Mindset, not mechanics: The biggest obstacle for remote team managers | with Linda Jonas & Jason Lauritsen

Welcome Everybody to episode 46 of the shortlist. Can't believe it's 46. We're nearly a year since we started the shortlist. We'll, we'll do something to mark our one year anniversary. But welcome folks. My name is Johnny Campbell. I am Your host, the CEO of & Co founder of Social Talents, the trading platform for hiring teams. And you're very welcome to our show. If you're listening live, which I hope you are, we broadcast live every week on LinkedIn and YouTube and we'd love to have your comments, questions, thoughts over the next 40, 45 minutes or so. If you're not and you're listening to our audio podcast, which you'll find on Apple or Spotify or wherever you find your good podcasts, we do reference any links or notes in our show Notes. You can find links to the articles, the news articles, et cetera, and some bios of our guests there as well. So check them out. And if you're new to the shortlist or you missed last week's fantastic show with Kevin Blair talking about how to get more performance out of your TA team or any of our previous shows on culture and diversity, you can find out more by going to socialtalent.com theshortlist where you'll find a list of all of our prior shows and a list of our upcoming shows. We're skipping next week, by the way. We're taking a quick break. I'm back in two weeks, but I'll tell you more about that towards the end. But let's get into this week's show. I'm really excited about this week's show. This is one of those shows that I think is for everybody. If you are in the work or planning to be in the workforce soon, this is a show for you. We're going to be talking about how you lead virtual teams in a time of. And I'm going to mispronounce this word. Tumult. I know, tumultuous. Is it tumult? I don't know. Leading virtual teams in a time of weird crap going on, which is where we are today, right. This is a big thing that a lot of teams have been forced to address. I do remember, you know, one of our earlier guests talking about how we were three or four weeks into the lockdown and will this last? And at what point do behaviors begin to permanently change? I think the consensus was somewhere between one and three months. We're 12 months in, right? Many, many of us are still working remotely, if not the majority of us in professional jobs. And this is a real challenge for organizations. And as the year has come and gone, organizations have really had to face up to this and really had to kind of almost press reset on how they lead, they manage. Looking at their cultural initiatives. And joining us today, we've got two fantastic guests who will be taking us through discussion on how leaders really have to bring people through periods of change at the same time have to manage versatility. So how do you do all that? So the pandemic restrictions that we've seen are still in place. If you're listening to this live, you're taking maybe 30 minutes out of your remote work day. But we're going to have a conversation today about how, you know, this isn't about the mechanics of working remotely, which is what we probably talked about at the start. This is arguably, according to our two guests today, about mindset. And that's probably the biggest obstacle for remote teams. You know, geographical distance, whether you can log on to Zoom or not, how you collaborate software wise. According to our two guests today, they're actually easy enough to solve for the thing that's going to really differentiate you and probably hold you back if you're not doing it right as a leader is mindset. And our guests this week are Linda Jonas and Jason Lauritson. And they believe that how a manager thinks and approaches remote work is vital to its success and cultivation. Mindsets can lead to very effective results while a destructive mindset can unravel the whole process. So, Linda, Jason, it's great to have you both join us on the show. Linda, you're the co founder of the Employee Performance Academy and Jason, you're an author. You've been on the show before. I see your fantastic books over my shoulder. I love that you've written those 150 books, Jason, by the way. And you know, consultant, leadership trainer. You know, I've been chatting to you several times over the last year about this. I know you're deep into this, but both of you have developed brand new content around this. But I'm going to rather than spoil your own introductions, maybe Linda, if you don't mind starting, give us a little bit of background as to what brings you to the table. Why, why you to talk about this subject and why, why is this a particular interest to you now? And then maybe we'll ask Jason the same.

Thanks for having me on the show, Jonny, and great to see you again. Well, let's just say when I first started to manage a virtual team back in 2012. There wasn't any type of content to help me be a great remote manager. So I had to learn the hard way and I made a lot of mistakes. So Moving on via 10 years of performance management and traveling around the world, living as a global nomad, working remotely, managing remotely and working with hundreds of organizations, I'm now thrilled to be able to share some of those learnings and help other managers avoid the pitfalls that I have taken myself.

Jason, how about you?

Well, I think as last year unfolded, as you well know, we, you know, my job has been to try to bring, you know, bring forth some really helpful, practical advice to people as they're navigating employee engagement and management generally. But as last year unfolded, we decided to go to my audience, to those who, you know, follow my stuff regularly and ask them, like, what are you struggling with related to remote management? And we collected some data. We heard that there were a handful of like really key central issues that they were struggling with. And so Linda and I put our heads together and thought, you know, we can, we can help solve this. We can bring some content together to really help people get through this and help them sort of demystify what it means to manage remotely. And so that's how we, we got to this conversation or how we got to this topic.

