How many regular meetings should a regional team have?

Fewer than most have. A short weekly team slot, a regular one-to-one with each person and a written weekly update usually cover what status meetings were doing. The test is whether a meeting produces a decision or a conversation that cannot happen in writing; if not, it is costing the shared window for nothing.

Who should take the early or late calls?

Not always the same people. When a meeting falls at an awkward hour for someone, rotate the slot so that the inconvenience is shared across locations, including the manager's own. A team notices very quickly whose evenings are treated as available.

How do I keep colleagues outside Singapore from feeling left out?

Make decisions in the places everyone can see. If a question is discussed at a desk in Singapore, the conclusion and its reasoning go into the shared channel before it is acted on. Remote colleagues rarely object to not being in the room; they object to finding out afterwards that the room decided without them.

Managing a regional team across time zones

Singapore is where many regional teams are run from, and it sits at a convenient point on the clock. Jakarta and Bangkok are an hour behind; Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Perth and Hong Kong share the same hour; Tokyo and Seoul are an hour ahead, Sydney two or three. Mumbai is two and a half hours behind. Europe is six or seven hours behind, which means the European morning is the Singapore afternoon.

On paper that looks manageable. In practice it produces a very particular kind of working day.

The window that swallows the day

Take a regional team spread across four of those locations, reporting to a head office in Europe. The hours when everyone is at work at once are few, and the hours that also overlap with head office are fewer still — often a slice of the Singapore late afternoon.

Every meeting that involves the whole team has to fit in that slice. So do the calls with head office. The window fills up, the meetings run back to back, and the rest of the day passes with people unable to reach the person they need. The manager ends up in meetings for the entire shared window and doing their own work in the evening.

Decide what does not need a meeting

The first move is to protect the shared window by taking out of it everything that can happen in writing:

Status updates go into a short written weekly note or a shared board, not a call.
Decisions with a clear owner are taken by that owner and announced, with the reasoning, rather than brought to a meeting for approval.
Questions that need several inputs are opened in writing with a deadline for replies, and only come to a meeting if the replies conflict.

What stays in the window is what genuinely needs a conversation: disagreements, trade-offs, anything emotionally charged, and the relationships themselves.

A shared progress board does much of that work on its own. When everyone can see where each piece of work stands, a large share of “where are we on this?” calls simply stop.

Some meetings will fall at a bad hour for someone. The question is who.

In many regional teams the answer is, without anyone deciding it, always the same people — usually those furthest from head office. It is worth making it an explicit decision: rotate the awkward slot across locations, and take your turn. It costs the manager a few early mornings or late evenings, and it tells the team something no speech about fairness can.

Do not let the hub become the team

The quietest risk in a regional team is that the real decisions start happening among the people who sit together in Singapore. A question gets settled over lunch; the conclusion reaches Jakarta two days later as an instruction.

Colleagues outside the hub rarely object to not being in the room. They object to discovering afterwards that the room decided without them. The rule that prevents it is simple and demanding: a discussion that happens locally ends with its conclusion, and the reasoning behind it, posted where everyone can see it before anyone acts on it.

One-to-ones matter more, not less

When people share an office, a manager picks up a great deal informally: who seems tired, who has gone quiet, who is stuck. At a distance, all of that has to come through a deliberate conversation. The regular one-to-one — kept, not moved every time the window gets crowded — is the tool that replaces the corridor. The one-to-one itself is at the core of The manager-leader toolkit.

Regional managers often also lead people who do not report to them: country teams, partners, colleagues in other functions. For that half of the job, the frame-setting and feedback work in The manager-leader toolkit applies just as well.