Breaking the Monotony: 6 Ways to Keep Your Team Fired Up

Feeling stuck on the monotony at work merry-go-round? When tasks feel more monotonous than merry, it’s crucial to inject some energy and motivation back into your team. If your team’s workday feels like a looped replay, this edition is tailored for you. Here’s how you can flip the script on repetitive tasks and keep the team morale high:

1. Talk About It

Instead of trying to persuade your team that those repetitive tasks shouldn’t feel like monotonous work, make that conversation visible. You can say, “Hey, I get that a lot of this work can feel repetitive and not that exciting, and I want us all to feel good about coming to work each day. What can we do to make this coming year the best year ever?

2. Connect to the Bigger Picture

Sometimes, the key to engagement is reminding your team why their work matters. Connect their tasks to the organization’s larger goals and show them how their efforts contribute to the bigger picture. When people understand the impact of their work, they find more meaning in even the most repetitive tasks.

3. Embrace the Power of Small Innovations

When the work feels repetitive, yearning for sweeping changes is tempting. However, seismic shifts are not always necessary or practical. Instead, focus on incremental innovation. Encourage your team to find small, everyday processes that can be improved. These micro-innovations can lead to significant enhancements over time and less monotony at work, and more importantly, they empower your team members to own the transformation.

4. Celebrate Every Success, No Matter the Size

Recognition is a catalyst for engagement. Make it a habit to celebrate successes, no matter how small. Did someone find a way to shave off a few minutes from a daily task? Applaud it. Did the team go a week without a single error in their work? Commend it. These celebrations create positive feedback loops that boost morale and reinforce the value of everyone’s contributions.

5. Set Challenges and Gamify

Turn work into play. Setting up friendly competitions or gamified challenges can make repetitive tasks more exciting. Who can come up with the most innovative solution to a common problem? Can the team beat its previous best performance? This not only makes the workday more engaging but also drives performance.

6. Inject Variety with Cross-Training

Monotony often stems from a lack of variety. Cross-training combats monotony and builds a more resilient team. By training team members in different roles, you not only give them a break from the humdrum but also foster a deeper understanding of the team’s work. This variety can reinvigorate interest and spark new ideas for efficiency and collaboration.

Join the Conversation: Got some tricks for turning the tedious into the terrific? Drop your monotony at work reducing ideas in the comments. Let’s make every day less about the grind and more about the growth.

Related Articles:

How Leaders Can Find Fun During the Slog

Workplace Innovation: The Secret to Getting Better, Remarkable Ideas

Leading Through Change: 4 Practical Ways to Get Your Team to Embrace Your New Idea

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Let’s talk about getting more leadership better visibility and recognition for YOU – and YOUR TEAM’s – work.

Today’s #AskingForaFriend came in from our Micro-Learning Lab.

“I’ve always had trouble “selling” my (or our) job to higher management. I thought the work should speak for itself. However, in a very busy environment, the message may get lost. How do I ensure that management knows of our achievements and realizes how much work the team does?“

Three Ways to Position Yourself for Better Exposure

1. Position Your Team Strategically for Better Leadership Visibility

In order to achieve better leadership visibility, set clear and measurable MITs (Most Important Things) that align with the bigger picture. If you need help creating clarity, this article is a great place to start. Or, drop us a note. We’d love to chat.

By setting specific MITs for your team, you show the impact of your work. And, track progress toward bigger organizational goals.

Provide regular updates on your team’s progress. You might even use our 5×5 communication technique to expand leadership visibility to your work.

This can help build trust and credibility, and demonstrate the value your team brings. Additionally, by regularly reviewing and adjusting your goals as circumstances change, you ensure your team REMAINS aligned with strategic objectives,

2. Build Cross-Functional Relationships with Other Departments

Help your team build deeper, collaborative relationships with other departments.

When people in other departments talk positively about your team, you get better leadership visibility without saying a word. Great work never happens in a vacuum. And some of the best recognition comes from peers.

