Managing Remote Teams

Description

After this course, you'll know clearly how to tweak your interactions with your team so that they gain clarity, become more proactive, and trust you (and each other) better.

About Luca Dellanna

As a management advisor, Luca has 10y+ of experience helping organizations increase their revenue and lower their costs.

As a scholar, he published several books and papers on human behavior and risk management, and regularly teaches related subjects at a local university.

Luca holds a master's in automotive engineering.

What's inside?

• 41 video lessons that take about 2h30 to be completed. They cover most of the tasks of a remote manager: delegating, running meetings, managing performance, keeping engagement high, training and coaching, bringing clarity, and more.

• An eBook, which contains the transcripts of the videos. It's helpful to take notes (and can be read instead of the videos, if they're not your thing).

• What's not inside? Anything that could be better asked to a lawyer (e.g., remote employment laws), a recruiter (e.g., where to find remote talent), or an IT specialist (e.g., how to troubleshoot your video call software).

Some of my principles:

It's not about the tools but how they are used

Project management software, team meetings, one-on-ones… any management tool can bring clarity and effectiveness in the hands of a great manager or become a nuisance in the hands of a poor manager. It's not about the tools but how they are used. For example, when managers use these tools to delegate, do they clearly and concretely explain what they need and why?

Hence, in this course, I will not recommend any specific tool or software to assign tasks, provide feedback, or otherwise do your job as a remote manager. Instead, I will teach you how to delegate effectively, give helpful and actionable feedback, and build trust remotely, so that you can become a more effective manager regardless of the specific tools you use.

Trust determines how people receive feedback

Two managers might use the exact same words to give the same piece of feedback to the same employee and get two radically different reactions. The difference is in the trust the employee had in each of the managers.

If your people don't trust you, they won't work full-heartedly on the tasks you assign them, no matter how good your delegation skills, and they will react defensively to your feedback, no matter how well given.

It is necessary that you build trust within your team that you are a good manager.

During the course, I will explain exactly how trust works, how you can build trust as a manager, and particularly in a remote environment.

Clarity enables feedback

The less clear you are during delegation, the more likely there will be a discrepancy between your people's output and the output you would have wanted them to produce. Any discussion you have after the discrepancy will be frustrating for both parties involved.

But not having any discussion would also be bad, both for you and your report.

The solution to prevent this lose-lose situation is to be extremely clear during delegation, before it seems necessary.

And the right way to achieve it is not by adding unnecessary details or specifications but by being superclear about the essence of the work you want your people to perform. I will teach you how.

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Some quotes from the course:

• Clarity is not micromanagement, but lack of clarity is lack of management.

• People only voice a fraction of their doubts. The rest shows up later as indecisiveness, inefficiency, and ineffectiveness.

• Employees love when their manager, while delegating a task, makes explicit what would be too little and what would be too much.

• Don’t aim to be clear enough so that you can be understood, but aim to be so clear that you cannot be misunderstood. That’s superclarity.

• Explain to each employee what abstract company objectives mean for them individually.

• If you feel awkward while giving negative feedback to your subordinates, it’s probably because you believe the root cause of their mistake is an inadequacy of yours.

• Unless you demonstrate to your subordinates that you are competent and trustworthy and have their best interests at heart, they won’t perceive your feedback as helpful, no matter how well you give it to them.

• If you spot any signs of paralysis, lack of confidence, or other negative responses, make your feedback smaller, more specific, and in general, provide a small, clear, explicit first step for them to take that they feel they can take.

• How good is a soccer coach who never attends his team’s games and training sessions, only meets the players in his office, and only evaluates their performance by looking at their report cards? He would be a terrible soccer coach. And yet, that’s how too many managers do their job.

• The more you reward efforts without results, the more your people will focus on efforting rather than achieving.

• Every time your actions demonstrate you are a fair, helpful, and effective manager, you build trust. And every time you waste your subordinates’ time, effort, or proactiveness, you break trust.

• Meetings are not inherently wasteful; it’s that their attendees are not good at meetings. It’s your job as a manager to teach your subordinates how to be effective participants in meetings. You must coach your people.

• Keep high standards for online meetings. They can and should be engaging and effective.

• Personal judgment cannot be taught with procedures and trainings, because it is what happens outside of procedures and trainings.

• During one-on-ones, spend at least 3 minutes discussing something more long-term: career growth, skill growth, sources of fatigue and frustration, etc.

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