14 ms·

Traits of good remote leaders

356 points by sfg 6y ago

api 6y ago
I am hoping remote work will “nerf” in person charisma. It’s not that charisma is bad, but in person it often seems to overcome any other concern. I have seen so many examples of total fools who nevertheless gain power and leadership on charisma alone. It has the power to overcome reason and speak directly to the brain stem.
- extremeMath 6y ago
  Meh, I have that in person charisma. I get a bit panicky online because you can't see someone's face. I don't know if I'm talking too much or if they are bored. Online I'm quick/short. That said, I enjoy being a tech guy over a leader. I tried leadership in done personal business and I don't like playing politics or psychology tricks.
  - mwcampbell 6y ago
    Since I'm visually impaired (legally blind), I always have that uncertainty you described, even in person. I'm often conscious that I might be talking too much. At some point you just learn to live with it.
- jacknews 6y ago
  Exactly this. Remote working does remove some of the rapport and chemistry from relationships, which is regrettable, but on the other hand it also reduces the ability for people to 'dominate the room', intimidate, etc. These kinds of people are sometimes intellectual giants, but very often simply bullies.
  - vsareto 6y ago
    I think it's the other way, the rapport and chemistry allow you to resist someone when they're (consciously or not) dominating the room. You're more easily divided if you don't have that with your coworkers.
    - jacknews 6y ago
      I think you're in a bad place if things have devolved to a herd-metality us-vs-them. But I find well-aimed questions can often derail attempts to railroad a situation from a position of power, and it can be very uncomfortable to field those questions in an in-person setting. Much less so remotely.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      It's both.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  Something else will replace it. The people who are effective on calls, emails and chat will get the brownie points instead.
  - mwcampbell 6y ago
    Sure, but being effective in calls, emails, and chat requires fewer advantages from factors that aren't under your control. Consider that on an audio-only call, a blind person can be just as effective as a sighted person, if not more so (edit: until sighted people learn to go without visual cues as if they were blind). And in email or text chat, a person with a thick accent, a person with a speech impediment, or a deaf person can be as effective as someone who speaks well in the team's common language.
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      I can't quite pinpoint it, but something feels off about this reasoning. No matter what, some group of people is going to be at a disadvantage. It doesn't really make sense to me that you want everyone to specifically cater for the minority, as opposed to the majority. Trying to somewhat accommodate everyone? Great. Forcing changes to accommodate minorities? Doesn't really make sense to me.
      - raziel2p 6y ago
        "Everyone" kind of includes minorities. And how do you define "trying"? Is making social media posts on diversity enough to qualify as trying, even if your hiring process only hires white dudes?
      - mwcampbell 6y ago
        Here are the best responses I can give to that: 1. Fully abled people are already, as John Scalzi put it (with regard to another category), playing on the lowest difficulty setting, across all of their lives. SO I think it's not so bad to take away some advantages, to level the playing field. 2. There are different kinds of disadvantages. There are disadvantages from skills you haven't yet learned, and there are disadvantages from abilities you can never have. What I propose is to replace the latter category for some people with the former category for others. Of course, if biotech someday allows us to give physical abilities to people who don't have them, that changes the equation. And perhaps my thick accent example was weak; my understanding is that it's possible, with great difficulty, to change one's accent.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  I've been remote for ~5 years, and in mostly-remote orgs during those times. You can ABSOLUTELY bully people remotely, dominate conversations, and play games. Leave someone off the invite, have side-bar convos via slack without people knowing, mute people in calls -- and being the loudest, pushiest person in the room absolutely works on skype if the meeting presenter won't mute you.
paulryanrogers 6y ago
IME remote managers have to communicate more explicitly, which I prefer. Remote also feels more empowering should one encounter a bad manager. During my WFO days I had a boss who berated me privately and publicly; even in front of clients. It was humiliating and destructive. Only when a more senior (by age, not rank) engineer finally rebuke them did the situation improve.
- spurdoman77 6y ago
  The good thing with WFH is that if your superior pisses you off you can just start drinking beer and stop working, and no one will probably notice.
  - acron0 6y ago
    If that's the case where you work then I wish you good luck!
    - paulryanrogers 6y ago
      That manager was fired for other reasons. Company folded years ago, also for other reasons. Ironically I think the hardest part is not internalizing the temptation to be an ass to others. Maybe if I had called them out on it myself? IDK.
      - mjayhn 6y ago
        I have a string of terrible workplaces that I'm pretty sure gave me work-anxiety/ptsd (not to belittle worse experiences, but these were bad) and I still have a lot of shame that I didn't speak out more or do more - but I was at the start of my career and had no power to do so that wouldn't have directly affected my ability to eat. That was 10 years ago, now I just try to be the opposite for everyone and amplify peoples knowledge that there really are abusive places and on the inverse there are supportive and collaborative places. On the flip side I can say after 5 years there I never once referred a soul and in fact helped many get jobs elsewhere and have pulled friends out of them when I could.
enriquto 6y ago
This is an interesting read, if a bit light. Unfortunately, its quality is diminished by the ridiculous stock photos that have nothing to do with the text.
- noisy_boy 6y ago
  So I am not the only one who noticed that all the books were facing backwards or their cover not visible in the stock photo (probably for the same reason they don't show brand of the phones being used in movies, unless it is a deliberate product placement).
  - afandian 6y ago
    Sadly the BBC (which as an institution I will defend) feel the need to put pictures on everything, whether salient or not. I'm sure there's research that says that readers like their news articles to have pictures, but they don't always add anything. Yesterday, though, the pictures editor made a masterful choice. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54088206 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54088206
- moltar 6y ago
  And typos: > actually dothe work of gettingprojects done
- eternalban 6y ago
  Are you entirely sure they have "nothing" to do with the content.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  The stock photos were people working remotely and looking relaxed. Which, I think, is part of the point of the article; stuff "leaders" would normally do in meetings are kind of lost on somebody who is in their study feeling secure.
  - ericmcer 6y ago
    I definitely do not get up, shower, do my hair, put on a collared shirt, and then go back into my room and sit at my desk. The stock photos in this were jarringly non-candid for what remote work actually looks like.
theaeolist 6y ago
And the evidence for these considerations is what?
- sfg 6y ago
  They reference a study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10869-020-09698-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10869-020-09698..., titled: "Who Emerges into Virtual Team Leadership Roles? The Role of Achievement and Ascription Antecedents for Leadership Emergence Across the Virtuality Spectrum".
  - westurner 6y ago
