Management practice

Running a team when you cannot see it working.

In a distributed team the one-to-one carries the whole weight of the relationship. Most are wasted on status.

Activity is not output. Most remote performance problems are measurement problems in disguise.

Async is not 'fewer meetings'. It is a different discipline, and doing it badly is worse than not doing it.

Remote teams accumulate meetings faster than office ones, for a reason worth understanding.

Trust in a distributed team is built by consistency rather than by contact, which is why forced socialising does not work.

The problem is usually detected late, discussed badly and documented poorly. Each of those is fixable.

Promotion has always been partly about visibility. Remote work removes the incidental kind and replaces it with nothing.

Project work depends on constant small corrections that used to happen for free. What replaces them.

Written feedback reads harsher than intended and video removes the repair mechanisms. What to adjust.

The first ninety days of managing a team you have never met, where none of the usual observation is available.

Disagreement escalates faster in text and gets resolved later. What a manager should do differently.

Most attempts to recreate office culture remotely fail. The ones that work share a specific property.