Top 5 Ways to Sabotage Global Teams
Never get stuck in another pointless “quick sync”
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We are thrilled to bring you a guest post by David Markley, a technology executive with over 30 years experience leading teams at Amazon, Discover, Warner Bros, and more. In this post, David will walk you through how to effectively lead remote and distributed teams by spotlighting the 5 most common practices he’s experienced that do the most damage on a daily basis:
“One Time Zone to Rule Them All”
Having more meetings (in the name of “communication”)
Micromanaging
Ignoring team dynamics
Decision paralysis
You can learn more about David on his website.
I’ve led teams across multiple continents, multiple time zones, and multiple cultures. I’ve run global programs where people started their day while I ended mine, and I’ve joined meetings where half the attendees were on their first coffee, and the other half was desperately trying to keep their eyes open.
Leading remote and distributed teams is an art. Done well, it’s a massive force multiplier, giving you access to the best talent in the world. Done poorly, it’s an endless loop of misalignment, frustration, and 3 a.m. Slack messages that make you question your life choices.
Having spent years leading global teams across the U.S., Europe, and beyond, I’ve learned some hard lessons (mostly the hard way). Now, I know that many common practices get in the way of successfully leading distributed teams.
I’ll breakdown the 5 that I see do the most damage on a regular basis.
1. “One Time Zone to Rule Them All”
Early on in my career as a leader of global teams, I made the rookie mistake of trying to find one perfect time for meetings. I was looking for a magical time that was comfortable for everyone. Turns out, that magical time doesn’t exist unless your entire team lives on a single longitude line.
At Amazon, I was based in Seattle and had teams in Tokyo and London. It’s mathematically impossible to find a common work hour between those three locations, so rather than force an unfair solution, I alternated our weekly team meeting times.
One week, it was a comfortable time for Tokyo & Seattle.
The next week, it was comfortable for London & Seattle.
Then, the most important part of this strategy was that I made the meeting optional. Anyone who found the timing inconvenient didn’t have to come, but most people still showed up. Why? Because they respected that the plan was considerate of everyone’s time, and they realized that this rotating solution was best for the team as a whole. For those who couldn’t attend, we sent out a short email with a summary of anything important.
Not only did this keep our whole team aligned, it also reduced the perception of Seattle as the "mother ship." Each team had their own responsibilities and actions, and respecting that meant they could feel central to their own missions rather than feeling like they were just “supporting” the central hub.
Pro tip: If you have to schedule a live meeting across multiple time zones, at least be honest about who’s suffering. Call it the “Someone Always Gets Screwed” meeting and rotate who takes the hit.
In the below clip, David talks about time shifting. Watch the full talk between Ethan and David here.
2. Having more meetings (in the name of “communication”)
With a distributed team, context disappears fast.
You can’t just assume someone “overheard” a conversation in the hallway or picked up on body language in a meeting. To handle this, the best remote teams are relentless about communication. But, they don’t confuse “clear communication” with “more meetings.”
Instead, they:
Write things down (clear meeting notes, shared documents, and structured updates).
Repeat key information in different channels (Slack, email, wikis).
Encourage ‘explicit confirmation’—meaning, if you hear a decision, acknowledge it. ("Got it, I’ll take this next step.”)
When I first moved to London, I found my new client engineering team was being pulled into multiple meetings a week to give status updates on the major architecture change they were undergoing. There were also multiple updates going out from our program management team, input and updates from other program management teams, and senior stakeholders with their own requests for updates.
The thirst for information was massive, but the clarity got lost as the information was distributed through multiple channels. Everyone was doing their best to keep the organization informed, but our systems were failing us.
I insisted that we get this frenzy down to one weekly, central update that would be the source of truth for our status. This greatly simplified the task of creating a comprehensive update across dozens of workstreams, and it also reduced most of the confusion. I say most because some teams still selectively pulled parts of our update to put into their own, and context was lost as a result.
Identifying and executing on the correct level of communication in a large, global organization is an ongoing struggle. It absolutely helped to assign one senior program manager to own the source of truth document for the organization. Once there was a single owner of “the truth,” correction of misinformation was just a matter of pointing people to the single source of truth.
Takeaway: Communication is necessary, but don’t spam your team. If you’re sending a meeting invite AND a Slack ping AND an email AND a carrier pigeon just to say, “Hey, let’s chat,” you might be the problem.
3. Micromanage
If you don’t trust your remote team without watching their every move, you don’t need a distributed team—you need a therapist.
Great remote teams thrive on autonomy, ownership, and clear expectations; mediocre leaders drive their teams by controlling their every move. The key to success and satisfaction when leading global teams is trust and understanding cultural differences in leadership styles.
This is something I learned firsthand when I moved to London.
Before I moved, I already had some experience working with global teams and I knew there were cultural differences. But living in Europe really drove these differences home.
There had been another American tech executive working with my organization in London before me, and, let’s just say, he left an “impression.” He had embodied the worst American leadership stereotype: a loud, brash know-it-all who was convinced he could “fix” everything by talking over everyone. My European colleagues had not appreciated this approach, and when I arrived, they fully expected me to be the same.
I am very glad I surprised them.
I’ve never been the type to speak just to seem relevant, which turned out to be a big advantage in Europe. After a few months of listening first and formulating thoughtful, necessary responses, I saw my colleagues starting to accept my approach.
One day, someone told me, "You're the most European-style executive we've ever had come from America."
I was taken aback for a moment, but I deeply appreciated the compliment.
But here’s the thing—while I embraced the European emphasis on thinking before speaking, I also noticed the flip side: sometimes there was more thinking than doing. So, I adjusted my leadership style, balancing my characteristic patience with a bit more urgency. I asked more questions, nudged decisions forward, and encouraged teams to move faster—not by demanding it, but by earning their trust. And you know what? My teams in Europe got things done—faster than many other teams around the globe.
The lesson? Trust first, push second. Micromanagement is a means of shortcutting trust; while it may work for getting a task done in the short term, it will not build a strong team in the long run. Relying on it is the fastest way to sabotage your team’s chances of being high performers.
FYI. David is fresh off of building the distribution technology for the Paris 2024 Olympics for Warner Brother's online sports network (47 markets, 19 languages, 215M viewers, 54 concurrent live streams)—massive numbers. Read this if you want to learn the 6 key principles he used for a successful Olympics.
In the below clip, David talks about building trust with his European team. Watch the full talk between Ethan and David here.
4. Ignoring Team Dynamics
High-performance teams aren’t just efficient; they actually like working together.
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