We’re starting a new series on Remotely Prepared called “Remote Connections” – the idea is to find ways to connect with your team in a remote way.  It’s been a few years since we have all gone remote and now more than ever, we need to make sure we are establishing these touchpoints for career and personal growth. Our first episode, no surprise, focused on One On Ones, and yielded some great content.

Nothing is more important than your team’s objective, purpose, their direction, even if you want to call it their policy. I sometimes refer to this as their mantra. It’s the one thing, the one line that people can repeat to themselves, again and again, that will find its way into their work that has the potential to seep into everything that they do. And all it takes is sitting down with them and batting around…

I  heard this the other day from someone and can’t get it out of my mind – I call it SUE for short. SUE happens when someone enters a meeting and they are so pumped about what they are doing they rattle off status updates. We delivered this. I coded that. Someone is testing this. We are designing this tomorrow. This is good, status updates are good, but now give me the context of that…

If you are accountable for your actions, whether right or wrong, succeed or fail, but mostly when you are wrong and you fail – you will change the culture of your team overnight. No longer will they think they need to hide and toil away mercilessly in the background trying to get something fixed before someone notices. In meetings, they will speak up about something being broken and not let it go down the line.…

When I went to configure my first hard drive, I had to use my thick thumbs to put these tiny little jumper boxes into the back of the drive on the pins so that the computer would pick it up correctly. I’d try, reboot, try, reboot, and eventually, I’d get the message that the drive was detected and ready for use. Oh, happy days – I had done it, I had configured the drive correctly.…