By collaborating effectively with other departments, you can also gain a better understanding of the organization’s overall goals and priorities. This helps better align your work with strategic priorities (see above). Which, in turn, helps gain support from senior leadership, Think of this as the leadership visibility snowball effect.

Furthermore, when YOU help OTHER DEPARTMENTS gain visibility and recognition, you pave the way for future collaboration. By working together and sharing successes, you can create a positive feedback loop that benefits everyone involved.

3. Invite Senior Leadership to Meetings

For more leadership visibility, invite senior leadership to a meeting and strategically share your work. It’s not bragging, it’s useful. Just be sure you’re ready to nail it. Not all executive exposure is good exposure. See Also: 6 Reasons to Give Your Team Better Executive Exposure.

A few tips to keep in mind (and more tips here on presenting to executives)

• Be transparent and authentic in your communication.
• Let them know the intent of the invite, and topics to discuss.
• Provide any relevant background or context.
• Be an excellent steward of time.
• Avoid overselling or exaggerating your accomplishments.
• Focus on presenting an accurate and honest picture of your team’s work and progress.
• Emphasize your commitment to working collaboratively towards shared goals.
• Use data to back up your claims and present them in a meaningful and compelling way.

Final Tip

When presenting your team’s work to senior leadership, be sure to emphasize the importance of collaboration and teamwork. Highlight the contributions of individual team members. Demonstrate how their skills and expertise complement each other to achieve shared goals. This helps demonstrate your leadership skills and your ability to build and manage high-performing teams. Additionally, by emphasizing collaboration and teamwork, you reinforce your commitment to a culture of shared ownership and responsibility.

And psst…Dear Leader…if you want to bring human-centered practical leadership training to your teams, visit our Team Accelerator page. Learn about our manager-driven team development program to sustain company-wide change, from the inside out.

And now, your turn. How do you help your team’s performance stand out so it’s impossible to ignore? How do you ensure that they get the attention they deserve? Leadership visibility does more than improve morale, it also leads to better creativity, innovation, and courage.

This article will also help.

How to Help Your Team Reflect on Their Accomplishments

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“Karin, I’ve got to tell you. The executives at my company are so busy and distracted. There are just so many things going on. I find it really, really difficult to have an engaging powerful conversation to capture their attention. And I have SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO SAY. What should I do #askingforafriend

In today’s quick Asking for a Friend from the road (less than 3 minutes) from Gettysburg, PA, I share three PRACTICAL tips for communicating with executives and grabbing their attention for your important message.

Resources for Compassionate Conversations

Three Tips for Communicating to Executives

1. Capture their attention with a powerful opening line

When communicating to executives one important secret is to start with a powerful opening line. The idea is to have the first words that leave your lips be so compelling, that they will put down their phones and really pay attention to you. This is the “I- Interesting” starting point of our Courageous Cultures I.D.E.A. model (read more about specific techniques to share your ideas here.

For example, you might say…

“I have an idea that’s going to say us $37,000.”or “I have an idea that’s going to improve our productivity by 15% in the next six months.

It’s not as easy as it seems. Even when we teach this in our executive development programs (and remind people 15 minutes before pitching an idea to the senior team in one of our Idea Challenges), there’s always some group, that takes the first few minutes thanking everyone for their time (“After all, we know how busy. you are”), introducing all the team members, or talking about how challenging the process was an all the options they’ve considered.

2. Keep it Brief

Consider your most important points and practice saying them concisely. I encourage you to write these down, in case you get interrupted or have less time than you anticipated. Make every word count.

You can also anticipate questions and integrate the answers into your message. For example, you might say something like, “you may be wondering if the team has the bandwidth for this right now. I was concerned about that too, so I checked with the team, and they’re all on board to get this done by June 1st.