I'm also, I should add, I'm really excited as this week we launch a new program on leading remotely on the social talent platform with Linda and Jason. So that's very exciting for existing social talent users. You'll be able to, from this weekend learn, I guess, in depth about these topics from Linda and Jason. We wanted to give everyone a flavor of some of that learning, some of that insight and knowledge over the next 30 or 40 minutes. But before we do that, folks, we got to start, as we always do on the show with this week's news. So related to this topic, dive into this one that was published very recently by Harvard Business Review and it's an article entitled what is your organization's long term work strategy? You can find that on hbor.org Published March 21 by Macarius et al. And this is a, is a really interesting article on a whole load of levels. I'll just maybe highlight some of the levels that I found interesting. You know, one of the pieces that the authors tease out is that a third of the executives that they polled describe their post pandemic remote work as going or their plan or strategy as going with the flow. This is a year in that they're just going to Go with the flow. Others, you've got two thirds saying they're going to plan to invest in training leaders on how to manage a more virtual workforce, whereas I think in the past only 20% would have ever given any sort of training to their leaders. On this topic. And it highlights a whole bunch of themes that you know, have come up over the last year in terms of that leadership are finding as being challenging and difficult. And I think to the point that we mentioned a few minutes ago, it's not about the technology or the processes, it's really about the mindset and the approach. Maybe I'll start with you, Linda. What did you get from this article? What really jumped out at you as. Yes, that's exactly what I'm seeing or hearing or finding myself. And maybe is there anything you said you found a little bit maybe that you disagree with or find not as strong or correlated?

Yeah.

Thank you. I mean, it is a shock to me that we are so used to that normal that we believe that we can just go back to any sort of normal. I don't think that that will be the case. I think that there is a new normal and we have to actively prepare for that. It's not going to be the same. So remote management is here to stay. I am happy that a lot of people got the chance to explore remote management, but the way that we've done it over last year, being forced, not having the right home set up and home office to do that, to have some of us kids run around in the background and school them, this is not what remote work is. So to me, this, this came a little bit of a shock that so many organizations are thinking that we can just go back to some sort of normal, remote is here to stay. And that's great, but it requires us to be way more intentional about how we set up the work and the workplace. And I think the article touches on the two things that companies need to look out for. And one of them is the company policies like how do we work, how do we recruit, how do we structure our organizations? And then the second piece, the management practices that also have to change now that this is going to stay. And then I think that the third interesting piece here that's not quite covered, but that's maybe by training leaders, is that individual leaders and managers have a much bigger responsibility these days and opportunity to shape company culture and the employee experience that their folks are having. So there's some exciting opportunities. Covid is a silver lining and I guess the last tough year has a Lot of silver lining points with it. And yes, we need to be intentional about them and create a better workplace.

You know, I wonder what you think. I've been talking to TA Leaders, talent acquisition, hiring leaders about this whole phenomenon of a mixed kind of distributed workforce and the implications and some of the challenges I'm getting from TA Leaders is that it's a real challenge for hiring right now, this lack of certainty about the future, you know, and I think the survey that HBO reference highlights that where a lot of leaders just haven't made a commitment as to what they're doing. The article says you can do a mainly remote or mainly office or a hybrid approach. But like so many are still not committed to even which one of those that they're going to go for. I spoke to a very fast growing tech company last week. They're head of Global Talent and they're growing like crazy out of Europe and they are losing talent, losing talent all over the place because they're. And this is the scenario they're asking the talent to at some point in the future, an undefined date, they'll have to move to the city that the head office is based in. Don't know when and not now because we're all working remotely, but at some point in the future that we can't ever tell you, but it probably will come soon. Maybe kind of soon you'll have to relocate and that will happen, but I just don't know when. But for the moment you can stay where you are. Do you want a job and you have a competitor going, listen, you can stay where you are forever. Just do the work. Which job are you going to take? And this company is just losing job offers. They're such a strong brand and they've been a great company. They're a real brand you want to work for in the tech space with this issue is losing them. Engineers, developers, salespeople, product people all over the place. This lack of certainty from top leadership and I think that that's just, you know, from a new employee perspective. But I imagine, Linda, it's also something from an existing employee perspective, from a culture perspective makes it very that uncertainty, as humans, we don't like uncertainty. Like we're just not comfortable with it. It gives us, you know, it makes us feel anxious. Anxiety goes up when things are uncertain and will I ever have to go back to an office? Makes you uncertain. Can I move home? Can I not? You know, where should we be in a year's time? You mentioned Linda, you know, not having the right workspace Should I bother buying a new desk for €500 or $500? Should I renovate the spare room? Like, will I need it or not? That's lack of uncertainty is really damaging, don't you think?

