Leading humans is hard enough in its own. Leading people remotely only makes it so much harder and requires a higher level of intentionality in how you shape work and show up as a leader.
On this page we highlight a set of tools and best practices to help you be effective in your remote leadership.
1) Don’t just rely on video - organise time in-person
As habitual humans, we can sometimes get a bit used to the virtual routines. Despite all the benefits that comes with remote working setups, there are some things that are just so much easier make happen in-person.
As a leader, you need to be considerate about when you spend in-person time with your team and other colleagues. A straightforward way to make this happen is to visit an office/colleague yourself. Another option is to organise an in-person meetup.
In-person meetups
Scheduling in-person meetups can be an effective way to foster team belonging, tackle knotty problems and get creative.
Here’s some questions to get you started, if you are planning a meetup for your team/department:
- What cadence is right for your team/department to meet up? (monthly, quarterly, bi-annual, annual)
- What does an impactful meetup look like? What preparation will you and others need to do before the meetup?
- What budget will you need? (make sure to sign off with your manager)
- How feeling do you want attendees to leave the meetup with?
- … and as always, let AI assist you
2) Practice asynchronous work
When remote teams struggle with “zoom fatigue” its often a symptom that some of the team’s work needs to move outside of meetings. At AutoUncle we encourage all leaders to experiment with the following tools to cultivate energetic work experiences and effective collaboration:
- Asynchronous information sharing: Loom, Slides, Docs and Slack are all useful tools to keep information flows efficient and make meetings more effective
- Status updates: Experiment with daily or weekly status updates to cultivate transparency, reflection and celebrations in the team (example guide)
- Decision proposal documents: Encouraging your team members to write brief proposals for decisions can be a very empowering way of cultivating ownership and effectively drive change while avoiding the traditional “present, discuss and reach consensus” format that can be rather gruesome in virtual meetings. Many leaders look to Amazon’s Memo format for inspiration. Remember to not get too fixated on the format and experiment to find what works best for your team.
- Low context communication: In order for asynchronous work to be effective, team members need to be considerate about the knowledge that readers/viewers may or may not have. Great async practitioners master the art of over-communicating (so that context is not left out) while staying concise (so that the audience dont give up). Gitlab’s guides on low context communication and async work is an insightful resource.