3. Create a Leave Behind

When communicating to executives, it can be so tempting to tell them all the things. After all, you’ve worked so hard and you know so much. One of the best ways to leave them knowing what you want them to know, and keeping it brief, is to “leave behind” with all the additional information and offer a follow-up meeting for anyone interested in learning more (or coming back for a part 2, now that you have their attention.

I share more details here in Presenting to Executives How to Have More Confidence.

So, here are 3 of my top tips to help you communicate better to executives. What would add as #4?

Are you ready to accelerate team performance?

Improve connection, trust and communication with the Let’s Grow Leaders Team Accelerator program. View the free demo to discover how this team development program can create positive, sustained culture change from within.

Executive Presence in a Virtual World: What Matters Now

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“Hey Karin, I’ve got to tell you. Your book, Courageous Cultures, kind of scares me. We don’t actually need more ideas around here… we have too many ideas! We’ve been growing so fast, it’s like the wild, wild west. Everybody’s bringing their ideas and moving in a gazillion directions. Pivoting. This way and that. We just need FOCUSED execution. What do you think we should do?”   #AskingForAFriend

This conversation came up when we were looking at curriculum design for ongoing training for one of our long-term leadership development clients.

And they said, “yeah, maybe not so much on the innovation.” They were getting too many people speaking up and sharing their ideas. They needed more focused execution.

So if this is your challenge, consider this.

Yes, you might not need new game-changing approaches. But consider where you MIGHT need ideas. Including, ideas about how to create better clarity and focus for your team. 

How to Cope When Your Team Has Too Many Ideas

1. Ensure everyone understands the bigger picture. Where you need a great idea.
2. Communicate those important strategic priorities, five times, five different ways. AND check for understanding.
3. Identify where you really do need new thinking (how you can be more effective, and efficient, looking for micro-innovations…ways to improve processes and collaborate in a matrixed environment…all the things that are getting in the way that are making it feel like the wild, wild west.
4. Communicate your desire for innovation in the areas you really want them to focus on.
5. Ask “what is ONE THING we could do differently in this arena (the area where you really want them to focus.)

Your turn.

What would you add? How do you help your team focus on the most helpful innovation?

Does your company need a Courageous Culture – with higher engagement and a results-oriented approach to innovation? Where your employees speak up, share their ideas and drive quality performance and productivity? If that’s a wholehearted “YES!” be sure to check out our Strategic Leadership and Team Innovation Page and download sample chapters from our book, Courageous Cultures. 

Related Article: How to Convince Your Boss You Have a Great Solution

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On, this edition of Asking For a Friend, I talk with Rita McGrath, author of Seeing Around Corners. We discuss, “How to think strategically when you don’t know what’s coming next.”

“Snow Melts From the Edges”

Andy Grove, former CEO and author of Only the Paranoid Survive observed that “When spring comes, snow melts first at the periphery because that is where it is most exposed.”  I love that image.  That’s why it’s so critical to listen carefully to the people closest to the edges: particularly your frontline employees and your customers.

This conversation about seeing around corners made me think of our early live-online, spaced learning over time leadership development programs.

The idea for what would become one of our signature programs came from the edges, a prospective customer at the time. Michelle Braden (you can watch her on Asking For a Friend here), said:

“I’ve read your books, and I want to work with you guys, but my teams are all over the world.  Can you design a program where I don’t have to fly you to Bulgaria, Ireland, Asia, and Las Vegas? Ideally, I’d love to have them working in mixed International cohorts.

We designed a six-month, highly interactive live-online program, with mixed cohorts which included micro-learning, learning lab, action learning, and application/reinforcement sessions in-between.

The program was highly successful and we learned a lot about the technology and techniques to maximize engagement and sustained learning. We’re so grateful because right around the corner, was a global pandemic.

Michelle’s ability to help us see around corners positioned us to quickly pivot our in-person programs to live online and to give our customers and prospects the confidence that we could do that well.