Well, absolutely it is. And no, absolutely it is. And as I said, like, this is the way that we've been running remote now isn't how we necessarily want to run it forever, but we all got a taster for it. So if now someone forces us to go back to an office, we're less likely to be thrilled about that. And that foosball table and that free food that companies have created, well, that is now our own fridge, and that looks very much like our own fridge. And you create your own sort of workspace now. So I bet that a lot of companies will struggle to sell their corporate advantages of their fancy offices by just the advantages that we do have from working from home, and that is the flexibility and whatnot. But yeah, it raises so many interesting questions, like, what is a job worth, right? Like, is it. Am I worth double the amount of money to the company because I choose to live in San Francisco, or am I just worth half of the money because I choose to live in whatever, Berlin or some, some cheap place? Like, what are we actually, who do we need to be on to have on board? Where do the people actually need to sit? What can we do virtually these days, what not? And what is it that people really want? And I think one of the things that we learned last year is spending more time, quality time with the folks that really matter. I know that I got to spend way more time with my family than I ever imagined being a nomad beforehand, but that's really good. So we learned a new way of what is important to us. And it'll be really hard to strip that layer back and be like, yeah, sure, come and join us at our whatever office. And this is what we require. When you exactly know that your job can be done from anywhere. Now, not every job can be done from anywhere, but a lot of jobs can be done. And I love that we now strip that band aid and just pushed a couple of jobs more to expand explore that virtual work actually works.

Kathy Iverson, who's listening live from Johns Hopkins TA Team, is saying they're finding the talent they are recruiting will only consider remote working. You know, you're seeing this come up. This is a real challenge for leaders as they hire and probably not related, but let's give a shout out. Josh Rock is saying hello. Great way to commute Listening to my pals, Johnny and Jason. Hey, Josh, we miss you. I miss you. I haven't seen you in too long, brother. Thanks for listening in. Jason, I gotta go to you for our second article. Thanks, Linda. This is from our own Irish Times. Very recent article and again, very, very similar. Leading virtual teams in a time of tumult. The word I struggle with at the start. So maybe, Jason, you can do two things for me. Correct my pronunciation of that final world word and let me know what you thought about what was in this article and anything interesting you picked out from this.

You know what? I don't, Johnny, I'm not even sure that until today I didn't realize that was such a difficult word. But I think you're right. I don't know if it's tumult. I don't know. I'll just roll with however you want to say it. That's good with me. It sounds better when you say it anyways, regardless of pronuncia. So I think we're winning there. This is such an interesting conversation. I love the second article. I think really pins down the heart of the issue. I mean, it was encouraging for me to read it because I think so often some of the stuff you read out there is cotton candy journalism. Stuff that really doesn't get at the heart of it. But I felt like this one, your team or you or whoever found this, found a good one that really nails it. It's about clarity, it's about trust. It's about social, you know, social and communication skills, which, you know, it's probably confirmation bias that I love this so much. Or maybe we're onto something. But like that's what our, that's what we're doing inside of our course is teaching these same kinds of things. That's what's at the heart of, of this. Regardless of whether it's remote or hybrid or in person, but particularly with remote. These social, social drivers, these skills that we've long overlooked or underdeveloped and managers and leaders or haven't given them the support that they needed are. It's time, right? It's time to, to make up that ground. Because if we don't with remotes, we're going to lose people. They're going to become disengaged, they're going to eventually drift away or feel disconnected. So I felt like this article would really cut to the heart of it.

I want to bring you back to something that I mentioned, the very top of the hour. I know it's something that the Three of us have discussed before, and it's this idea of a cultivation mindset versus a destructive mindset. Jason, would you mind just explaining that to me? What is the difference between. Because I get, I guess, destructive mindset, you just know instantly by the name of the. By the name, it's probably not going to be good, right?

But maybe.

Can you tease out what is a cultivation mindset and compare that?

Yeah, well, the comparison, I guess, is we use the word destructive, and destructive is more the outcome of the mindset that I think is counter to a cultivation mindset is what I would describe as a production mindset. And the production mindset is what we've been running with in work and business for the last hundred years. And that basically says that as an organization, we bring in these human cogs in the wheel that produce work output, and we have this sort of contract with them where we offer salary and they do work. And our job as management is to ensure production stays on schedule and on time. And that's how we've designed all of our management and HR practices for the last hundred years. For the most part, cultivation. On the other hand, the way I. The cultivation insight hit me a number of years ago because I grew up on a farm, and I grew up surrounded by farmers. And one of the things that I started to realize both about farming and then later in my life about gardening is that, you know, farmers and gardeners, if you think about the work they do, they're in the performance business. Like they're in the business to maximize performance of living things. But they spend almost no time and energy, energy worrying about whether or not those living things will perform or grow or develop in the way they should. They spend their time worrying about the stuff that they can control, which is, you know, making sure that they have an optimal environment to grow in, making sure that they're getting obstacles out of the way, and then letting those seeds or plants do what they're genetically programmed to do. They're genetically hardwired for growth and to. To, you know, maximize their potential. And that really struck me that, like, you know what? I think those farmers have had the model of management right all along. And so a cultivation mindset is really shifting to seeing and recognizing that human beings, just like any other lab living things, are genetically hardwired for growth, for performance, for learning. It's not something we have to be trained or taught how to do. It's what we are born to do. And so when we are not, it's because we don't have something that we need or there's an obstacle in our way. And so that's really the heart of cultivation. And so particularly in a remote world, you have to. If you shift into a cultivation mindset, you start thinking about employees different, you start thinking about your job as a manager differently because you're thinking about it as how do I need to be really dialed into my job as a manager with a cultivation mindset is what do my people need in order to be at their best and what obstacles are in their way that I can remove? And that's the work. So that's what a cultivation mindset is.

