Imposter Syndrome and the Long-Distance Leader

“I don’t know what I’m doing half the time,” “I have to look strong and in control for my team. If they ever find out I’m a fraud, it will all fall apart.” “Any day now, they’ll figure out I don’t know what I’m doing and fire me.” Odds are, most of us have said

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Learning in Cohorts for Hybrid Teams

How can you help new hires to a virtual or hybrid team connect and learn about the company culture faster? That’s a question we get a lot, and there’s no one simple answer. That said, one solution is to resurrect the idea of cohorts. How cohorts used to work By definition a cohort is a

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Displaying Empathy While Maintaining Standards

A few weeks back, I was leading a class on How Leaders Create and Manage Remote and Hybrid Teams. Two of the participants got into a heated exchange that was very instructive. It raised a good question: When does empathy toward your team members get in the way of managing performance? One of the participants said

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What’s the True Cost of Working from Home?

Does working from home save you money or add to your expenses? The answer might not be as simple as you think. As usual with complicated questions, it may get answered in a court of law. The LA Times recently ran an article on the increasing number of law suits against employers for money employees

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Why Onboarding New Employees on a Hybrid Team is Tricky

When joining or bringing people onto a hybrid team, you encounter all the challenges associated with an office-based team, as well as many of the challenges that come with a fully remote team. There are also nuances because the new team structure will be neither of those things, but something new and often unprecedented. Specifically,

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When Does Remote Bonding Go Too Far?

A few weeks back, we wrote about how showing your pets on Zoom meetings, or at least not hiding them like guilty secrets, can help the team bond and get to know each other. But can it go too far? Here’s the other side of that conversation. Apparently, some people make their pets too central

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When Should We Use Virtual Backgrounds for Meetings?

Have you been on a Zoom meeting with Bob in Accounting, and it looks like he’s sitting in a luxurious office with a view of Manhattan? He’s not, of course. He’s using a virtual background to hide the fact he’s actually working from the north end of his dining room table. Someone recently asked a question

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Is Social Time Wasted Time?

It’s NCAA Tournament time again, which means nothing to 90% of the civilized world. But here in the US it means three weeks of drama, gambling, and well-intentioned foolishness.  It’s also a good time to examine the role of creatively “wasting” time with social activities at work. First, we’ll start with the supposedly bad news.

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Can You Work from Home and Still Have a Career?

Everyone knows that if you work from home once everyone else returns to the office, you’ve obviously decided your career doesn’t matter. Right? A recent article in Bloomburg quotes Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, who has some strong thoughts on remote work and why we need to go back to the office as soon as

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Why Do We Miss In-Person Meetings?

Remember back before we got sent home for having cooties? Two or three years ago, when the workplace was as it had always been, we hated meetings. We complained constantly about them:  A waste of time. Productivity killer. Boring. Remember? Now, when we ask people what the biggest reason for returning to the office is,

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