Middle-level and people managers play a crucial role in companies, but they also model many corporate dysfunctions. It’s time for people managers to get back in service of the people they lead.

When we leave cultural characteristics open to interpretation, we run the risk of creating toxic cultures. The loudest voices usually undermine diversity. It makes more sense for distributed organisations to do the boring work of defining culture. It isn’t as sexy as a secret sauce, but writing things up fosters a consistent and healthy culture.

Many decisions execs take for their employees, ignore externalised costs. Mike Hopkins of Amazon claims their RTO policy has “no data” to back it. Lyft CEO, David Risher can only advocate for snacks in the office, while batting for RTO. Meanwhile, employees and other stakeholders pay for such decisions through costs to their health, productivity and happiness.

We continue exploring the seven deadly sins of knowledge management in this week’s post. I explained three of them to you last week. Here are four more.

In a massively distributed world of work, effective knowledge management is a superpower for your people. On this site, we’re already discussed many things you must do, to foster knowledge sharing. This post is the first, in a two part series about things you shouldn’t do.

A common argument against remote work is that coaching and mentoring are harder when you’re all remote. But I believe that if companies are intentional about building modern coaching and mentoring skills, they’ll do much better being remote-first.

If you’re calling your culture a “secret sauce”, or your “x-factor”, you’re doing little to clarify it. To demonstrate care for culture, means that we must define it clearly, at the level of behaviours. We must move beyond platitudes and poetic expressions.

If you want to grow as a professional or a leader, you must stop doing some work, to take up new work. In this post I explain the concept of “metawork”, why it should be explicit and how it can help you scale yourself.

In large organisations, it’s tough for a small team to cling to its own subculture for too long. It’s not impossible to have an ‘async island of excellence’! It’s just hard. I want to use this post to reflect on the challenges your async-first team could face. In the process, I want to explain why it makes sense for the entire company to eventually go async-first.

Communication is a big part of an exec’s role. In fact, many people would argue that if an exec isn’t communicating, what are they doing? In today’s post I want to demystify asynchronous company communication for the executive. If you’re leading a department, or your own company, think of this as your guide to effective internal communication.

Senior leaders are often victims to blind spots and corporate superstition. And just like in real life, superstition hurts at work as well. So, let’s examine some common superstitions we all face at work, with a critical lens. By the end of this post, we’ll know which of them hold up to logical scrutiny.

Every work model has its pitfalls. It’s not as if a remote workplace can’t go south. In today’s post I want to explore some anti-patterns I’ve seen in remote-first and “hybrid” organisations that can make your workplace toxic. When you know of these possibilities ahead of time, you’ll be able to pre-empt them and put the right guardrails in place for your team.

In an async-first culture, the role of a manager is crucial. If the company is the mother-ship, the manager’s the employee’s bridge to it. They should be the individuals that know the most about their people, their skills, abilities and strengths, their personalities and their aspirations. You need managers who lead with care. In this post, I want to address how you can show that care as a leader and a manager.

Depending on the level you operate at as a leader, you probably have some discretionary budgets available to you. When you spend that money, your company wants you to get the most bang for their buck. In this post, I want to explore four areas of expenditure that’ll make a big impact on your remote teams.

In today’s post, I want to address four sets of factors that’ll affect your team’s productivity and happiness. As a leader, you’ll to address these factors using your judgement, experience and vision. Your choices will influence your new async agile team’s behaviour.

One sign of a healthy culture is that people feel motivated by the work they do. Yes, there’ll be good days and bad, but on the whole you want your people to enjoy the work they do. In today’s post, I want to examine autonomy, mastery and purpose as factors that help you create a motivating environment for the people you work with.

As a leader, you’re responsible for much more than the mechanics of work. Depending on the size of your company you’re a custodian of culture, or the one who defines it, or someone in between. In today’s post, I want to share with you how you can foster a culture that supports async agile.

With the right systems and the right people in community management and curation roles, you can brew the perfect storm of “organised serendipity”. I daresay, that this can often work better than the proverbial water cooler meeting.

In this post, we’ll discuss how you can enhance your knowledge ecosystem by building on your existing collaboration stack. I’ll also go over how to create the right team of people to govern, curate and nurture that platform.

The approach of creating stocks of well structured, organisational knowledge has its limitations. In this post, I argue that you should invest in solutions that create flows and streams of knowledge while stocks move to a supporting act.

As a manager or a leader in any tech firm today, I imagine you have a DEI agenda. Your people’s ability to work asynchronously can be a powerful tool to not just further that agenda, but also to differentiate you as a progressive leader.

In today’s post, I want to share a few notes about diversity and a few more about inclusion. I expect these perspectives will help you shape your organisation’s culture and eventual competitive advantage, starting of course with the people you influence.