That's pretty profound, actually. I had never thought of it that way, and it sums up better probably thoughts I probably had on leadership. But you. I've never, I've never heard it put that way, but it makes a whole lot of sense. You know, it is just a case of what are they, what are they missing and. Or what's in their way. And your job as the farmer is to provide for what's missing or get stuff out of the way for them. Linda, when you think about leaders and managers who might be listening in to this podcast or watching us live, what recommendation, what recommendations do you have for those managers to help them develop this right mindset, to get a cultivation mindset or other similar mindset in a remote working world, how. How did they solve for this? Oh, and Linda, you're on mute. Sorry.

I am.

Hello.

I'm back.

And we said it's not about the tools and technology, it's about the mindset. Your mindset caused that, not the tool.

Sometimes there's so many layers to it. But I agree with the cultivation mindset. It is just such a profound way of rethinking and re looking at management. And with that in line, let me just start by saying that mindset has a tremendous influence on our behaviors and how we show up for others. And the one thing that is quite dangerous is that we're not aware, quite often we're not aware of the mindsets that we're carrying. We have acquired them at some point, but we don't know what they really are. And the biggest issue with that is that a lot of those mindsets, they come from the traditional management, that sort of production mindset that Jason just hit on, and we're stuck with those. We don't see them, but we have them, we live them, and they're not very helpful. They can actually be quite hindering. Maybe that shows up in the way of thinking. Everyone has to work at the same time? Well, that's simply not possible when you have children to homeschool or when you're a caregiver. And is that really that important that we all work at the same time? Or another quite dangerous mindset that is sort of coming from those industrial ages is if I don't see you or if I don't watch you, then you're not working. And this is quite hindering. So we're stuck with those unhelpful, ineffective mindsets. And the first thing to do when you want to change your mindset is to unpack that, right? To unpack and reflect what mindsets we actually carry, what beliefs we have, and then what is it that we need to do to change. So in the course we actually have a three step approach on how to impact that. And we have actually a whole course around the importance of mindset. But the three step approach is to start with documenting your beliefs. What are the things that you hold true about your people and your employees and especially about remote work environment. And then step two to set your intentions and write down where you're coming from, what mindsets do you want to go from and where do you want to go? Maybe you are in a not so trusting mindset and you want to go to a more trusting mindset, right? So you can use techniques like visualizing, how do you want to see your people to see you in six months time and just be really clear on where you're coming from, where you want to go. And then the step number three is to hold yourself accountable. What commitments are you making to achieve these changes? And check in with your folks as well, whether you're making any kind of progress towards moving from one mindset that is hindering you to another one.

Jason, I'm going to ask you as a follow up to that, you know, having the right mindset is really important. I love this three step approach, Linda, to getting there. But like we hear so much about communication. Like that's the last year I've heard communication. Communication. Communication has been really key to doing this, particularly in a remote work. But what, how important is a regular cadence of contact? What does a, what does regular mean, do you think? What has your research together shown?

Well, communication. The reason that communication is, you know, we're hearing about communication is because it is vital. It's been, you know, we've known communication is critical to engagement for the last 20 or 30 years, right? Every, every engagement survey that's been done anywhere always comes back and says communication isn't working. That, well, and so when you, when you, when we go remote and we all spread out, it, it becomes even harder because we don't even get the benefit of informal, accidental communication. And so the reason, well, first off, the reason this is so important goes back, Johnny, to what you started us out on is. Or one of the comments you made is uncertainty, is that uncertainty is at the heart of all of this. When we are uncertain and you talked about that client or the person that you were talking to that you know, they're allowing this uncertainty to exist. And here's what happens when we don't know the story. What our brains do is our brain fills in the story. We don't stay in uncertainty. We fill in the details. And when we fill in the details, it's not very pretty. We write bad, bad stories. And so, you know, when those employees, they're saying, well, we don't know someday you're going to have to move. But we don't know when, we don't know exactly what that'll look like. They're saying, oh well, that'll probably be at the worst time. They won't pay me to move, it'll disrupt. I'll probably have just found the person that's the love of my life and then I'm going to have to choose between them and my job. We fill in terrible stories. And so uncertainty is at the heart of all of this. So our role as leaders, as managers with a cultivation mindset in particular when it comes to communication is reduce uncertainty. And so with, with uncertainty, the key, the reason that regular communication is so important has to do with, okay, if I have a regular cadence and I think the most powerful and we get communication wrong. Often we think about it as push, push, push, push. And it's not about that right now. And especially in remote, it's about having a regular cadence of most important communication are one on one interactions with your team that are scheduled, predictable, reliable that they can count on. So that's once a week or whatever it is that they have this meeting with you. The other is team meetings, like regular, meaningful, quality team meetings that are scheduled, predictable and that they know what those are there for because that gives them a place they know they're going to get communication. They ask questions that's super powerful and super important to keep that going. So yeah, like it is. And as far as frequency, the interesting thing we found when we were, when we were checking in is there's this sort of like push and pull between like too many meetings, too little meetings, how Much should we be interacting? And, and we found that actually people, you know, the cadence of communication had gone up there had been, you know, and that then begs the question like, well, doesn't that mean too many meetings or more meetings? And what we found interestingly was that people don't necessarily. They actually craved more meeting, more meaningful meetings, meaningful interactions. What they hate is the waste of time. Ridiculous make work meetings. And so yes, it's really important and that's what it looks like. One on ones and team meetings that are consistent, reliable are the most important things.

