Coach your team to write

As an async-first leader, you must coach your team to communicate in writing. This can be daunting if your team had a trigger happy, meeting-centric way of working to start with. But all’s not lost. Here are a few pieces of advice that’ll help.

• Lead by example. Follow the rule of three and show people how it’s done.

• Nudge them to take a writing course. Many of these are very simple and will help them identify how they can write simple, effective documents for professional work.

• Create templates. It’s always easier to start with a template than to write on a blank document. As people get better, they may shake off the template, but otherwise they’ll have a sensible starting point.

• Celebrate success. When someone works async-first by writing things up, be sure to praise them publicly. This makes the behaviour infectious.