Tis the season… Relax, this isn’t another “prep for the holidays” blog post. It’s worse. Because while everyone around you goes into holiday mode, you have to prepare for the worst thing about the end of the year—performance reviews and development plans for yourself and your people. If you lead a long-distance or dispersed team,

Read More

Of all the jobs a manager/leader has, the one that we often feel we could do better with is coaching. Study after study shows that’s the part of the gig we often feel gets ignored or isn’t done as well as we’d like. Your employees, especially those who work remotely, agree with you. So what

Read More

Ah, the wittiness of the internet. How many memes, pictures and snarky comments have you seen from people complaining that the latest assault on their precious time was “a meeting that could have been an email”? Especially when we work remotely, it’s easy to complain about the time spent in unproductive meetings. I feel your

Read More

How do you go about fixing work that goes off the rails when you’re not face to face or you work on a remote team? We spend a lot of time around here giving out advice about how to make things work well. And, best as we can, we try to live up to our

Read More

Recently, Wayne Turmel sat down with Tom Crea on his podcast “Your Evolving Leadership Journey.” Wayne and Tom discussed a number of challenges facing remote teams and their leaders today. You can catch the full episode here. This is the third and final part of that interview. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 if

Read More

We have heard a thousand times that conflict isn’t a bad thing. No match is lit without friction. Pressure turns coal into diamonds. The list of clichés is long. The fact that they’re true doesn’t eliminate a major sticking point: for many of us, conflict is uncomfortable, and we try to avoid it as much as

Read More

Recently, Wayne Turmel sat down with Tom Crea on his podcast “Your Evolving Leadership Journey.” Wayne and Tom discussed a number of challenges facing remote teams and their leaders today. You can catch the full episode here. This is the second part of that interview. You can read the first installment here. Tom: What are the

Read More

Recently, Wayne Turmel sat down with Tom Crea on his podcast “Your Evolving Leadership Journey.” Wayne and Tom discussed a number of challenges facing remote teams and their leaders today. You can catch the full episode here.    Tom: Wayne, you shared a story about NASA scientists who were asked which is more complex, rocket

Read More

  by Maura Nevel Thomas Some managers judge the productivity of their team members by what can be observed during time in the office. Are they staring intently at their computer? Constantly running to meetings? When did they arrive and leave?  It’s true that “knowledge work” has intangible outputs, like analysis, relationships, and creativity, and

Read More

When we talk about remote work, we throw the word “team” around a lot.  But do you have a real team, or just a bunch of people who all report to the same manager? The difference can matter a lot. A recent study on employee engagement by ADP and done by Marcus Buckingham among others,

Read More