Linda, you touched on something earlier on. You mentioned obviously as a former nomad, you come back, you spent more time with your friends, family, really enjoyed that. So when you look at it from the company perspective, of course we look at the need for communication. Let's have these regular meetings. Right, but, but, and Jason, you mentioned a bit of it when you talked about zoom fatigue. How do you balance. Well, what does the person need? Yes, the regularity of these meetings is great. No meaningful team meetings and stuff like that. But how do you basically balance that with the fact that I've got so much else going on? You mentioned obviously people who have child care, our parent, parental care, responsibilities in their homes. Over the last year, this hasn't been strictly speaking remote working. It's been a lockdown and you're stuck in your house working as opposed to true remote working. How do you balance that? From an employee perspective, how do you balance it? But also from a leader perspective, what can a leader do to make sure that she is genuinely have an empathy for her team and trying to have a better appreciation for what's going on their lives when balancing these needs, not just being one sided as to. Oh, I read Jason's, I listened to Jason's comments. So I'm going to lock in a regular meeting here and I'm going to do another one at this time. That's going to be brilliant for everybody. How do you balance that with. Hang on a second. You have a bunch of people who work for you with a whole lot of things going on and you've got to consider them.

Yeah, awesome. So the first rule of remote management is though, don't assume so wellbeing is a very individual thing and it happens in an individual level. So what you'll need to do is you need to ask people, how's it going? How's your workload? What is working? What isn't working? Right. I mean there's the parents, but then there's also caregivers, the folks who are stuck alone in their home, who are sort of struggling with that and they actually want more meetings and they're happy. Then there's the whole thing about the too much work and not being able to stop working. So first rule, just ask everyone and see where they're at. Right. In saying that, though, the one assumption that probably is very fair to make or that's very safe to make at least, is that we probably have too many meetings. And by that I mean too many meetings that are not as good as they really could or should be. So I think that the zoom fatigue comes from too many bad meetings rather than, rather than just having too many meetings. To Jason's point, the intentional meetings that are set up with a regular cadence that people can expect, that are meaningful and helpful, they're not the ones that are stopping us. Right? No one is complaining about the meetings that are helping us balance work load and private life or that are bringing us more connection to our team or that are helping us to get forward in our jobs. So it's about the quality of meetings. And for that we have to make sure that we have better meetings and better meetings. Starts with being clear about the purpose of meeting, why do we have that? And then after that, the next step is to don't just assume that you need a meeting, but see whether you actually need one. And in this course, we also share and teach about the use of meeting protocols and agreements on how we communicate. So, like, you can set up protocols and agreements with your teams. And one of the agreements that I'd suggest any team to look at to set expectations is to never have a meeting if an email will do. Right? It's simply lazy when we don't even want to write an email because it's so easy to schedule in a meeting. But these are the meetings, those bad meetings are the ones that are, that are making people hate more meetings and be zoom fatigued. So we walk through a whole process to help understand that before you have a meeting or before you schedule in a meeting, you need to have a plan. You need to clearly understand the purpose and the objective of the meeting. You need to be aware of what decisions are going to be made in the meeting and what the outcomes are. And if you have this as an agreement, and if everyone who schedules a meeting needs to answer that, then what we found was that there's simply a lot less meetings because people realize that, oh wait, there's maybe another way of communicating that, right? And then, and then the other thing of that is like not Just have fewer meetings but also have more boundaries like have no meeting days and yeah, schedule some time to have deep work and just take, take that time away as well that you need.

