I get it love, but it won't work for me
Leaders often see the value in async work, but struggle to apply it to their own activities. As always, it's a matter of striking a balance.
- To get the most out of yourself, there are a few ideas.
- Scrutinise your recurring meetings and decline or delete the ones that are "meetings without agendas".
- Meetings are the last resort. Use that rule to make the meetings you have, more efficient.
- Reduce repetitive communication and save time by committing them to a more permanent medium.
- Use asynchronous communication to amplify your own voice and to be inclusive of your other leadership counterparts.
- Be the change you wish to see in the world. By working asynchronously yourself, you set the right example and you avoid being a bottleneck for others.
- Eliminate your bullshit jobs that force you to do meetings. Instead, spend your time fixing systemic issues.
- Improve your team's resilience by reducing their dependence on you. Use asynchronous communication to improve information flows and to empower your colleagues.
When I speak to managers and leaders about asynchronous work, I receive a variety of responses. If they’re remote work naysayers, then there’s an obvious scepticism. Then there are the remote work believers who listen carefully. There are some who can immediately think of ways this “asynchronous work thing” would work for them and their teams. Many leaders, however, see the value for their people, or maybe “other people”, but claim it won’t work for them. I hear statements such as the following.
“Oh, but my job can’t happen async!”
“You know, my job involves talking to people. It’s tough to do that async!”
“I get it love, but it won’t work for me.”
“This is the way!”
Sometimes this feels a bit like the “Way of the Mandalore”. We’re used to doing things a certain way and we can’t think of another way of going about it. If you’re one of those leaders or managers, I want you to stay with me till the end of this post. Allow me to unpack asynchronous work for you. Who knows, you may find an idea or two to enrich your own work life.
Before I begin, let me make something clear. I don’t disagree that there are some parts of your work that need synchrony. I’ll come to those bits as well. Before that, let’s examine the “Oh, but my job can’t happen async!” mindset. I want to do that through a series of questions. Let’s get started.
How can you get the most out of yourself?
Let’s go back to the first principles. Asynchronous work is not the goal. It’s a means to an end. We’ve discussed the benefits of asynchronous work already. Which of these benefits would you like to experience in your own work life? I want to share a few ideas with you that may help you think about your work a bit differently.
Escape recurring meeting hell
Take a good, hard look at your calendar. How many meetings are just recurring? Don’t count your one-on-one meetings with your coworkers. Count the other ones. Chances are that you’re spending close to 15 hours each week on meetings that are begging for an agenda. Not the other way around. Some managers I’ve observed have a recurring meeting to discuss the agenda for another recurring meeting. Let me restate this differently. These recurring meetings take up to 38% of your time every week. That’s two in every five hours, lost to meetings without agendas.
Ask yourself some hard questions about these interactions.
How many of these meetings have over eight people? Any more than that, and you’re wasting your time. There’s no way the meeting is collaborative and is productive at the same time.
How many of these meetings are about passive information transfer? Emails, documents, even slideuments share that information more efficiently. They are also more permanent than a conversation.
How often do you actively engage in these meetings? If the answer is “occasionally”, then do you need to lose time with it regularly?
Now I understand that in some work-cultures, your bosses may want you to show up in meetings for you to seem “visible”. That’s a problem we can’t solve at the individual level. However, if your organisation gives you the autonomy to use your time effectively, then consider voting with your feet for an async-first culture. Decline those recurring meetings. And if you’ve set up some of these meetings, think about deleting them and freeing up your own time. People can still meet up in smaller groups for agendas that need meetings. You’ll give them time to do exactly that!
Fewer meetings, more effective meetings
The idea of “meetings as the last resort, and not the first option,” exists not to demonise or ban meetings, but to make them effective. We don’t work in meetings. We either facilitate the work that happens outside meetings or we make decisions about that work. Olivier Sibony, Cass Sunstein and Daniel Kahneman describe the concept of decision hygiene, that leads to better decisions.
“Whenever you have different people making judgments, rather than assign the judgement to one person or gathering three people to talk about it around the table, get them to make their judgments independently and take the average of that. Or use some other variation on that theme. But essentially preserve the independence of people’s judgments before you aggregate them. That’s a big tool.”
Think of meetings where you want to make some complex decisions. It’s tough to accommodate all the data, surface all perspectives, avoid bias-cascades and also reach consensus inside that time box. You’ll recognise many occasions when you’ve had to rush things just to finish in time.
When you make meetings the last resort, you can give yourself and everyone else time to work independently. Everyone can share their perspective related to the decision. The group gets time to synthesise the data and the information that’s relevant. When you come to the meeting, you can now make the same decisions after considering all the data and viewpoints. In fact, your meeting can now be shorter and more efficient! Isn’t that a good thing?
Reduce repetitive work
Communication complexity increases with team size.
How many times do you have to say the same thing to different people? Leaders and managers do a lot of repetitive communication through presentations, walkthroughs and sharing ideas. While there’s value in using your charisma to present an idea live, only a few people get to consume the idea each time. Using asynchronous communication such as blog posts, documents, and recorded audio or video, you can reduce the number of times you have to say something. Your idea can go viral.