    Fortunately the references are free to view. "Table 4 – Correlation of Development Phases, Coping Stages and Comfort Zone transitions and the Performance Model" in "From Comfort Zone to Performance Management" White (2008) tabularly correlates the Tuckman group development phases (Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, Adjourning) with the Carnall coping cycle (Denial, Defense, Discarding, Adaptation, Internalization) and Comfort Zone Theory (First Performance Level, Transition Zone, Second Performance Level), and the White-Fairhurst TPR model (Transforming, Performing, Reforming). The ScholarlyArticle also suggests management styles for each stage (Commanding, Cooperative, Motivational, Directive, Collaborative); and suggests that team performance is described by chained power curves of re-progression through these stages. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=%E2%80%9CFrom+Comfort+Zone+to+Performance+Management%E2%80%9D+White+%282008%29&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3D38spZfy7PdsJ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=%E2... IDK what's different about online teams in regards to performance management?
fivre 6y ago
there are actors who excel in the status quo through virtue of said quo lauding their strengths (here, putting on a good face during sync communication) alongside basic competency in other skills (having a bare minimum capability outside their face fronting forte) when that status quo slips away, it exposes those who were merely charlatans acting the lauded part (putting on a good facade face while lacking depth in teh actual capabilities society and organizations rely on, simply fronting a good appearance)--the changes uncovers those who failed to put forth the front out of ignorance of or disdain for it. it raises those whose true strengths mattered more all along, but to which broader culture was blind to, having long lost its way tacking too hard towards praising the facade, assuming it implied the foundation fires burn away some moss; the hardwood remains--it was always there, but now we get to see it, and further see that some of the most elegant fungus was naught but a large clump of mold growing upon itself alone, without much underneath
hownottowrite 6y ago
I worked remote for most of the 90s. Wooo 9600 baud! Competency was probably the most important trait. A boss without a clue was easy to dupe and avoid, but also a pain when you were actually doing plenty of work. A boss that knew what was what would be on your case if you slacked, but also super relaxed if you were producing to expectations. Clear communication was also critical but it was even more important to be measured in the volume.
- sida 6y ago
  Can you share your stories around how working remotely in the 90s was like? e.g. there probably wasn't video chat. So how did you communicate? Were you coding? What were tooling like for coding remotely back then? etc etc
  - bobbane 6y ago
    I worked as part of a distributed team from 1989-1994. I was on the US east coast, one guy was in Ohio, two guys were in California, and two were in Japan. I worked at the end of a Telebit Trailblazer, so I had a 19200 baud link to the internet. I remember emailing myself GCC - staged the tarball on a remote host, uuencoded it and sent it home as multiple email messages. We mostly did stuff via email, with the occasional conference voice call. I had to learn to restrain myself and not try to solve user problems when I first saw them - because of the distribution of time zones, I would tend to be the first person awake. This was definitely coding - we were selling and supporting Interlisp-D and its many derivatives.
  - brainbag 6y ago
    Remote work in the 90s and 00s was a lot of FTP, CVS, email and IM. Long distance phone calls still cost money for much of that time too, so there wasn't much synchronous phone calls, once a week or so. Also, generally the business needs were either high enough that the staff were all expert-ish and could get done what they needed, or low enough that random Bob's cousin's nephew could build it in HoTMetaL. There wasn't a lot of in between. When I worked for other people, management spent a lot of time with requirements and specs before implementing, which often resulted in mismatched software expectations. Agile gets poo-poo'd now, but it was a revolution at the time When I was doing my own consulting, I always did my best to find local clients for remote work (often building e-commerce web sites when the competition was still using FrontPage) because it was preferable to be able to call the client or meet in person to discuss the inevitable requirements snafus. Honestly, it doesn't seem that much different now. Humans are generally not all that great at communication. The tools we have today make a dent in that problem but there's still significant unresolved challenges. When I'm leading teams, I tend to spend a lot of time on teaching people to communicate more effectively and creating processes to enable it. It makes things go more smoothly than trying to be the central hub for all communication.
mumblemumble 6y ago
I suspect that the ideal primary role of a leader in a remote setting is to serve as a communication channel. In person, it's somehow easier to tune the office chatter in and out as needed to keep track of what your colleagues are up to. I have yet to find an electronic replacement for this phenomenon. Email, if nobody thought to CC you, you simply won't find out. If people deal with this by defensively CCing everyone, you drown in email. Slack's value is inversely proportional to its uptake: The more people talk on it, the more it resembles a sort of workplace Twitter where it's simply impossible to try and keep track of what everyone is saying, so you give up and resort to only looking at it when you're trying to slack off. Threads attempt to work around this by replicating the problems of email in a chat app. I suspect that an old-school web forum like phpBB could work well, but any technical merits won't overcome the social perception. There's just no getting around the nerd factor there. The only technique I've seen work well is the manager-as-dispatcher approach. This poor soul becomes the designated firehose-drinker. They get CC'd on every email, and they subscribe to every Slack thread. They keep an eye out for anything that Sam or Pat might want to know about, and check in to make sure that Sam or Pat is keeping an eye on it.
- jordache 6y ago
  facebook workplace or yammer are good options for async communication approaches w/o the need for defensive ccing
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > They keep an eye out for anything that Sam or Pat might want to know about, and check in to make sure that Sam or Pat is keeping an eye on it. This is miserable for everyone. Don't make Slack the center of your workflow. Don't let spontaneous Slack chats dictate your process. The manager's job shouldn't be to scour Slack for information and then ping every person who might need to participate in or read each conversation. That just amplifies the noise. It's terrible to be deliberately ignoring Slack for 30 minutes to focus on work, only to have your manager ping you back into Slack to make sure you don't miss something. Instead, the manager should be forcing important conversations to happen outside of spontaneous Slack conversations. If something important is decided in Slack, the decision needs to be recorded in the tracking ticket, Wiki, or other important location. If it changes anyone's active work, they should be interrupted. Otherwise, they can pick up the information from the single source of record (ticket, wiki, etc.) rather than being expected to follow every detail of Slack all day. Small groups working on tasks together should have private PMs or channels to discuss implementation details, not giant Slack channels with 10s or 100s of members. A good manager will avoid design by committee and will stay ahead of the spontaneous Slack firehose by arranging planning sessions and scheduled meetings where necessary. Don't let the Slack chaos drive your workflow. Don't try to make managing Slack someone's job. Manage the workflow first, deliberately rather than reactively. If important conversations are happening spontaneously in Slack too often, that's a sign that you need to fix your workflow.
werber 6y ago
IMO, the best leaders I've had were great I've had have been great online and in person. And I've always preferred a mixture of IRL and off site work. It has never mattered to me if a person is extroverted or introverted, messy or organized, just that I can trust them and that they trust me. When that contract is fractured there is no way to have a healthy working relationship in my opinion. Mutual respect is the most important thing in the office to me
