Remote Leadership is a different beast of leadership. You need to reach out, engage, discuss, follow up, call (yes call), and organize sit-downs. You can’t just walk by someone’s desk and see they’re having a bad day, you need to reach out to them, you need to talk to them, you need to find a way to poke without disrupting them. It’s not easy, it takes effort, and it takes a change in the style…
You used to be able to talk with someone and realize the conversation is going to go longer and realize there was a need to have an ad-hoc 2-hour meeting to map out everything that was happening. You never came out of that thinking – “that was a waste of time”. The value of ad-hoc meetings is that they are instantiated at the time a problem is discovered – “Hey we need to chat” -…
We go onto wikipedia to find the plot of a movie we didn’t want to watch the rest of or a book we didn’t want to finish. We have that innate urge to know what happened because as we sat there reading or watching, we couldn’t figure it out. The same goes for your team, if you can’t find the plot, if you can’t direct it, if you can’t call it out – all your…
You wouldn’t attend a bad movie (or you might start and then leave?) You wouldn’t go to a bad restaurant? You wouldn’t continue going to a bad store you’ve had a continually bad experience with? So why keep going to a bad meeting where you are getting nothing out of? Where nothing good happens? Where all you get is a another 5 minutes of your life back at the end?
A sponge absorbs everything around it. It doesn’t expel it all correctly, but absorbing is what it does perfectly. If you can be a sponge and absorb everything, focus on that one great thing, you’re far ahead of so many you aren’t even doing that. Be the sponge that absorbs it all, everything else will fall into place from there.