More from Michelle Braden on Leadership Development

What are Your Best Practices for Seeing Around Corners?

In this interview, Rita shares some great examples of companies thriving because they got good at seeing around corners. And shares examples of what happens when they don’t.

I’m curious, what are your best practices for seeing around corners?

The post Seeing Around Corners: How to Know What’s Coming Next (Video) appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

You have a highly valued employee who you sense is looking for a new opportunity. You’d hate to lose them, but you know people are leaving jobs during this “Great Resignation.”  How do you get them to consider the “Great Return” or even better, not leaving in the first place?

Today on Asking for a Friend, I speak with employee retention expert, Beverly Kaye, author of Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em, Getting Good People to Stay.

Some of Bev’s Best Bets for Retaining Employees

1:07 What do you do if you have a good employee who you feel has one foot out the door?

1:21 Allow for an elegant exit because there is potential for a return. People are “boomeranging” back to jobs they left.

2:37 If they are intent on leaving, talk to them about their job equity: social, influence, skill, and finances to make sure they understand what they are leaving.

4:52 How do you handle the concern that people are leaving because they are less connected when working remotely?

Free Resource for Employee Retention

Bev has written a free resource Staying Connected While Working Apart. Click here for your copy.

Your turn: What ideas do you have for retaining a valued employee?

Check out David’s interview with Bev Kaye on Leadership without Losing Your Soul podcast

The post Employee Retention: Retain an Employee Who Has One Foot Out the Door (Video) appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Today on Asking For a Friend, I interview Peter Economy, the Inc. Leadership Guy on how to deal with a jerk at work.

Peter and I are kindred spirits and have been passionately connected on this topic of dealing with jerks at work for some time.

Here’s a very early Inc. interview on being a jerk at work, after my very first book on Overcoming an Imperfect Boss came out in 2014.

How Do I Deal With a Jerk at Work? (Highlights)

Q- In your book, “Wait I’m Working With Who?” You talk about 16 kinds of jerks at work and how to work with them more effectively.

What’s one of your favorite jerks at work to contend with?

Peter Economy (2:10) On Dealing With a Credit Thief

You know, I, I listed 16 in the book and there’s probably even more than that. It’s just amazing how many different ways people can be toxic, and I mean nasty, that kind of thing.

So  I think really the one we probably most resonate with is the credit thief.

Let’s say you’re on a team that was supposed to accomplish something. And the team worked really well together. Maybe there were five of you, you’re all working great together.

And then there’s somebody who kind of jumps up as the team leader and they end up taking all the credit, you know, they’re in the staff meeting with your boss and maybe your boss’s boss,  and they’re the one who jumps up and says, “I got this great thing done, and I did all this and I did all that.”

And all of a sudden there, they’ve got the shine, the spotlight shining on them. And so that’s pretty typical. I mean, that kind of person, and it could be a coworker, it could be a teammate or it could be your boss.

Karin Hurt (03:28)

I’ve seen that a lot too, obviously—a boss who takes all the credit and doesn’t acknowledge the fact that the people who work for them actually got the work done. That’s a big one for sure.

And, you know, what’s interesting in our courageous cultures research that we just finished the most surprising fact was when we asked people “Why, if you had a really great idea to improve the customer experience or productivity process, why would you hold it back?”

56% said the reason they would not share an idea like that is that they wouldn’t receive credit.

Refuse to Play Their Game (10:35)

Karin Hurt

So let’s talk about some of these tactics. One of my favorites was refuse to play their game because it’s so tempting to play their game.

They do passive-aggressive and you’re like, ah, maybe I could play that too. So what unpack that a little bit for us.

Peter Economy

Yeah. Well, it, it is a game,

I talked about it earlier about there being maybe a couple of kinds of toxic people, those that are consciously toxic and those that are unconsciously toxic and the ones that are, you know, consciously toxic, they’re playing a game.