- zmmmmm 6y ago
  It's an interesting point you raise around trust. It's certainly one of my biggest challenges in a management role - there are staff I struggle to trust due to past instances where they have gone significantly off track and failed to deliver due to ignoring or taking too much license with the direction they were given. We've got huge piles of technical debt and whole series of poor decisions we're just living with due to this kind of thing. The challenge now is how to continue to delegate to such people, without creating a huge amount of overhead to track what they are doing and how it is being executed. Simultaneously with all this, those same people are in a technical sense the most skilled in the team. Finding a way for these people to mature into their roles would be ideal but it's really hard work.
  - werber 6y ago
    I feel that. Sorry if you never see this due to the late reply, but i strongly feel that trust is a constantly built thing. The team needs to trust working with each other, and have open communication horizontally and vertically. I’m not a 10x dev and have seen way better developers than me go off the rails because they weren’t able to communicate and their work becomes unmanageable because of that lack of trust. I think it’s ok for a junior developer to feel safe taking on less points and doing things slower and spending more time pairing and mentoring. But This has only ever worked on teams I’ve been on where people had the opportunity to fail. And with that being said, once a team loses passion it is so hard to work back to a healthy self regulated environment
deleted 6y ago
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khalilravanna 6y ago
Unless I'm reading the summary of the study's findings wrong, the study showed what people are selected as leaders, right? Which is super interesting but not the same as who is a good leader. The summary of the article inaccurately states, "Strong in-person leadership skills don’t necessarily translate to being a good virtual leader", which feels like a huge leap with no evidence. Unless being chosen as a leader by the group directly correlates with who is actually successful as leaders this doesn't seem like a huge takeaway. Would be very interested to see something more substantive on this front.
- mannykannot 6y ago
  The article is based on a study that it links to. Like just about every other study, it is done within the context of existing work, in this case 'multilevel leadership emergence theory'. While it is possible that this field is flawed to the core, I am not yet ready to assume that it is, so that, for example, there is little correlation between who gets selected for leadership and who is suited for it, without having first done some digging into the literature myself.
  - khalilravanna 6y ago
    Thanks for the added insight. I guess I have two follow up questions to that. 1) Is anyone who does have the context able to weigh in? From my own digging I'm not seeing a lot of agreed upon definitions of "leadership emergency theory". I found one paper [1] which I read the abstract of. It again, like the OP, seems to talk about how "leaders emerge in teams that lack a hierarchical structure". From my experience this doesn't seem incredibly useful given all managers/leaders I've seen have been appointed by someone else. It's not some subconscious, democratic process where they're chosen by the group. 2) Kind of meta, but did the writer of the article do the research that seems necessary for this? And if not is this acceptable, given that I can only assume numerous people will take this at face value and may even make organizational changes as a result? [1] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/LODJ-08-2012-0109/full/html https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/LODJ-08-...
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
troughway 6y ago
The surprising thing to me is that there is no mention of the copious online communities we have had for the past few decades. The number of WoW guilds alone is staggering. If you want to know the "surprising" traits, just look to the people* leading these, you have ample data there. *BBC put up some qtπ photos with makeup. In reality: pasty, overweight nerds, neckbeards and warlocks.
shubb 6y ago
This study seems to answer the question of 'who would the team select as a leader', but in reality project leadership at companies is rarely a democracy. People move jobs a lot in the tech industry, so as a result senior roles are often filled externally. It helps to have a recommendation, but roles are rarely filled by asking the team who they would most like to work with an approaching them. Normally companies advertise roles and try to use some kind of standardized process. So CV writing and interview technique are critical. Promotions often happen because people apply for the role up when it is advertised competitively. My observation is that people succeed at this by focusing on performing against their current objectives, not being a problem, requesting training, and picking up the tasks relevant to their current role that will be on the job description for the next one up. That next role up might be in another team so your own teams favor matters less. The main thing is not to have been a problem to management and to present yourself well during the application process. I think external upwards moves are more likely to be powered by skill at believable exaggeration, and internal promotions by rules compliance and consistent ambition driven box ticking. Finally, some people get promoted because management need someone they trust to do that job now, at least temporarily. This happens when a new project team is created and someone is told they are in charge of it, or someone quits and their duties are reallocated to an immediate report. These reward competence yes, but such a people keep their winnings or fall back by their actual short term success - if things look shaky management go out externally for a permanent replacement and quietly put them back where they were. I don't really see any of this changing due to work from home. It is probably different at high levels of management because these roles seem to be filled more based on relationships.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
My takeaway: in-person leadership is a charisma game where somebody fools everyone into letting them be boss. Perhaps to the detriment of the project and goals. Virtual leadership is based on performance and productivity. It related directly to achieving goals. Another big win for virtual work? It factors pointless, harmful charisma out of the equation?
- jordache 6y ago
  100% wrong and no doubt myopic to your own personal and likely limited experiences. a venn diagram of good leader qualities and charismatic qualities has non-trivial overlap. A leader lacking people skills has a very limited ceiling in what he/she can affect.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Explain the OP then? Almost a perfect experiment in removing charisma from the work equation - everybody works remotely and communicates through a limited channel. And things get better. And perhaps delve into 'charismatic' as it relates to loud, aggressive or overbearing.
    - jordache 6y ago
      one can convey charisma through digital/remote channels. Just because the physical connection is gone, it does not mean a robotic / formulaic approach is now the only way to lead/manage humans
      - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
        It reduces the effect. It becomes possible to squelch the loudmouth, take turns talking, hear from everyone. It removes physical intimidation and most body language. Nobody is suggesting 'robotic' or 'formulaic'.
        xauronx 6y ago
Hoasi 6y ago
> “Suddenly it’s not just about who talks the most, but rather, who is actually getting stuff done.” One wishes. That almost sounds too ideal to be true.
joubert 6y ago
"“To me, this is half the story,” she says, pointing out that though the study data touches on interpersonal relationships, it more heavily measures task-oriented actions, which are only a portion of what drive leadership. “The next logical step is [to study] how team members manage interpersonal relations and behaviours and who emerges as leaders. We don’t really know that.” For example, a follow-up study might explore whether doer leaders maintain interpersonal skills over time."
