How do you build a team when the people in it have never been in the same room?
This is the question that opens a new series from the Women Emerging Podcast on building teams. Julia Middleton begins the series with Funmi, former Expedition Director at Women Emerging, who has built teams of Explorers across countries and time zones, often without ever being physically in the same room as them.
For Funmi, building a remote team begins with something deceptively simple: energy.
“You have to bring in the energy you want,” she tells Julia. If you want a room to feel vibrant, engaged and connected, you cannot wait for that energy to appear. When you are the person bringing the team together, you have a responsibility to create it. You arrive present. You smile. You ask how people are. You pay attention to what is happening on the screen.
This matters even more online because so much of the context we usually rely on has disappeared. You can see someone’s face, but you cannot necessarily see the child crying outside the frame, the difficult morning they have had or everything else competing for their attention. Funmi therefore pays close attention to what she can see: faces, gestures, body language and changes in energy.
She also uses people’s names constantly. Online, Funmi says, people can begin to feel like “just a tile in the grid.” Calling someone by name pulls them back into the room. It tells them that they have been noticed. But Funmi does more than invite people to respond to her. She connects them to each other: asking one person what they think of what another has just said, allowing conversations and relationships to form across the screen.
Structure helps too, but Funmi does not confuse structure with rigidity. She might enter a meeting knowing how much time she wants to spend on each subject, only to discover that someone’s child is ill or something important has happened. Building the team means being willing to adjust. The structure gives people safety and clarity; the flexibility makes room for the people inside it.
Perhaps one of Funmi’s simplest habits captures her approach best: “I hear you.”
She says it often. Not because people do not know she is listening, but because sometimes they need to hear that they have been heard. In a virtual room, where it is particularly easy to feel invisible, acknowledgement becomes part of building connection.
By the end of their conversation, Julia returns to Funmi’s central point. When we are physically together, energy can come from many places in the room. Online, the person bringing the team together has to work much harder to generate it.
Names, gestures, questions, polls, structure, flexibility, a smile, an “I hear you” and, in Funmi’s case, even a pair of bright glasses can become ways of saying the same thing.
Listen to the first episode in the Women Emerging Podcast’s new series on building teams.
