The recent slew of layoffs should give us all pause for thought. How should we view our relationship with employment? I’d like to share my perspective.

Poorly formed teams are woefully ineffective, but I see it so often that I’d be remiss not to state the problem. In this article, I’ll call out two common problems I see leaders repeat when forming new teams. I’ll also describe a few simple ways to avoid these problems.

The remote-work divide between employers and employees feels more stark each passing week. Lest it descend into an adversarial relationship, I believe we must view this exchange as a two-way street.

A common argument against remote work is that coaching and mentoring are harder when you’re all remote. But I believe that if companies are intentional about building modern coaching and mentoring skills, they’ll do much better being remote-first.

The world of work has a toxic masculinity bias. In this post I share some thoughts about such biases.

To invite diverse views in an open discussion, psychological safety is essential. In this article I want to tell you how anonymity can help create that safety.

Organisations can benefit from volunteerism in the workplace by harnessing their people's spare capacity. But how do you get it right? Allow me to explain.

I think sending meeting recordings instead of meeting minutes is inefficient and insensitive. You can do much better.

If you’re calling your culture a “secret sauce”, or your “x-factor”, you’re doing little to clarify it. To demonstrate care for culture, means that we must define it clearly, at the level of behaviours. We must move beyond platitudes and poetic expressions.

If you want to grow as a professional or a leader, you must stop doing some work, to take up new work. In this post I explain the concept of “metawork”, why it should be explicit and how it can help you scale yourself.

It’s tempting to extract the last bit of productivity from our work schedules. However, busyness isn’t the same thing as productiivity. Let me explain why cutting yourself some slack, is a better idea.

With their return-to-office (RTO) strategies, I see many IT firms take a passive-aggressive stance with their people. This, I fear, can be disruptive, in an industry where people matter most.

Wait, what? Write in slides? Well, yes. And I’m sure you’ve seen this yourself. Heck, I’ve done it myself as well. Guilty as charged!

If you’ve normalised this approach to writing and sharing information, then I’m here to tell you that you should write differently. That’s what this post is about.

Unpredictable days are shapeless days. This represents the classic maker-manager paradox. Makers need contiguous blocks of time to achieve meaningful outcomes. A calendar driven schedule is amongst the worst blows to a maker’s productivity. We can’t be proud of this way of working.

I recently spent a couple of days in an office. That experience made me reflect a bit more about the tensions between remote work and the role of the office. In this short post, I share some thoughts about the purpose and a potential future for the office.

If decisions are the fuel for high-performing teams, a permissions culture is its kryptonite. In this post I discuss three areas you must focus on, so your team can maintain a high decision velocity.

I notice that some teams, organisations and products are attempting to recreate an office in the cloud. This is a counterproductive trend. In this post I explain why being async-first is a better idea.

Constant urgency is the enemy of deep work and an async-first culture. Often this means getting on meetings, and being ok with days full of IM interruptions. With enough of these “urgent” tasks, even the most motivated teams can slip back into their old, synchronous ways of working. In this post, I explain techniques to deal with urgency.

In large organisations, it’s tough for a small team to cling to its own subculture for too long. It’s not impossible to have an ‘async island of excellence’! It’s just hard. I want to use this post to reflect on the challenges your async-first team could face. In the process, I want to explain why it makes sense for the entire company to eventually go async-first.

The agile manifesto claims that the best way of communicating in a team, is face-to-face. Does that claim hold up to scrutiny? 21 years after the manifesto came to life, have technology, the nature of our projects and our ways of organising and working taught us something different? I explore all these questions and more.