I love that. Actually. I remember there was an article, I think it was in Fast Company or something that looked at GitLab, the company and the case study, which I think lots of people have talked about since the pandemic. And they have very, very detailed processes around what, you know, kind of a triage, should I have a meeting or not? And you follow the process. No send an email, no send a slack. And it's really quite rigid. I found myself recently trying my best to use things like loom. I don't know why they ever lose loom when I want to communicate. But an email or slack is just too long to write. But it largely is a one way communication. It doesn't require the person taking time out of their day to schedule. So I'm like, well, I'll record a loom video and send it to them. They can watch it in their own time and I know that it's been communicated and they can come back to me with questions or we can have a meeting if they want after that. But it's kind of going like technology is great. There's loads of ways to do communication, not just have a meeting. And I think you're so right. Having an agreement between peers and between the organization that says these are the types of reasons we have meetings. These are the types of things you use slack for or email or a loom recording. And you touched on it earlier. We didn't explore. But the whole idea of synchronous versus asynchronous working as well, which I still think most companies haven't got their heads around. I know, I see Jason nodding. Do you want to take a punt at that one? Jason? The asynchronous versus synchronous working.

You know what, it's funny like Linda and I talk about this. The whole notion of asynchronous is a word that I think a lot of people still like. We have to unpack that for people, I think because it's one of those things where it's like, what Synchronous eight What are we talking about? And it's like, it's so interesting to me that synchronous is meaning we have to all be doing it at exactly the same time, talking at the same time. Asynchronous meaning that there's a lot of things that we can do that don't have to happen in real time. And I think this is one of the really reimagining work. The part of reimagining of work that we have to do is because we were all like production mindset traditionally we were all in the, you know, the human production line regardless of what we were working on. And we all come together for these meetings to talk about things at the same time. But the reality is a lot of times that doesn't have to happen that way. It doesn't. You know, I still think we're underutilizing. I mean Johnny, I think we've talked about this. Maybe the last time we talked is under underutilizing video for hey, if you need to do, you know, people talking about like update meetings. Like why do we have update meetings? For people to come together real time and sit and listen to someone provide and just puke out some information that could have been either written down or just do it in a video. Same amount of time invested on the part of the person. Same amount of time invested on the part of the person receiving it. But you can do it whenever you want to. Right? Those are examples of asynchronous that I think we just have it. I mean that's one really silly, simple example. But I think it starts to become like we're really disrespectful with other people's time when we require everything to be synchronous. And synchronous is what blows up the whole remote model. And so I do think that, that we haven't that frontier like we're, you know, we're, we're an inch down the, the, the track on that one. There's a lot more to come and I think that's where tools will come in and play a big role. Better tools and some better training for managers.

I'll bring in a couple of comments on this one. Sorry. Then the Julie west just saying from her experience many managers have had no training and had meeting and really struggle. I totally agree with that. We've got Evie coming in saying he believes in five minute meetings and tracking progress three times a day, morning, afternoon and the end of day. But sorry, I cut you across there and I think you're going to come in on that point around synchronous asynchronous meetings.

Well, I think quite often we use the advantage of asynchronousity when we have teams spread all over the world when we need to cover different teams time zones and there's a, there's a great benefit of that, but there's so much more that, as Jason pointed to, we don't need to do and just one little addition to the video and to the recorded video. People can then watch it not only in their own time, but at their own speed as well, and run it faster or do sports on the side and just take in the. The meeting while also, I don't know, doing a little workout or so you're just giving so much more flexibility to, to people while still conveying the points that you want to bring across. So, yeah, we should be ultimately grateful for all of the technology that's. That we have already and that's also coming out this year as an opportunity. Right.

So, yeah, I'll be honest. I'm gonna. I can't wait to watch both of your new courses on this little town platform this weekend. But I gotta watch you both in 1.5x speed. Not gonna lie. That's how I do it. I'm okay with that. I'm a, you know, English is my, my first language. I find it good. It's. It suits me to go 1.5x. I love listening to you go fast. I've done it with your content in the past, Jason, as well, and it works just fine for me. But to your point, Linda, that, that's great, but somebody else might want to add 0.75x or they might want to be able to go over it again because they missed a point and, you know, or have a documented, you know, version of that where it's video or it's a slack message or whatever, just to be sure what was asked again, which helps in terms of accurate communication, what's communicated and what's actually heard. But I want to bring it on to a kind of a final question on this thread, Jason, for you to start with, if you don't mind. And that's about setting the tone. This is all great and we talk about, you know, team members and colleagues, but, you know, monkey see, monkey do, right? You know, there's a lot being said about leadership and management style if you want to know what really matters to a leader. You look at the KPIs that they look at or you, you see how they act. I heard a brilliant, brilliant summary. I won't do it justice about onboarding that described. I was a podcast and there was a guy being interviewed and he talked about his colleague who he does a podcast with who spent some time in jail for murder. And he said the first. When he went into prison, first, first time he spent three or Four days in this kind of like holding place where you don't get released in the general population just yet. And then you go into general population. And he went to general population his first day and he walked into the yard, sat down and he watched as another inmate got up and walked over to an inmate in the far side of the yard and stabbed him with a shank in the neck and killed him. And this guy was then sitting, having lunch an hour later and he said, that's first day indoctrination, where you go, I see how it works around here. This is what you need to be able to do to survive. And he said, well, that might be an extreme example. Everybody looks to their. You look to the leaders, you look to the high performers and go, what do they do? Okay, that's how it actually works around here. Got it. And in that sense, you know, when we look at remote working, remote leadership, how important is it for managers to set the tone? And you know, do you think most managers are conscious of the fact that they are setting the tone so visibly? Maybe not as visible as stabbing with a shank in a prison yard, but you know what I mean?

