In the corporate world we often reach for training as silver bullet solution to performance problems. But building and practicing new skills is hard and if we don’t recognise the real-world difficulties people face, it’s likely that many skill-building initiatives will fail.

When people can identify themselves in all their interactions with each other, it reflects a high psychological safety. But just like a failing test can be invaluable in coding, you need the test of “anonymous contributions allowed” to test if your psychological safety is indeed as high as you’d like it to be.

The sooner a new team can norm, the sooner it delivers value to its stakeholders. This article provides a recipe for leaders of distributed teams to accelerate team norming.

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.

Poorly formed teams are woefully ineffective, but I see it so often that I’d be remiss not to state the problem. In this article, I’ll call out two common problems I see leaders repeat when forming new teams. I’ll also describe a few simple ways to avoid these problems.

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.

To invite diverse views in an open discussion, psychological safety is essential. In this article I want to tell you how anonymity can help create that safety.

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.

It’s tempting to extract the last bit of productivity from our work schedules. However, busyness isn’t the same thing as productiivity. Let me explain why cutting yourself some slack, is a better idea.

If decisions are the fuel for high-performing teams, a permissions culture is its kryptonite. In this post I discuss three areas you must focus on, so your team can maintain a high decision velocity.

Constant urgency is the enemy of deep work and an async-first culture. Often this means getting on meetings, and being ok with days full of IM interruptions. With enough of these “urgent” tasks, even the most motivated teams can slip back into their old, synchronous ways of working. In this post, I explain techniques to deal with urgency.

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.

If you learned to be a manager in an office-centric setup, async-first remote work may seem like an opaque way to lead your people. How do you manage without walking around and listening? In this post, I’ll unpack the risks of leading unhappy, disengaged or struggling team members in remote teams and what you as a manager can do to pre-empt these problems.

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.