You are not a control freak. You are not a micro-manager. (Keep repeating this until it either feels true or you decide to stop being a control freak micro-manager.) Still, your life would be a little less stressful if you just knew what was happening with the team members who work far from you. You’re

Read More

By Wayne Turmel Many organizations aren’t quite sure where to start when it comes to helping their leaders adapt to a world where half their people are in the office, and others are scattered to the four corners of the world (or the nearest Starbucks.) In our book, The Long-Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote

Read More

In the August 6 Chicago Tribune, the lead story in the Business section was how there are pros and cons to having employees work remotely. This hardly seems like ground-breaking journalism, but there were some excellent points made in the article that tend to get lost in the binary, either-or discussions that usually take place

Read More

By Wayne Turmel None of us lacks for good advice. Everyone from gurus to our mothers tells us how to get more work done, stay focused on important tasks, and fight gum disease. That doesn’t mean we actually do any of those things, or change what we do every day to get the results we

Read More

By Wayne Turmel One of the most common mistakes organizations make when rolling out team technology (think Skype for Business, Slack, and the like) is putting IT in charge of its selection, rollout and upkeep. That’s probably not the best plan. While it’s their responsibility to keep things running, and they need to be involved,

Read More

By Wayne Turmel It might seem that leading a remote team has very little to do with Ancient Rome, but stick with me on this. I have decided I need an Auriga. So do you. Every team does. Okay, you probably need more to work with…. An Auriga was a slave to the Roman Caesar.

Read More

By Wayne Turmel Many organizations don’t have a plan for helping their project teams or managers work with remote employees, because officially, they don’t exist. I hear a lot of our clients say things like: “We have people who work from home occasionally, but we don’t have full-time teleworkers.” “We don’t have remote teams…. But

Read More

By Wayne Turmel The workplace today communicates electronically, at the speed of light, and largely in writing. This wasn’t always the case, but there’s no sense moaning about that fact. In fact, it’s become so common to use tools like email, text, and Instant Messaging that we’re kind of numb to the effect of our

Read More

When people talk about remote teams, one of the big questions is about company culture. How can we create a good team culture when everyone (or at least some of the team) are located away from each other? How can we maintain the team (or company) culture now that we’re located all over the place?

Read More

By Wayne Turmel As leaders, we need to constantly educate ourselves and that can seem a bit onerous. Business books are so darned serious, and it’s not like we have a lot of spare time to dedicate to self-improvement. Not to be snarky about it, but it’s a little disheartening to think that 42% of

Read More