Yeah. Yes, it's critically important. And no, I don't think most managers recognize the impact they have. The, the example that I think is most vivid right now is there's so much conversation about well being. Right. And I even, I wrote a blog post last week arguing that well being is the future of work because it's such an important thing and particularly around wellbe. I'm just going to use that as an example. If a manager is not caring for their own well being, then they lose all credibility. And so like the way I, you know, silly examples, but I'm like, would you, would you give your money over to a financial advisor to invest whose personal finances are a complete disaster? Probably not. Would you hire someone to be your physical trainer to get you in great physical shape who is completely out of shape and overweight? Probably not. It just like it stop. It starts with a trust. Like, if I can't trust that you will do the things that you're telling me to do, then nothing else you say after that matters. Because I'm only going to pay attention to what you do and that's foundationally important as a manager. So that's when you send emails, how you send emails, how you show up in meetings, how you care for your own well being, how you do anything sets the tone. And if your words and actions don't match, it's like, I I always used to say that the, the quote that I always used to remind me is like, I'm sorry, I can't, I can't hear what you're saying to me because your actions are so loud. And that, that's what always reminded me or how I anchored into remembering that. That, like, it's, it's all about the integrity, that gap. If there's a gap, they will always do what you do, not what you say.

Yeah, I think it's, you're so right. You have leaders going. You should take some time off. Are you taking time off? No, I'm really busy. You know, it's kind of like implicit in that is, okay, you're saying take time off, but you don't really mean take time off. It's just the thing to say. It's. I, I think I know you, you both would agree with this, but I think it's, you need to be even more explicit as a leader. You need to almost deliberate and almost contrive situations where you can communicate this to get your point across. You might genuinely not want to take time off because you are busy and you don't need it off or you're just okay. But in fact, you need to show you're taking time off so that others will follow you.

And another really powerful example, I heard somebody last week we were talking about, we were talking about how do we start to attack gender roles and the gender bias and, and sort of the anti parenting or the anti working mom bias in workplaces. And one of the things that it was an expert that was, she was, she said, and I think Eve Rodsky's her name, she said, we need our leaders to parent, our male leaders to parent out loud. So it's like, hey, hey, guys, I'm leaving today at 3 so I can take my children to their doctor's appointment this afternoon. Like, you have to, you articulate it and you do it. And when you do that, that gives everybody else permission to do the same thing. Like, that's, that's how real change happens. And so it's not just about like silly, like when you send emails, that's an important one. But like, it's really. You can also like culturally change things in the actions that you take.

Linda, can I ask you, you know, having been that nomad come back and having worked remotely longer than certainly I have, right? And most people listening here with an optimistic hat on, what are you most looking forward to in our new distributed working future? What do you think the benefits, the big benefits will be for society, for.

People in general, that we start to see work as work again and not as sort of hours or time spent that we sort of move away from, from this compliance piece that we're in an office or, you know, we have to be there, we have to be somewhere at a certain time. But, but it's about the, the outcomes that we bring, the value that we bring, but also the, the approaches that we take. I think, I think it really helps us to, to bring work to the forefront and build in a lot more flexibility around work and around working. I don't know. There's so many benefits, basically. Yeah. But I think the flexibility and the seeing work as work and not just having someone sit in an office, I mean, how often have you seen someone day dreaming at their laptop, but because they're there or because they come five minutes early, they're always on time and they're a good employee. No, maybe they're not. It's not about that. It's not about the compliance. It's about, hey, we're a group of people, we want to achieve something together. How can we best do that? And let's focus on that. Let's bring our cultures together and create something and get forward together. And that's the main focus. I don't care whether you work in the morning or night or you're a night owl or whatever, you have parents to look after or kids or anyone, anything else. What is it that we're here, set out to do and how can we get there best? So it gets to the core of that, I think.

Do you think, do you think there's a danger in, in saying that, that organizations and some leaders. Because organizations aren't organizations, they're just people, right, who work for the same organization that people say it's about product, it's about your output, it's about what you get done and the work. But there's no upper limit. And what can be implicit in that is, hey, do what it takes to get the outcome. And as opposed to saying, I have begun to kind of caveat that opinion in my head to go, it's about the output with an upper limit. Do not. I don't care if you work late, you work in the morning, the afternoons, but do not work above a certain amount of hours, otherwise there's a problem. I think it's necessary to put perhaps that caveat there because the danger is we know these leaders and managers and organizations, they just go, it's output focused, by the way, still working away on the Output for me, you want to work some more on that output for me. And with no consideration on an upper limit, which is the downside of that.

