Communication is a big part of an exec’s role. In fact, many people would argue that if an exec isn’t communicating, what are they doing? In today’s post I want to demystify asynchronous company communication for the executive. If you’re leading a department, or your own company, think of this as your guide to effective internal communication.

If you learned to be a manager in an office-centric setup, async-first remote work may seem like an opaque way to lead your people. How do you manage without walking around and listening? In this post, I’ll unpack the risks of leading unhappy, disengaged or struggling team members in remote teams and what you as a manager can do to pre-empt these problems.

Senior leaders are often victims to blind spots and corporate superstition. And just like in real life, superstition hurts at work as well. So, let’s examine some common superstitions we all face at work, with a critical lens. By the end of this post, we’ll know which of them hold up to logical scrutiny.

The future is uncertain. So, it helps to keep an adaptive mindset so we can respond to this uncertainty. I believe there are five key trends that are shaping the future of work, and, in this post, I want to share my thoughts about them.

Every work model has its pitfalls. It’s not as if a remote workplace can’t go south. In today’s post I want to explore some anti-patterns I’ve seen in remote-first and “hybrid” organisations that can make your workplace toxic. When you know of these possibilities ahead of time, you’ll be able to pre-empt them and put the right guardrails in place for your team.

To move away from the office mindset, then we’ll need to unlearn a few unhealthy habits we’ve picked up over the years. In this post, I want to share four of these habits. Benign as they may seem, they are pernicious obstacles in your path to being an async-first team or organisation. Let’s explore each of them and the problems they create. As we do so, I’ll outline a few alternatives to these behaviour

You don’t want work to feel mechanical and for people to feel like robots. The team should be able to balance efficiency at work with their sense of being human. In this post I want to show you how being intentional about synchronous communication can help you build a tightly knit async-first team.

There are different approaches to estimation and planning depending on the outcomes you’re looking for and the context you’re operating in. Making synchronous workshops efficient is part of this. Many activities can be asynchronous as well. You also need to consider if estimates are necessary in your context. I cover all these topics and more, in this post.

Onboarding is one of the first areas where you’ll see payoff for the effort you spend in writing things up. In this post, let’s explore a few mindset shifts and a few tips and tricks you can use to bring people aboard your team. As you read on, you’ll notice how your handbook and your developer documentation are among the key ingredients to brew the perfect onboarding storm.

In an async-first culture, the role of a manager is crucial. If the company is the mother-ship, the manager’s the employee’s bridge to it. They should be the individuals that know the most about their people, their skills, abilities and strengths, their personalities and their aspirations. You need managers who lead with care. In this post, I want to address how you can show that care as a leader and a manager.

Depending on the level you operate at as a leader, you probably have some discretionary budgets available to you. When you spend that money, your company wants you to get the most bang for their buck. In this post, I want to explore four areas of expenditure that’ll make a big impact on your remote teams.

In today’s post, I want to address four sets of factors that’ll affect your team’s productivity and happiness. As a leader, you’ll to address these factors using your judgement, experience and vision. Your choices will influence your new async agile team’s behaviour.

One sign of a healthy culture is that people feel motivated by the work they do. Yes, there’ll be good days and bad, but on the whole you want your people to enjoy the work they do. In today’s post, I want to examine autonomy, mastery and purpose as factors that help you create a motivating environment for the people you work with.

As a leader, you’re responsible for much more than the mechanics of work. Depending on the size of your company you’re a custodian of culture, or the one who defines it, or someone in between. In today’s post, I want to share with you how you can foster a culture that supports async agile.

With the right systems and the right people in community management and curation roles, you can brew the perfect storm of “organised serendipity”. I daresay, that this can often work better than the proverbial water cooler meeting.

In this post, we’ll discuss how you can enhance your knowledge ecosystem by building on your existing collaboration stack. I’ll also go over how to create the right team of people to govern, curate and nurture that platform.

The approach of creating stocks of well structured, organisational knowledge has its limitations. In this post, I argue that you should invest in solutions that create flows and streams of knowledge while stocks move to a supporting act.

Remote work would have renewed your organisation’s interest in knowledge management. Considering one can’t walk up to co-workers for a quick clarification, could we instead ask the system for an answer? In an asynchronous, remote-first culture, a solid knowledge strategy can be a productivity power up.

In this article and a few subsequent ones, I want to share my thoughts about creating a knowledge ecosystem that keeps pace with your people’s know-how.

As a manager or a leader in any tech firm today, I imagine you have a DEI agenda. Your people’s ability to work asynchronously can be a powerful tool to not just further that agenda, but also to differentiate you as a progressive leader.

In today’s post, I want to share a few notes about diversity and a few more about inclusion. I expect these perspectives will help you shape your organisation’s culture and eventual competitive advantage, starting of course with the people you influence.

Remote and async first work is all set to be the standard way of working in the next decade. There’s still a window of opportunity for firms to be the early majority. Those that miss this window will lag the innovation curve in designing the workplace of the future. A misunderstanding of “hybrid” work can set organisations back in this journey. This is also counterproductive to async agile.

In today’s post I want to unpack the term “hybrid work” for you and I want to explain why misunderstanding this term is dangerous.

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.

If you’re one of those leaders or managers, allow me to unpack asynchronous work for you. Who knows, you may find an idea or two to enrich your own work life.