Meetings

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    Linked: Management with intent

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    Being remote is different. You have to over-communicate to make sure that people are in the loop. You have to create collaboration opportunities and build camaraderie purposefully, and they can’t be team trust falls. You have to get creative about how you work together and interact.

    Most of all, you have to be purposeful about it. You have to create opportunities for people to interact and allow them the freedom to create their own patterns and relationships. You have to learn how to work asynchronously so that you can have more meaningful meetings.

  • Can I “Plus-One” your Day? Interesting Idea to Take to Your One on Ones

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    Admittedly I’m a few months behind on podcasts, so be patient with me as I discuss a couple of ideas that came across some of my favorites back in May that I just listened to this week. First, I want to talk about the idea of Model/Coach/Care, an approach to management discussed by Microsoft CEO…

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    Linked: The case for turning off your Zoom camera

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Stop considering people who aren’t on camera as less engaged. This is just your bias. Your smartest employees understand the additional stress being on camera causes and take every opportunity to limit that effect for themselves. Keep people who are that self-aware.

    Recently, I was doing a training session with some new employees and started off by telling them to turn their cameras off. I am fairly sure it was their favorite meeting of their week.

    Think about how easy that was. I was showing them how to use a cloud tool, I wanted them focused on the screen, what I was doing and what I was saying about what I was doing. They were. I didn’t need their cameras to tell me that.

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    Linked: How long your meetings should last

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    We aren’t strategic about meetings. We don’t plan for the meeting enough, we schedule the meeting in order to plan. We should start planning before the meeting, and figure out what we want from the other folks before we invite them, and tell them. Those of us who think more creatively by ourselves ahead of meeting with others will also bring much more to the meeting when you share the agenda and expectations ahead of time too.

    If you take anything away from this, remember that it’s OK to not invite everyone to every meeting, and it’s OK to use all of the other tools we have to collaborate instead of having a meeting.

    Your calendar will thank you.

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    Linked: The Rise of the 9 p.m. Work Hour

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    One of the bigger management issues surrounding the remote work model is how and when to communicate. I’m an advocate of more communication, always. I’m a huge advocate of a lot more communication with a remote team.

    But, we also have to think about the best way to work together. There are lots, and lots, of meetings that are designed to create better communication but aren’t necessary. Most of them are recurring meetings that no one ever cancels, even when there’s nothing urgent to discuss. Just because we’ve always had this meeting, and we always will.

    That’s not a good reason to meet. At the end of the day, if your check-ins or project status meetings are nothing more than a “here’s where we are this week,” we might consider whether it makes more sense for people to send an email instead. Or even a Teams/Slack chat? It’s the same information, but no one has to plan their day around it.