Leadership lessons from a virtual world tour during a global pandemic

With a large team distributed across the globe, Karen Hassman, VP of Global Tax Content at Avalara, saw a great opportunity during the coronavirus pandemic to go on a 6-week virtual tour and connect with her global teams. Here are her thoughts on leadership lessons and key takeaways from her virtual tour experience .

When the COVID-19 pandemic made its way across the globe this year, the offices at Avalara successfully transitioned to remote working. It was important for the company to put the safety of Avalara employees first, so that’s just what we did. And while I admit, the initial few weeks of work from home were welcomed by just about everyone, including me, in the next few weeks I recognized changes in my demeanor, engagement and leadership that I had not anticipated pre-COVID. 

With the world under lockdown, my usual plans to travel to our offices around the globe were disrupted. I didn’t realize what I was missing out on at first but within a few months saw visually in Outlook that a percentage of my time was focused almost exclusively with my own team of Global Content Leaders.  My typical collaboration with ‘first-team’ peers and leaders from across our company had reduced drastically without the discipline of office travel. I am never one in favor of siloed culture, and here I was, sitting in a self-imposed silo. Without my usual routine of travelling to various Avalara locations, I realized how important it was to holistically connect with the other offices, partner with regional leadership teams or even oversee and recognize team and dependent team progress. Yes, all of this could be achieved through reports and conference calls, but it still felt like I was missing an opportunity for greater engagement. To get out of a slump, it was time to get creative and make virtual travels as authentic as possible.

I planned a six-week virtual world tour covering multiple locations in India, Europe, South America and across the United States. Over these six weeks, I adjusted to the time zones of each office, collaborated with people regionally to set agendas and incorporate language, culture, and even local cuisine. I had planned my tour for each country, prepared my guest bedroom to become my virtual airplane and prepared my virtual office for these six weeks.

• 

• 

There is a six-part blog series on LinkedIn where I have elaborated how I planned the entire virtual tour. I am happy to say this experiment was quite successful, and there are three key takeaways from my virtual journey that I am sharing here. 

Get Creative

Ideally, I could have just continued with normal 1:1s and asked for progress reports and be done with it. But that did not reflect my personal brand of leadership. As a global leader, there are resources available to me waiting to be optimized. Connecting departments, bridging corporate and regional communication, providing forums for innovation and recognizing working automation progress is the part of global travel that has been my leadership hallmark. So, if travel was the only reason why I couldn’t personally be with my teams in their locations, then all that had to be done was fixing this barrier. So, I decided to make big changes to my work patterns.

Many team members in different locations were going out of their way to adjust to virtual conference calls outside of their time zone. So why couldn’t I do the same? My guest bedroom was converted to a virtual “hotel suite” that operated on a time zone different from the rest of my household. I adjusted my body clock to the time zone I was supposed to fly to. My first destination was for two weeks in India, a whopping 11.5 hours ahead of US Central time. So, a few days ahead of my ‘travel’, I started to adjust to IST using an app to transition to the time difference and strategically minimize ‘jet lag’. I notified my colleagues and changed my out-of-office status to let them know that I was available, only at different working hours.

But a time zone adjustment alone wasn’t all. I wanted to make this a real visit by making the most of my time in each of these countries doing what I would usually do whenever I was there – even in the hours off work. I wore clothing and accessories treasured from past trips, finished and started books on India and Brazil history and switched cuisines by location to the delight of my family (during that one time we would eat together daily). We indulged in spicy Indian curries and naan bread, Belgian waffles, fish and chips, Spanish tapas and Carolina barbeque, consistent with our Avalara offices across locations.

Do not be afraid to get outside of your comfort zone. At the end of the year, I did not want my self-review to say, “couldn’t get things done as well as I had planned because a killer virus was on the loose.” Remember, we create our own new normal.

Advocate Human Connections

If there is one resource we absolutely must invest in, it is that of time. During my six-week virtual journey, I consciously took out the time to connect and meet with colleagues and team members around the world. Every week of my travel was organized to hear from cross-functional regional leaders and then invest time in my local team.  Every month, Avalara organizes an all-hands meeting for each vertical. For me, these meetings are an excellent opportunity to renew connections as well as encourage new connections. I took this concept a step further and organized All Hands Meetings in each country during my visit. It was an opportunity to explain and actively advocate for projects I am passionate about. It was also an opportunity to encourage suggestions and recommendations from team members across locations, tailor communication to that region and most importantly, hear about projects my team members were passionate about. Each location I visited turned into a powerhouse of discussions, ideation, detailed mid-year planning and included plenty of 1:1 interactions. This journey was different from the ones I usually take up, not because it was virtual, but it brought out a different side to my colleagues. I learned that making an effort to reach others is just one step to connecting with them. I found that my attitude toward connections was undergoing a positive change as I began to appreciate people, different cultures and unique contributions on a new level.

Make the Most of Technology

We have so many resources at hand and yet there have been times during this pandemic and even otherwise in life, that we have felt helpless over not being able to achieve what we envisioned. There is a plethora of technology. I identified my problems and created solutions. I made use of a time transitioning app to help me adjust my body clock to five different time zones in six weeks. I used virtual conferencing tools like Zoom and collaboration tools like Slack and Outlook to stay in touch with the team constantly. I was prepared with AI translation technology to communicate with colleagues in locations where English is not the native language. I even used food rating and delivery apps to find authentic cuisine local to my place of visit. That being said, I would never want to completely replace the human and spontaneous connections that occur when you actually visit a place. In times when you must make the best of the situation, one can rely on technology as the next best thing to being there.

Bonus Skill

Each of us has so much potential. In just six weeks of virtual travel, I developed an additional skill, blogging, something I would not have taken up if it had not been for this rut-busting adventure. I received so much encouragement for my initial attempts and found this to enhance relationships with internal team members that I ordinarily would not work with. It was a great way to collaborate with my family, former and current colleagues and commit to writing. It made me gain a new level of appreciation for bloggers. It also made me realize that I was not alone in this experience. The pandemic has led a lot of my team to self-analyze and take ownership of what makes them happy. Some started learning a new language while others were exploring gardening, cooking, advanced degrees and photography.

In retrospect

In agile software development, a retrospective ceremony helps the entire team to reflect on what happened, discuss what worked and what did not during a project. The goal is to identify actions for improvement. While this experiment was a great success, I must admit, there are at least three things I would do differently.

First, I have discovered that since I manage a global team, having regional all-hands meetings gives leaders a greater opportunity to communicate with a tailored agenda and material to suit each region. The next time I go for a virtual tour, I would include regional human resource and communications professionals upfront in the planning so that I can deliver the core message effectively.

Second, I would add in at least one buffer week between my global trip and before I go back to work during the US time zone, giving me time to reflect on my key learnings and summarize actions.

Last but certainly not least, I would encourage other global leaders to join me.  I am convinced that other global leaders would also endorse this “travel as a pack” mentality once they experience how colleagues and team members truly appreciate the extra effort and extended presence of leaders who break down silos and collaborate. During these six weeks, while being deeply engaged with people who are involved in our business from a different region, I got to experience many more first-hand accounts of the pandemic, the destructive Cyclone Nisarga in India (during a strong thunderstorm in the US Midwest), awareness of racial and social justice globally, and the promise of an interconnected world enabled by technology.  Employees and peers really do take notice when a leader puts in the effort, shows interest in their work and brings humanizing connection and empathy to the forefront.  

Author Profile:

Karen Hassman, VP, Global Tax Content, Avalara