A few weeks back, I was leading a class on How Leaders Create and Manage Remote and Hybrid Teams. Two of the participants got into a heated exchange that was very instructive. It raised a good question: When does empathy towards your team members get in the way of managing performance? One of the participants said how much he liked seeing people when they worked from home … [Read more...]
Is Social Time Wasted Time?
It’s NCAA Tournament time again, which means nothing to 90% of the civilized world. But here in the US it means three weeks of drama, gambling, and well-intentioned foolishness. It’s also a good time to examine the role of creatively "wasting" time with social activities at work. First, we’ll start with the supposedly bad news. According to lots of studies done every year … [Read more...]
Do You Hold People Accountable or Help Them Be Accountable?
Accountability. We throw the word around quite a bit in leadership circles. We use phrases like ‘holding people accountable.” To many managers, it’s the stick we use when the carrot doesn’t work. In the words of that great philosopher Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Can we hold people … [Read more...]
The First Rule of Remote Leadership
In all the talk about hybrid work and RTO (Returning To Office for those of us who are acronym-intolerant), it’s easy to stress out. Let me remind you of a very simple rule to help guide your thinking. In The Long-Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership, we have 18 (sort of 19) rules for leading at a distance. But whether all of your people are remote, only … [Read more...]
You Need to Coach Your Stars, Too
One of the things many leaders feel we don’t do as well as we could is coach our people. Whether our team is co-located or scattered to the winds, it’s hard to find the time to coach effectively. When we do, it’s almost always focused on improving weak performance. That means we spend most of our limited time coaching the lowest-performers. But what about the rest of them? … [Read more...]