deleted 6y ago
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maerF0x0 6y ago
IMO the best of any kind is one that designs themselves out of the hot path. What does that mean for leaders? Don't _be_ the conduit to good communication, instead tend to it like something external to you. Processes and tooling are like code for businesses and can be updated over time to fix the bugs.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  I think this is definitely true. But the biggest reason it's rare in practice is because middle managers who aren't viewed as essential to day-to-day operations are likely to be made redundant by senior leadership. Managers bias towards taking an overly hands-on, interventionist style, because that creates a lot more visible signals that they're not easily replaced. There's no incentive to build a well designed process that the team's empowers self-driven success. As often happens to programmers, that type of manager often finds that he's engineered himself out of a job. Much better to create busywork, lest senior executives start asking "what exactly would you say you do here". What often separates out great senior leadership is recognizing the pernicious influence of this bias. John D Rockefeller was famous for having tons of middle managers who barely worked at all, took naps in the afternoon, and the like.
  - bfuclusion 6y ago
    I mean that works if all you want is to rise to middle management. When you start having actual revenue or project goals then that method falls apart.
raintrees 6y ago
The virtual version of Joel Spolsky's "Good managers move chairs out of the way to assist programmers getting work done" (heavily paraphrased from memory).
Nimitz14 6y ago
The primary role of leaders is communication, so I'm a bit confused by this idea that the leader is whoever "does" the most. You're not leading much of anything if you have time to do the work yourself I believe.
- john_cogs 6y ago
  In my lived experience at GitLab, leaders can deliver results through efficient communication that enables others to do their jobs successfully (rather than waiting hours to respond to messages), helping team members iterate on the scope of projects to ensure progress is made on goals, and modeling our company values which helps others better understand the values and incorporate them into their work.
SiempreViernes 6y ago
the WEIRD sample strikes again! I hope we at least have a round of reproducibility crises in management research within a decade, because evidently it's not reached them yet. > The researchers conducted a series of in-lab experiments with 86 four-person teams, and also traced the communications and experiences of 134 teams doing a semester-long project in a university class
- triyambakam 6y ago
  What is WEIRD in this context?
  - phaemon 6y ago
    Look at weirdceo.com Wisdom, Emotional Intelligence, Initiative, Robot, Dastardly or something like that.
  - bobbiechen 6y ago
    >Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/weirdest-people-in-the-world/BF84F7517D56AFF7B7EB58411A554C17 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain...
- duckmysick 6y ago
  Perhaps I'm ignorant and I'm missing something obvious - but how exactly are we going to apply this particular experiment to pre-industrial, uneducated population? We're talking about communication in remote virtual meetings. The original WEIRD paper contrasts the industrial societies with small-scale ones. Can we even find small-scale societies that do virtual remote work?
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago
    There's more than pre-industrial people in the complement to the WEIRD-collage population, you know? Like maybe start with real adults working actual jobs? You could also see how it works for Canadians, Indians, Chileans, Thai, Russians, Nigerians... all have developed enough economies that there are at least some remote workers.
steve76 6y ago
Remote work always ends up like this for me: A private room with the meeting always on opened with screen share. I'm online when I'm at my desk. Speakers on, so people can shout for me through my house. Everyone at home learns to either laugh at them or ignore them. No matter what someone else does, I don't criticize them. I learn quick to ignore people. I work through their chatter even people calling me by name. I always focus on the most important problem and nothing else. When that's done, I move onto the next. I don't leave until at least one of those are completely finished a day, regardless of other people. If I ask someone to contribute, and they mess up big, I just say "Great Job!" and redo their work. Don't expect any contributions of merit. Next time I give them something simple or just pay them and get rid of them. I now have a grave grim stare, like judges do. If it bothers people I don't look away on their time. I look away on mine. Even remote, people can still be very dangerous or just waste your time. At start I say no unless it's perfect. I often give an hour or two at no-charge if I don't know. I'm never afraid to walk away at the slightest problem. I'm here to make money not babysit or cleanup.
stakkur 6y ago
researchers conducted a series of in-lab experiments with 86 four-person teams, and also traced the communications and experiences of 134 teams doing a semester-long project in a university class This research isn't based on what's happening in the real work world, with real workers, in real companies. After reading the summary, I'm having a hard time giving this much weight.
supergeek133 6y ago
There is also another important factor... mutual respect. To be stereotypical, I'd go ahead and assume that a majority of people on HN work in tech and likely are paid a decent salary. The one thing I find in bad leaders (remote or otherwise), and relational in poorly run companies is the lack of trust. I've worked with leaders who micromanage as much/more than I was when I worked a minimum wage/high supervisory job. This is bad and holds back many employees/companies. It encourages "shared courage" and centralized decision making. I'm usually amazed at how much responsibility people are given who make over 6 figures, but yet how little decision power they are given. Even when the leader may not have the same knowledge level as their employee. I've had the pleasure of working with many people who respect that I know how to manage my time, that I know things they don't, and the understand that I appreciate the same about them. I can imagine how much the "wrong" side of this is amplified when you suddenly aren't around each other all the time.
- zmmmmm 6y ago
  > I'm usually amazed at how much responsibility people are given who make over 6 figures, but yet how little decision power they are given. It's an interesting distortion of the inflated tech-skill market I think. I have individual team members doing software who are paid more than entire group leaders doing other things but they are still very immature, and in no way can accept responsibility for more higher level things. I do agree about the responsibility / decision power point though. To me one of the most powerful motivating forces for tech people is giving them autonomy to make technical decisions themselves. It's somewhat tragic that this is so negative in the large - allow a whole team of engineers to each choose a different web stack and they'll love it, but you're in for a disaster.
eb3c90 6y ago
I suspect it is still important to get to know people and build trust in the flesh, even if having a remote leader can be good.
virgulino 6y ago
What's up with the books in the second photo?
spurgu 6y ago
> President Trump has set Sept. 15 as a deadline for the company's Chinese owner, ByteDance, to find an American purchaser, or it will face a ban in the U.S. I know it's been almost 4 years but I still have a hard time grasping that I'm not on The Onion when I'm reading sentences like this...
bloodorange 6y ago
Man, at some point, someone has to point it out. What the hell is with these clickbait headlines on HN. Is there no place on the internet saved from it? Even what used to be reputable news websites have it everywhere (and BBC of course shamefully is one of them). Does it help to flag these? Or is this now the new normal on HN? EDIT: I'm glad it has now been edited to be more sensible.

