Building Trust in a Global Virtual Team

Five management activities that drive team performance

· Updated · 5 min read · Leadership

This article covers five activities I use to build trust and performance in a team spread across several countries and offices. Three come from Horstman’s The Effective Manager (2016), applied one to one. Two are about how the team works together. They are what worked for me over the past few years, including the pandemic period, when no one could travel and every interaction was remote.

Trust with individuals

Each team member has goals and career aspirations of their own. Trust starts when the manager cares about those before worrying about what suits the manager. The three activities that matter most here are described in detail by Horstman (2016): one-on-ones, feedback and delegation.

One-on-ones. Hold them weekly, or fortnightly if weekly is impossible. Never skip or cancel them, and take notes. I use 30 minutes split into three blocks of ten: the employee talks, the manager talks, and the two discuss the future (career, training). Adapt the split to each meeting. In the first weeks, spend time on getting to know the person rather than on work alone. Share something about yourself, let them do the same, and build on what you have in common.

Feedback. For the first few weeks give positive feedback only, then introduce critical feedback. Always ask permission first, and address the behaviour, not the person (examples below). The structure:

  1. Ask permission.
  2. State the behaviour.
  3. State its impact.
  4. Encourage effective behaviour in future.

Give feedback as soon as possible after the event, and never while angry. Timely feedback manages performance early, keeps trust intact and shows you care about the person’s growth.

Delegation. Delegating stretches people, lets them build skills for the next level and gives them visibility with key stakeholders. It also frees the manager’s time. Delegate the “small rocks”. Handing over a brand-new responsibility or your hardest task risks overwhelming the person and burning them out. The steps:

  1. State that you want help.
  2. Say why you are asking them.
  3. Ask for a specific acceptance.
  4. Describe the task or project in detail.
  5. Agree deadline, quality and reporting standards.

At AWS in 2022 one of my most senior specialists, strong technically and good with people, wanted to move into management with no prior experience as a manager. The company’s formal path was two or three training steps, which I knew from my own experience was not enough. I used delegation as the main development tool. He shadowed me first, then took over real pieces of my own work, and I reviewed everything before it reached senior stakeholders. As his confidence grew I moved direct reports to him: two at first, five within three months. When he was ready, I agreed with my director and the other regional managers to run him through a full interview loop, as if he were an external candidate. He passed, became a manager, later took on a team of 11 at a restructure, and was promoted again in early 2025, well after I had left the company.

Team interactions

A team is more than a set of individual relationships, so two further activities work at team level.

Weekly team meeting. We meet for one hour each week. We review any critical result from an internal tool that gauges team morale (survey tools of this kind are widely available, and I recommend using one). I do not hand the team a solution. I ask them to describe the issue in detail and propose a fix. That builds ownership, and it stops problems from being ignored or accepted passively until they get worse. The meeting also has a standing slot for challenges and concerns.

Social contact. Trust between team members grows when they share some personal information. During the pandemic, travel limits and fully remote work removed the usual day-to-day contact, even for colleagues in the same office. We replaced it with three things:

  1. Success stories, not only work-related, shared in team meetings.
  2. Virtual offsites that are not only about work.
  3. Virtual get-togethers to chat about anything, preferably not work.

Ground rules for a distributed team

Trust needs a working frame around it. When people sit in different countries, three things fail first: messages get misread, focus drops without a manager in the room, and team spirit is hard to build between people who rarely meet. Before any of the activities above, I agree five ground rules with the team:

  1. A communication plan: which channel for what, expected response times, and where files and documents live.
  2. Clear roles: each person knows what they own.
  3. Shared goals, with a way to track progress against them.
  4. A conflict process, agreed before the first dispute.
  5. The right tools, with access and training for everyone. Pick the ones the team will use, not the longest feature list.

Examples of feedback

Positive:

When you start and lead projects like the ones you mentioned, you show evidence of some of our key principles and help the whole company make a significant impact on our customers. Well done!

Critical:

When you make jokes about a sensitive topic like the current COVID-19 pandemic, you risk upsetting people and getting strong reactions that I then need to settle down with their managers. This kind of joke could put you in trouble. Can you avoid them in the future?

The critical example is a real one, from 2021. A highly skilled specialist on my team had made a COVID-related joke in a company-wide thread and a director in another team had complained. In our next one-on-one he pushed back: he did not see the harm. I asked whether he knew anyone personally affected by COVID, and that changed how he read the situation. He then asked me for feedback in real time rather than waiting for our weekly meeting, so I flagged issues as soon as they happened and gave equally specific positive feedback when he showed the behaviours we wanted. Within nine months the pattern had gone and his colleagues had noticed. We put him forward for promotion and he was promoted at the first attempt. The single conversation did not change the outcome; the nine months of feedback after it did.

Reference

Horstman, M. (2016) The Effective Manager. John Wiley & Sons.