We’re all remote managers

And we’re not ready for the new way of working

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash

For the last 12 years of my career I had a manager that was in a different location to me. For most of it — that meant someone in California while I was in London. I also had teams spread across the globe including California, Australia, China, Singapore, Bulgaria… It’s a long list. When you become a manager hopefully some kind soul takes you aside and explains this is an entirely new job to individual contributor to set you up to learn how to fill in the gaps.

Here’s the thing. Remote management is a totally different job to managing a team of people who sit with you every day. Yes, Google found that distributed teams could perform as well as colocated teams in Project Aristotle — but there are some characteristics at Google which mean people are developing those skills. For example — the degree of cooperation between teams at Google is high because it’s hard to deliver anything meaningful without working in someone else’s codebase or across disciplines. Googlers get good at this because it’s their day to day existence. For most people — this is not the case. We operate in a little autonomous pocket and dont’ develop these skills.

Now the first excitement of all being remote has probably worn off teams around the world are starting to realise that things aren’t as rosy as they first seemed. Working at…