356 points by sfg 6y ago

api 6y ago

I am hoping remote work will “nerf” in person charisma. It’s not that charisma is bad, but in person it often seems to overcome any other concern. I have seen so many examples of total fools who nevertheless gain power and leadership on charisma alone. It has the power to overcome reason and speak directly to the brain stem.

extremeMath 6y ago
Meh, I have that in person charisma. I get a bit panicky online because you can't see someone's face. I don't know if I'm talking too much or if they are bored. Online I'm quick/short. That said, I enjoy being a tech guy over a leader. I tried leadership in done personal business and I don't like playing politics or psychology tricks.
- mwcampbell 6y ago
  Since I'm visually impaired (legally blind), I always have that uncertainty you described, even in person. I'm often conscious that I might be talking too much. At some point you just learn to live with it.
jacknews 6y ago
Exactly this. Remote working does remove some of the rapport and chemistry from relationships, which is regrettable, but on the other hand it also reduces the ability for people to 'dominate the room', intimidate, etc. These kinds of people are sometimes intellectual giants, but very often simply bullies.
- vsareto 6y ago
  I think it's the other way, the rapport and chemistry allow you to resist someone when they're (consciously or not) dominating the room. You're more easily divided if you don't have that with your coworkers.
  - jacknews 6y ago
    I think you're in a bad place if things have devolved to a herd-metality us-vs-them. But I find well-aimed questions can often derail attempts to railroad a situation from a position of power, and it can be very uncomfortable to field those questions in an in-person setting. Much less so remotely.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    It's both.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
Something else will replace it. The people who are effective on calls, emails and chat will get the brownie points instead.
- mwcampbell 6y ago
  Sure, but being effective in calls, emails, and chat requires fewer advantages from factors that aren't under your control. Consider that on an audio-only call, a blind person can be just as effective as a sighted person, if not more so (edit: until sighted people learn to go without visual cues as if they were blind). And in email or text chat, a person with a thick accent, a person with a speech impediment, or a deaf person can be as effective as someone who speaks well in the team's common language.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    I can't quite pinpoint it, but something feels off about this reasoning. No matter what, some group of people is going to be at a disadvantage. It doesn't really make sense to me that you want everyone to specifically cater for the minority, as opposed to the majority. Trying to somewhat accommodate everyone? Great. Forcing changes to accommodate minorities? Doesn't really make sense to me.
    - raziel2p 6y ago
      "Everyone" kind of includes minorities. And how do you define "trying"? Is making social media posts on diversity enough to qualify as trying, even if your hiring process only hires white dudes?
    - mwcampbell 6y ago
      Here are the best responses I can give to that: 1. Fully abled people are already, as John Scalzi put it (with regard to another category), playing on the lowest difficulty setting, across all of their lives. SO I think it's not so bad to take away some advantages, to level the playing field. 2. There are different kinds of disadvantages. There are disadvantages from skills you haven't yet learned, and there are disadvantages from abilities you can never have. What I propose is to replace the latter category for some people with the former category for others. Of course, if biotech someday allows us to give physical abilities to people who don't have them, that changes the equation. And perhaps my thick accent example was weak; my understanding is that it's possible, with great difficulty, to change one's accent.
blaser-waffle 6y ago
I've been remote for ~5 years, and in mostly-remote orgs during those times. You can ABSOLUTELY bully people remotely, dominate conversations, and play games. Leave someone off the invite, have side-bar convos via slack without people knowing, mute people in calls -- and being the loudest, pushiest person in the room absolutely works on skype if the meeting presenter won't mute you.