They’re playing a game on you. They’re hoping to get a response. It’s sorta like, you know, pushing a button on a video game. If I push the button hard enough and often enough, maybe I’ll get something to happen and this is what they want to do.

They want to get you to play their game and, and get a reaction.  And they enjoy that. They actually get some pleasure out of that. So, you know, first of all, you got to figure out, um, that you’re being played. I mean, you got to step back and say, “Hey, you know, I think I’m being played by this person.”

Wait, What If My Boss is the Jerk?

A few years ago, I taught a night MBA class at the University of MD called Dealing with Difficult People. One of the assignments was to work on your relationship with one particularly difficult person at work.

Over 90% of the class chose their boss. So what do you do if your boss is the jerk at work?

See Also: 5 Reasons Not to Be a Jerk When an Employee Resigns 

and 3 Consequences of Promoting the Smart, Successful Jerk

The post How Do I Deal With a Jerk at Work? (With Videos) appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

When you’re a manager of managers, one of the most important parts of your job is to know the managers on your team are leading well. Which can be tricky. Because every now and then you run into a two-faced leader, who acts one way in your presence, and completely different when you’re not around.

I’ve been there. And it’s not easy, but dealing with this scene is so vital for morale, productivity, employee engagement, and culture.

Two-faced leaders destroy culture, break trust, and diminish results.

Working with a two-faced leader can be frustrating when it’s a peer. But even more terrifying when you realize that your two-faced manager is actually a direct report snowing you with her charm and strategic stories of effective leadership, all the time hiding what’s really going on behind closed doors.

You see human-centered leader with:

• Receptivity to feedback
• Helpful approaches
• Warm engagement
• Inclusive discussions
• Calm and helpful meetings

Her team sees a two-faced leader with:

• Threats and ultimatums
• Micro-management
• Yelling
• Disorganization
• Mismanaged stress

And if this is going on, chances are her team is too scared to tell you.

5 Ways to Deal with a Suspected Two-Faced Leader

1. Hang around

Show up unexpectedly to see if you can experience the two-faced leader’s behavior firsthand. Engage with the team in casual settings where they’re more likely to open up.

2. Conduct skip-level one-on-ones

Talk about the two-faced leader’s leadership style. Inquire about support. Ask what they need most. Ask for examples of great leaders. Some brave guys will bring up “two-faced.”  Avoiding the subject is also data.

3. Conduct a 360

Your two-faced manager may not fully recognize the differences in style with different audiences. Conduct an assessment, invite candor, and show her the data.  Get her a coach.

4. Ask her

Don’t wait until you have files full of evidence about the two-faced leader. Ask questions without confrontation. “How would you describe your leadership style? How does that play out in these different contexts?” “What would your team say about you” Watch for body language.

5. Talk to her peers

They’ve heard the stories, and have felt the repercussions. They didn’t want to throw her under the bus, but “since you asked” they are more likely to tell you about the two-faced leader.

Your turn. What advice do you have for a friend dealing with a two-faced leader?

For more Asking For Friend advice or to ask a question for a friend for Karin to answer click here.

See Also: Managing the Art of the Tough Conversation (Training Magazine)

The post How Do I Deal With a Suspected Two-Faced Leader? (Video) appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

Advanced Skills for Leading Remote Teams

1. Connect your team to meaningful vision and purpose, “Ask, what are we fighting for?”
2. Create psychological safety (for more on this read our Courageous Cultures foreword by Harvard’s Dr. Amy Edmonson)
3. Avoid disruption through more deliberate synchronous and asynchronous communication
4. Hold shorter, purpose-driven meetings
5. Nurture creativity and new ideas by breaking down conversation (issue, ideas, decisions)

If you’re looking for more tools and resources for leading remote teams, visit our Let’s Grow Leaders remote team’s resource center.

Linkedin LIVE on Leading Remote Teams with David Burkus and Karin Hurt (Transcript Highlights)

Connecting Your Team to Meaningful Mission and Purpose

Ask “What are we fighting for?”