We’ve also discussed how communication gets complex as your team grows. A synchronous communication strategy doesn’t just force you to be repetitive. It also leaves a lot of room for interpretation and Chinese whispers.
When you commit something to writing, people can interact with it, ask questions and leave feedback. This allows you to enrich that piece of communication by either simplifying it or by adding an FAQ section. This way, your communication gets better with time and small incremental efforts.
Amplify your voice and that of others
Leadership and management groups should be diverse. Even if your leadership group doesn’t have gender, racial or caste diversity, you’re all neuro-diverse. Synchronous collaboration suits extroverts and native English speakers a lot more than it suits others. If you’re the quiet kind, this style of communication isn’t giving you the best chance to express yourself. And if English isn’t your first language, then I imagine it’s tough to construct and express your thoughts effectively, in real time. Writing allows you to slow things down to your pace. A culture of asynchronous communication allows you to have a voice as well.
Even if you’re an extrovert and you speak English fluently, going async helps you. You get well thought out inputs from people who’re unlike you. The diversity of your leadership group shines through. Being a champion of asynchronous communication is a great way to be an ally for your less articulate or introverted counterparts.
How can you be an example, not a bottleneck?
When you’re running from one meeting to another, you barely have time to think about work itself. Most of your conversations are superficial and off the cuff. This means that people in your team(s) can’t work with you the way they may work with each other. You become the weakest link in the asynchronous-first culture that you want to create.
Humans are imitation machines. We mostly learn what to do by copying those around us. In general, we imitate the habits of three groups:
The close - what are friends and family doing?
The many - what is the crowd doing?
The powerful - what are those with status doing?
As a leader, you’re powerful. You’re a role model everyone aspires to be like. If meetings are your first option, then you set the wrong example. First, you derail your team’s ability to work asynchronously, if they have to collaborate with you. Second, anyone who wants to be like you will imitate your meeting-centric schedule and try that with their own colleagues. You don’t want that, do you?
How can you avoid being in a “bullshit job”?
In an earlier post, I shared the notion of “bullshit jobs”. These are jobs that David Graeber describes as “pointless, unnecessary or pernicious”. Now hold on! Take a chill pill. I don’t mean to demean your job. Same team, my friend. I just want you to make your work meaningful. Let’s check out a few examples.
Many project managers have to communicate on behalf of their teams. However, if the team has effective communication patterns already in place, the project manager can focus on something else.
How can you remove pointless approvals and hand discretion back to your team(s)?
When you have to do a lot of support and investigation calls, does that mean something’s wrong with the quality or user experience of your product? Shouldn’t you be paying more attention there?
Why be the internal journalist who consumes updates from the team and radiates it to others? How about championing an enterprise social network? That way, everyone is their own journalist!
Jobs that create nothing valuable need more meetings and calls than otherwise. The meetings are a proxy for importance and the jobs just mask problems in the system. Most people want to do something meaningful instead - I’m sure you do too.
How fragile is your setup?
In the book Antifragile, Nassim Taleb describes the idea of “domain dependence”.
“Humans somehow fail to recognise situations outside the contexts in which they learn about them… We’re all in a way, similarly handicapped, unable to recognise the same idea when it is presented in a different context. It is as if we are doomed to be deceived by the most superficial part of things, the packaging, the gift wrapping.”
Talking to leaders about asynchronous work suffers a bit from this domain dependence. People can recognise how this gives a developer or a designer more time and space to do great work. They also see how teams can be happier and more effective this way. What they struggle with is to see how asynchronous work can apply in their leadership domain. This makes their part of the organisation fragile, because many people depend on just one leader.
On agile teams, we have the concept of a “bus factor” to measure the resilience of a team. It refers to the minimum number of people that have to suddenly disappear from a team before all work stalls. A synchrony-centric communication approach puts you at the centre of information flow. If you disappear, the system can grind to a halt. Your bus factor is the lowest possible - 1.
Another world is possible. Where you make meetings the last resort. Foster thoughtful communication behaviours in the team. Encourage writing as a super-power. Behaviour change, process improvement, skill building are leadership activities too. This way your team becomes resilient and you don’t have to be their human router anymore.
Image showing how choice of collaboration patterns rests on a fine balance.
At the start of this article, I acknowledged that there’ll always be situations that need synchrony. As a leader, you’ll make trade-offs. Between speed and thoughtfulness, gaining breadth or seeking depth; between winning the moment or investing in the future. Connectedness will rank high on your priorities too. That’s why those one-on-one meetings get a free pass. Spending quality time with people on your team can be amongst the most impactful things you do as a leader.
When you champion asynchronous work in your company, you don’t have to give up all synchronous communication. You just need to be more thoughtful about it all. Make the most of your own time, lead by example, eliminate your own bullshit jobs and make your team resilient. That’s what I hope asynchronous work can do for you, dear leader!