paulryanrogers 6y ago

IME remote managers have to communicate more explicitly, which I prefer. Remote also feels more empowering should one encounter a bad manager. During my WFO days I had a boss who berated me privately and publicly; even in front of clients. It was humiliating and destructive. Only when a more senior (by age, not rank) engineer finally rebuke them did the situation improve.

spurdoman77 6y ago
The good thing with WFH is that if your superior pisses you off you can just start drinking beer and stop working, and no one will probably notice.
- acron0 6y ago
  If that's the case where you work then I wish you good luck!
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    That manager was fired for other reasons. Company folded years ago, also for other reasons. Ironically I think the hardest part is not internalizing the temptation to be an ass to others. Maybe if I had called them out on it myself? IDK.
    - mjayhn 6y ago
      I have a string of terrible workplaces that I'm pretty sure gave me work-anxiety/ptsd (not to belittle worse experiences, but these were bad) and I still have a lot of shame that I didn't speak out more or do more - but I was at the start of my career and had no power to do so that wouldn't have directly affected my ability to eat. That was 10 years ago, now I just try to be the opposite for everyone and amplify peoples knowledge that there really are abusive places and on the inverse there are supportive and collaborative places. On the flip side I can say after 5 years there I never once referred a soul and in fact helped many get jobs elsewhere and have pulled friends out of them when I could.

enriquto 6y ago

This is an interesting read, if a bit light. Unfortunately, its quality is diminished by the ridiculous stock photos that have nothing to do with the text.

noisy_boy 6y ago
So I am not the only one who noticed that all the books were facing backwards or their cover not visible in the stock photo (probably for the same reason they don't show brand of the phones being used in movies, unless it is a deliberate product placement).
- afandian 6y ago
  Sadly the BBC (which as an institution I will defend) feel the need to put pictures on everything, whether salient or not. I'm sure there's research that says that readers like their news articles to have pictures, but they don't always add anything. Yesterday, though, the pictures editor made a masterful choice. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54088206 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54088206
moltar 6y ago
And typos: > actually dothe work of gettingprojects done
eternalban 6y ago
Are you entirely sure they have "nothing" to do with the content.
Ensorceled 6y ago
The stock photos were people working remotely and looking relaxed. Which, I think, is part of the point of the article; stuff "leaders" would normally do in meetings are kind of lost on somebody who is in their study feeling secure.
- ericmcer 6y ago
  I definitely do not get up, shower, do my hair, put on a collared shirt, and then go back into my room and sit at my desk. The stock photos in this were jarringly non-candid for what remote work actually looks like.

theaeolist 6y ago

And the evidence for these considerations is what?

sfg 6y ago
They reference a study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10869-020-09698-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10869-020-09698..., titled: "Who Emerges into Virtual Team Leadership Roles? The Role of Achievement and Ascription Antecedents for Leadership Emergence Across the Virtuality Spectrum".
- westurner 6y ago
  Fortunately the references are free to view. "Table 4 – Correlation of Development Phases, Coping Stages and Comfort Zone transitions and the Performance Model" in "From Comfort Zone to Performance Management" White (2008) tabularly correlates the Tuckman group development phases (Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, Adjourning) with the Carnall coping cycle (Denial, Defense, Discarding, Adaptation, Internalization) and Comfort Zone Theory (First Performance Level, Transition Zone, Second Performance Level), and the White-Fairhurst TPR model (Transforming, Performing, Reforming). The ScholarlyArticle also suggests management styles for each stage (Commanding, Cooperative, Motivational, Directive, Collaborative); and suggests that team performance is described by chained power curves of re-progression through these stages. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=%E2%80%9CFrom+Comfort+Zone+to+Performance+Management%E2%80%9D+White+%282008%29&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3D38spZfy7PdsJ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=%E2... IDK what's different about online teams in regards to performance management?

fivre 6y ago

there are actors who excel in the status quo through virtue of said quo lauding their strengths (here, putting on a good face during sync communication) alongside basic competency in other skills (having a bare minimum capability outside their face fronting forte) when that status quo slips away, it exposes those who were merely charlatans acting the lauded part (putting on a good facade face while lacking depth in teh actual capabilities society and organizations rely on, simply fronting a good appearance)--the changes uncovers those who failed to put forth the front out of ignorance of or disdain for it. it raises those whose true strengths mattered more all along, but to which broader culture was blind to, having long lost its way tacking too hard towards praising the facade, assuming it implied the foundation fires burn away some moss; the hardwood remains--it was always there, but now we get to see it, and further see that some of the most elegant fungus was naught but a large clump of mold growing upon itself alone, without much underneath

hownottowrite 6y ago

I worked remote for most of the 90s. Wooo 9600 baud! Competency was probably the most important trait. A boss without a clue was easy to dupe and avoid, but also a pain when you were actually doing plenty of work. A boss that knew what was what would be on your case if you slacked, but also super relaxed if you were producing to expectations. Clear communication was also critical but it was even more important to be measured in the volume.