How do I make the mission and vision of the company, affect people’s day-to-day lives? And the irony is the engagement numbers haven’t moved, right?

David Burkus (02:49):

In some cases, they’ve gotten worse,  but I’m going to blame that on a lot of different factors. But it, it hasn’t moved the needle.

And I think one of the questions is that there’s not that sense of clarity and there’s not that sense of where we’re really working toward something important, something that will make the world a better place.

And so I started cutting through all of that and asking teams or even individuals when it came to mission and purpose, I would go, you know, I don’t care if you know it, most companies write such a complicated mission statement that like, I wouldn’t be able to memorize it either.

But when I asked them the question,
“Hey, you know, when we think about our organization, what are we fighting for?”

What About Psychological Safety When Leading Remote Teams?

David Burkus (07:53):

And when, when people invest trust in us, it releases that oxytocin, we’re more likely to respond with trustworthy behavior. And so if you’re a leader looking to actually build trust in a team, you need to think about it that way.

What are the things you can do to demonstrate that you actually already trust your people?

This is an interesting conversation by the way, in this world of work from anywhere.

David Burkus (08:38):

So as a leader, I think it’s a little bit of letting go that you have to do…. One of the biggest things you can do is when you’re working early with a team and they’re looking to you to make a decision, make sure you’re demonstrating the rationale behind that decision. Not just because here’s what it is, but you want to be understood. You want people to understand how you’re thinking so that gradually you can actually delegate that decision once your team has a great idea of that kind they have learned from you, what you think and, and the wisdom that you have to give the rest of the team. You can let them make the decision.

David Burkus (09:13):

And then you end up usually at a very similar decision, but through a sense of trust and a sense of camaraderie that wouldn’t have happened if you just snapped to that decision. Right? So little things you can do like that. I think that also means not engaging in a uniform standard of checking in with people. You know, you don’t need to do a 15 minute zoom call all Friday, stack the ball on Friday afternoon. And then again on Monday to say, what are you going to work on this week? Everybody manages their workflow a little bit differently, especially in this environment and the leaders who actually trust their people are the leaders who go through that feeling out process to find out how can I make sure that you have the autonomy to work? However you want. You don’t feel like I’m breathing down your neck, but you know, I’m here for you anytime you need help.

On Trust and Security

Karin Hurt (09:54):

Yeah. It’s so interesting. About eight years ago, uh, I was involved in this experiment of having call center agents working from home and it was so fascinating. I mean, the dealing with it, dealing with the security, dealing with CPNI issues…

We talked about, Oh, should we put cameras in people’s offices so we can watch them like radically different conversation. And now I’m laughing because I watched, you know, our call center clients in one week back in March, move everybody home. They’re where they’re at right now. It’s amazing how, in a sense of urgency, how see how much simpler it got and guess what it’s working out. Great.

David Burkus (10:39):

I remember a lot of rhetoric in April and May about what software systems should we use the monitor employees, fancy term for spying on them. And that’s, and I just remember thinking again, through this idea of trust and autonomy, mutual respect, psychological safety, that like, if you couldn’t, if you couldn’t send your call center employees home on a week’s notice and trust that they would do their job without being monitored, you screwed up a long time ago, right?

How Do I Create Boundaries Between Work and Home?

Karin Hurt (11:23):

What you were writing was reminding me of the conversations I’m having literally every day, which is people are not finding that their employees are not working enough. They’re finding that their employees are working too much. I think, and this is, I think this is the next big problem we’re going to have is that more and more people are going to be burned out, stressed out and they can’t have the boundaries. And what I like is that you really did give some, we’re all about really practical advice on this, like really practical ways to do that. Can you share a few of those tips?

