the project to conversations you have with the customer, so they get a feel for what the project is envisioned like to them. ## Read next - [Distributed Team Evasion Tactic - Away or Offline](https://www.5whys.com/articles/distributed-team-evasion-tactic-away-or-offline.html): Why a distributed team leader who stays set to away or offline on Skype erodes trust, how the team reacts, and how known working hours fix it. - [Daily Standup Meetings - Introduction and 5 useful tips](https://www.5whys.com/articles/daily-standup-meetings-introduction-and-5-useful-tips.html): How to run a daily standup meeting with the three questions, why each question matters, and five hard-learned tips for keeping it under 15 minutes. - [4 ways to discover a stuck team member, and what you can do about it](https://www.5whys.com/articles/4-ways-to-discover-a-stuck-team-member-and-what-you-can-do-a.html): Roy Osherove recalls being fired as a stuck developer and shows how standups, code reviews, test reviews and pairing help a lead spot and unblock people. --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/