sida 6y ago
Can you share your stories around how working remotely in the 90s was like? e.g. there probably wasn't video chat. So how did you communicate? Were you coding? What were tooling like for coding remotely back then? etc etc
- bobbane 6y ago
  I worked as part of a distributed team from 1989-1994. I was on the US east coast, one guy was in Ohio, two guys were in California, and two were in Japan. I worked at the end of a Telebit Trailblazer, so I had a 19200 baud link to the internet. I remember emailing myself GCC - staged the tarball on a remote host, uuencoded it and sent it home as multiple email messages. We mostly did stuff via email, with the occasional conference voice call. I had to learn to restrain myself and not try to solve user problems when I first saw them - because of the distribution of time zones, I would tend to be the first person awake. This was definitely coding - we were selling and supporting Interlisp-D and its many derivatives.
- brainbag 6y ago
  Remote work in the 90s and 00s was a lot of FTP, CVS, email and IM. Long distance phone calls still cost money for much of that time too, so there wasn't much synchronous phone calls, once a week or so. Also, generally the business needs were either high enough that the staff were all expert-ish and could get done what they needed, or low enough that random Bob's cousin's nephew could build it in HoTMetaL. There wasn't a lot of in between. When I worked for other people, management spent a lot of time with requirements and specs before implementing, which often resulted in mismatched software expectations. Agile gets poo-poo'd now, but it was a revolution at the time When I was doing my own consulting, I always did my best to find local clients for remote work (often building e-commerce web sites when the competition was still using FrontPage) because it was preferable to be able to call the client or meet in person to discuss the inevitable requirements snafus. Honestly, it doesn't seem that much different now. Humans are generally not all that great at communication. The tools we have today make a dent in that problem but there's still significant unresolved challenges. When I'm leading teams, I tend to spend a lot of time on teaching people to communicate more effectively and creating processes to enable it. It makes things go more smoothly than trying to be the central hub for all communication.

mumblemumble 6y ago

I suspect that the ideal primary role of a leader in a remote setting is to serve as a communication channel. In person, it's somehow easier to tune the office chatter in and out as needed to keep track of what your colleagues are up to. I have yet to find an electronic replacement for this phenomenon. Email, if nobody thought to CC you, you simply won't find out. If people deal with this by defensively CCing everyone, you drown in email. Slack's value is inversely proportional to its uptake: The more people talk on it, the more it resembles a sort of workplace Twitter where it's simply impossible to try and keep track of what everyone is saying, so you give up and resort to only looking at it when you're trying to slack off. Threads attempt to work around this by replicating the problems of email in a chat app. I suspect that an old-school web forum like phpBB could work well, but any technical merits won't overcome the social perception. There's just no getting around the nerd factor there. The only technique I've seen work well is the manager-as-dispatcher approach. This poor soul becomes the designated firehose-drinker. They get CC'd on every email, and they subscribe to every Slack thread. They keep an eye out for anything that Sam or Pat might want to know about, and check in to make sure that Sam or Pat is keeping an eye on it.

jordache 6y ago
facebook workplace or yammer are good options for async communication approaches w/o the need for defensive ccing
deleted 6y ago
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PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> They keep an eye out for anything that Sam or Pat might want to know about, and check in to make sure that Sam or Pat is keeping an eye on it. This is miserable for everyone. Don't make Slack the center of your workflow. Don't let spontaneous Slack chats dictate your process. The manager's job shouldn't be to scour Slack for information and then ping every person who might need to participate in or read each conversation. That just amplifies the noise. It's terrible to be deliberately ignoring Slack for 30 minutes to focus on work, only to have your manager ping you back into Slack to make sure you don't miss something. Instead, the manager should be forcing important conversations to happen outside of spontaneous Slack conversations. If something important is decided in Slack, the decision needs to be recorded in the tracking ticket, Wiki, or other important location. If it changes anyone's active work, they should be interrupted. Otherwise, they can pick up the information from the single source of record (ticket, wiki, etc.) rather than being expected to follow every detail of Slack all day. Small groups working on tasks together should have private PMs or channels to discuss implementation details, not giant Slack channels with 10s or 100s of members. A good manager will avoid design by committee and will stay ahead of the spontaneous Slack firehose by arranging planning sessions and scheduled meetings where necessary. Don't let the Slack chaos drive your workflow. Don't try to make managing Slack someone's job. Manage the workflow first, deliberately rather than reactively. If important conversations are happening spontaneously in Slack too often, that's a sign that you need to fix your workflow.

werber 6y ago

IMO, the best leaders I've had were great I've had have been great online and in person. And I've always preferred a mixture of IRL and off site work. It has never mattered to me if a person is extroverted or introverted, messy or organized, just that I can trust them and that they trust me. When that contract is fractured there is no way to have a healthy working relationship in my opinion. Mutual respect is the most important thing in the office to me

zmmmmm 6y ago
It's an interesting point you raise around trust. It's certainly one of my biggest challenges in a management role - there are staff I struggle to trust due to past instances where they have gone significantly off track and failed to deliver due to ignoring or taking too much license with the direction they were given. We've got huge piles of technical debt and whole series of poor decisions we're just living with due to this kind of thing. The challenge now is how to continue to delegate to such people, without creating a huge amount of overhead to track what they are doing and how it is being executed. Simultaneously with all this, those same people are in a technical sense the most skilled in the team. Finding a way for these people to mature into their roles would be ideal but it's really hard work.
- werber 6y ago
  I feel that. Sorry if you never see this due to the late reply, but i strongly feel that trust is a constantly built thing. The team needs to trust working with each other, and have open communication horizontally and vertically. I’m not a 10x dev and have seen way better developers than me go off the rails because they weren’t able to communicate and their work becomes unmanageable because of that lack of trust. I think it’s ok for a junior developer to feel safe taking on less points and doing things slower and spending more time pairing and mentoring. But This has only ever worked on teams I’ve been on where people had the opportunity to fail. And with that being said, once a team loses passion it is so hard to work back to a healthy self regulated environment