David Burkus (12:43):

And so everything that we can do as leaders to help people avoid burnout is really about making those distinctions that’s the little things. Right? So that can be little things like teaching people to set business hours, not the normal nine to five, but to actually plan it out in your calendar, when are you going to be working? And when are you not so that, you know you’re off right now, or rituals, are you going to use that replace the commute? Right. So like for me I have two devices and when I leave this room, which is in the basement of our house, when I leave this room, I go upstairs to a charging station and I switched my phone for a tablet. The tablet has nothing work-related on it. It’s like my personal Facebook account and then Netflix and Kindle and, and that’s it.

What Can Senior Leaders Do to Model the Way?

Karin Hurt (14:14):

So Jonathan Green, who is also a friend of mine (coming in the LinkedIn Live chat) says leadership not disconnecting is a real issue when leading remote teams. So I want to turn that into a question.

“What do you do if your leaders are not turning it off? They’re not setting boundaries, but they’re telling you, it’s okay for you too?”

David Burkus (14:33):

Yeah. So this is a huge problem that predates the great work from home experiment, right? The idea that we care about work-life balance and you being off work, but we’re also sending you emails at 1130 at night, right. Um, and this is something that, that really needed to stop, um, kind of a long, long time ago. I think now the best thing you can do is be first, you’ve got to commit to disconnecting. If you say that our work hours are this, or you say that are times where we don’t expect email responses, this is actually the big one for a lot of leaders. If you say that 24 hours is a reasonable amount of time to wait for an email, then you have to wait 24 hours. Right. So it starts with you and it starts with drawing those up.

The irony…

David Burkus (15:12):

The irony, of course, is that leaders are the most burnout by this whole thing that we’ve been running through. So they’re the biggest incentive to be the ones drawing up those boundaries. And then when you have those boundaries be showy about those boundaries, right? You don’t need to apologize if someone sends you an email at 6:00 PM and you don’t reply till six 30. Right. You don’t have to say, Oh, I’m sorry, I’m just seeing this.

Of course, you’re just seeing this now, because you turned off that device at five o’clock. Right. Um, so I think those little things go a long way. I think the problem is, like you said, about challenges with it before. Well, one of the, one of the big problems is this is a senior leadership and it level issue, but it’s also a team issue. And so if you can’t get senior leadership to go, yeah, we probably should turn off the email servers at some point at night and turn them back on at 8:00 AM. Then you, as a leader, need to have that discussion with your team to go, okay, what are the standards we’re committing to inside of this team? And then hold, hold yourself accountable to them first and let other people, I don’t want to say fall in line, but follow your lead.

Communication in Remote Teams

Karin Hurt (20:48):

Okay. I want to shift gears to my favorite part of your book because this is, this is an area, this concept of in remote work environment, synchronous communication, asynchronous communication. And I’m going to share with you my favorite sentence from your book.

So you say asking employees to keep a group chat open is like demanding they attended all day meeting with no agenda where participants come in and out at random and speak only in sentence fragments, as you’re asking them to commit to the work that they’re doing right here, what could go wrong?

David Burkus (22:39):

The problem is that a lot of us choose tools that were actually designed for asynchronous communication and then have expectations that it’s synchronous, whether that’s expecting an email reply in the next hour or feeling like you always have to be in that Slack channel because if you’re not, you might miss something. And that the tools are getting a little better than this like threaded discussions in Slack actually make it a totally different tool.

And when it was like, if it was like trying to do a business meeting and a Chucky cheese before that but, but the point is we can’t pick the right tool until we break out of that and have that conversation. What are the subjects of the issues and the types of communication we need to commit to as being asynchronous, project updates, requests for help, all of those sort of things can usually be asynchronous? And then what are the things and the subjects and the times that we want to have synchronous communication. Once we settle that, then we can think about what the tool for talking about those specific issues is, right? It’s usually not Slack, by the way, it’s usually a project management software. If you’ve committed to the idea that this is asynchronous communication.

Your turn.

What would you add? What are some of your best-advanced strategies for leading remote teams?

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