Approach, would you think, well, we're human beings, so we're not machines. And it's not like if we work for 10 hours and we add another five hours, then we'll be 50% more productive. In the contrary, at some point we can't even focus more or get more done. And when we're tired, we make more mistakes and we're pushed to do something that we're not, you know, mentally capable of doing, then we just, I mean, it's more destructive than helpful. I think this balance and taking time off and looking after yourself, your own well being and stepping away is super important. And, and that that shouldn't be built in. And you're right, this is exact, this is one big worry. Right. And I thought about it and I don't quite have an answer because on the one hand it is about the output, but it's not just about the productivity. Also, like my example is always a travel agent last year could have worked 24 hours a day, but he probably, or she would have probably still had a hard time selling a trip. It just wasn't possible to achieve whatever goals were set out in January. Right. So it's not just the output, it's also the how we get there that's, that's important. But yeah, this is another opportunity for us to rethink and reshape of what it is that we actually really want to see and achieve in organizations.

Johnny, can I put a bow on this for you? Because it comes all full circle, is that it comes back to mindset. And mindset like Johnny, when you heard output, you anchored into a production mindset which says output. Productivity is about maximizing the output we can get from a human being. And that is how our workplaces have been, have been managed. One of the things we get into in the course actually is that we have to redefine what productivity means. And that starts with defining what output is expected. So this is what we expect from you and we start there and then productivity is about how do I help you most efficiently get to that output? That is the work of the future. That's what cultivation is about. And I think that is the opportunity of remote work is that it's freeing us from. But if we don't do the work to cap it, if we don't do the work to say not, it's not capping it, it's just being clear about what's expected. The outcome should be defined before we start the work period. Hard stop. And so if we don't do that work, then people will always be exploited. So that comes back to mindset.

Go on. I'm excited. The missions are developing the right mindset to manage teams, communicating effectively as a manager when remote balancing care with accountability in remote teams, fostering productivity and motivation with remote teams, making remote meetings work and keeping remote teams connected. And last but not least, confronting poor performance with remote direct reports. And actually last, there's more making feedback work in remote teams. There's so much. It's actually our biggest ever released. I don't know if you both, you know this that we've ever put live at once and it goes live just in time for the weekend. So if you're a social talent user, check that out. New content by Linda Jonas and Jason Larson that goes live on managing and leading remotely. That goes live on the socialtown platform this weekend. If you'd like to check out more, you can find out more about Socialtown@Socialtown.com but we're well over. It's time for this part of the show where I'm going to ask both of you to leave us with your piece of advice for the shortlist. I have a little two year old knocking on my door about to burst it in, so let's go. Linda, what advice would you leave to our listeners today that either you've received through the course of your career or you want to impart yourself from your own experience?

It's actually both and it's inspired by our chat today and that is to really take time out of work as well. It was an advice that I got from a CEO of a pretty large company who actually took time away and then I did it myself and took a sabbatical. And I can only recommend that when you step away and we're so caught up in the moment and we don't see the forest for the trees and when you take some time to really step out and I'm not talking a week or two, but like a month or two and then come back, suddenly you can see the things that are super important and you're like, this is important, this is important, that's important. And this is not my cup of this is not my problem. This is not what I need to worry about. This is not it. This sense of clarity only takes with taking time off. So if we can just rethink on what we want to achieve in a year or at a company and stop thinking about this like eight hours a day kind of minuscule things. Then by taking time out every now and then, stepping away and reflecting, we can achieve way more and get ahead quicker. So that's my advice.

Great advice. Jason, over to you.

Get vaccinated.

Period.

Hard stop. Get vaccinated. We need the world back on track.

Let's take time out to get vaccinated. How about we combine the two together? Yes, Jason. Thank you both so much for joining us on the show this week. I'm really excited about your new content going live this weekend. I wish you both every success. I know you guys have other programs that you're running directly and continuing this amazing work and it's just been a pleasure to work with you. I'm really excited about your new content. 1.5x. Don't be offended. I'm looking forward to it.

It's all good. Thanks, John.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks both. And thanks to all of you for listening. Thanks to all of you for your live comments. We're going to be taking a break next week. We're going to be back on the 21st of April for show 47 and that's going to be with Kelly Jones of Cisco, talking about Cisco's fantastic journey upskilling their hiring managers and having a more holistic approach to hiring that's across the whole organization. So do come back to us in two weeks for that. Until then, really hope you have a wonderful April. Good start to your quarter to take that advice. Take time out and if you are lucky enough to be in a country where you're next on the list to be vaccinated, don't be an idiot. Get vaccinated. It's good for you. It's good for society. Until then, we'll see you in two weeks. Take care.