Go async-first with your team
Use the filters below to find async-first methods that are relevant to your team. For detailed articles, check out the blog.
Promote skin in the game
Don’t tell smart people what to do. Give them autonomy and allow them to take risks.
Encourage people management
People managers are an important cog in a team’s machine. Let’s recognise this competency.
Take the long view
Don’t disrupt yourselves. The future of work is location and time independent. Prepare for that future.
Manage by outcomes
When you measure performance, ignore presence and focus on what people are actually achieving.
Fund personal development
Help your people get better at what they love doing. Fund their personal development.
Practise radical candour
Use Kim Scott’s model of “Radical Candour” to share effective feedback.
Create slack in the system
Without the space to pause and reflect, you’ll rarely improve your systems. To get better, you need slack.
Practice “metawork”
Metawork is all the work you do, to make your actual work happen. Here’s why you, as a leader must practice it.
Communication as a process; not an event
An async-first mindset helps you see communication as a series of steps, instead of a one-and-done event.
Coach your team to write
Your team won’t start writing things up diligently from day one. As a leader, you must coach them.
Coworking budgets
Coworking spaces allow your people to work in local chapters. Fund this flexibility, if you can.
Clarify your essential intent
Your team’s purpose must be concrete and inspirational. Here’s a way to define it.
Celebrate in the open
Thank and recognise people openly. This is a small, low effort task that helps build team cohesion.
Be there for your people
If you manage people, you must keep your calendar free so it’s easier for people to seek you out, if they must sync up with you.
Run skip level meetings
If you have direct reports who manage other people, you must meet these people directly, without their bosses. This helps you keep your “ear to the ground”.
Async by default
To include diverse people and points of view on your team, embrace asynchronous work as a default way to collaborate.
Aim for next level autonomy
Aim to keep getting better at distributed work. Matt Mullenweg’s levels of autonomy can guide you to improve as a company or team.
Community platform = knowledge platform
In tech, static knowledge is often less valuable than dynamic, tacit knowledge. To make this tacit knowledge visible at speed, you must elevate your community platform to be your knowledge platform.