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khalilravanna 6y ago

Unless I'm reading the summary of the study's findings wrong, the study showed what people are selected as leaders, right? Which is super interesting but not the same as who is a good leader. The summary of the article inaccurately states, "Strong in-person leadership skills don’t necessarily translate to being a good virtual leader", which feels like a huge leap with no evidence. Unless being chosen as a leader by the group directly correlates with who is actually successful as leaders this doesn't seem like a huge takeaway. Would be very interested to see something more substantive on this front.

mannykannot 6y ago
The article is based on a study that it links to. Like just about every other study, it is done within the context of existing work, in this case 'multilevel leadership emergence theory'. While it is possible that this field is flawed to the core, I am not yet ready to assume that it is, so that, for example, there is little correlation between who gets selected for leadership and who is suited for it, without having first done some digging into the literature myself.
- khalilravanna 6y ago
  Thanks for the added insight. I guess I have two follow up questions to that. 1) Is anyone who does have the context able to weigh in? From my own digging I'm not seeing a lot of agreed upon definitions of "leadership emergency theory". I found one paper [1] which I read the abstract of. It again, like the OP, seems to talk about how "leaders emerge in teams that lack a hierarchical structure". From my experience this doesn't seem incredibly useful given all managers/leaders I've seen have been appointed by someone else. It's not some subconscious, democratic process where they're chosen by the group. 2) Kind of meta, but did the writer of the article do the research that seems necessary for this? And if not is this acceptable, given that I can only assume numerous people will take this at face value and may even make organizational changes as a result? [1] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/LODJ-08-2012-0109/full/html https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/LODJ-08-...
- srtjstjsj 6y ago

troughway 6y ago

The surprising thing to me is that there is no mention of the copious online communities we have had for the past few decades. The number of WoW guilds alone is staggering. If you want to know the "surprising" traits, just look to the people* leading these, you have ample data there. *BBC put up some qtπ photos with makeup. In reality: pasty, overweight nerds, neckbeards and warlocks.

shubb 6y ago

This study seems to answer the question of 'who would the team select as a leader', but in reality project leadership at companies is rarely a democracy. People move jobs a lot in the tech industry, so as a result senior roles are often filled externally. It helps to have a recommendation, but roles are rarely filled by asking the team who they would most like to work with an approaching them. Normally companies advertise roles and try to use some kind of standardized process. So CV writing and interview technique are critical. Promotions often happen because people apply for the role up when it is advertised competitively. My observation is that people succeed at this by focusing on performing against their current objectives, not being a problem, requesting training, and picking up the tasks relevant to their current role that will be on the job description for the next one up. That next role up might be in another team so your own teams favor matters less. The main thing is not to have been a problem to management and to present yourself well during the application process. I think external upwards moves are more likely to be powered by skill at believable exaggeration, and internal promotions by rules compliance and consistent ambition driven box ticking. Finally, some people get promoted because management need someone they trust to do that job now, at least temporarily. This happens when a new project team is created and someone is told they are in charge of it, or someone quits and their duties are reallocated to an immediate report. These reward competence yes, but such a people keep their winnings or fall back by their actual short term success - if things look shaky management go out externally for a permanent replacement and quietly put them back where they were. I don't really see any of this changing due to work from home. It is probably different at high levels of management because these roles seem to be filled more based on relationships.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

My takeaway: in-person leadership is a charisma game where somebody fools everyone into letting them be boss. Perhaps to the detriment of the project and goals. Virtual leadership is based on performance and productivity. It related directly to achieving goals. Another big win for virtual work? It factors pointless, harmful charisma out of the equation?

jordache 6y ago
100% wrong and no doubt myopic to your own personal and likely limited experiences. a venn diagram of good leader qualities and charismatic qualities has non-trivial overlap. A leader lacking people skills has a very limited ceiling in what he/she can affect.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Explain the OP then? Almost a perfect experiment in removing charisma from the work equation - everybody works remotely and communicates through a limited channel. And things get better. And perhaps delve into 'charismatic' as it relates to loud, aggressive or overbearing.
  - jordache 6y ago
    one can convey charisma through digital/remote channels. Just because the physical connection is gone, it does not mean a robotic / formulaic approach is now the only way to lead/manage humans
    - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      It reduces the effect. It becomes possible to squelch the loudmouth, take turns talking, hear from everyone. It removes physical intimidation and most body language. Nobody is suggesting 'robotic' or 'formulaic'.
      - xauronx 6y ago

Hoasi 6y ago

> “Suddenly it’s not just about who talks the most, but rather, who is actually getting stuff done.” One wishes. That almost sounds too ideal to be true.

joubert 6y ago

"“To me, this is half the story,” she says, pointing out that though the study data touches on interpersonal relationships, it more heavily measures task-oriented actions, which are only a portion of what drive leadership. “The next logical step is [to study] how team members manage interpersonal relations and behaviours and who emerges as leaders. We don’t really know that.” For example, a follow-up study might explore whether doer leaders maintain interpersonal skills over time."

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maerF0x0 6y ago

IMO the best of any kind is one that designs themselves out of the hot path. What does that mean for leaders? Don't _be_ the conduit to good communication, instead tend to it like something external to you. Processes and tooling are like code for businesses and can be updated over time to fix the bugs.

dcolkitt 6y ago
I think this is definitely true. But the biggest reason it's rare in practice is because middle managers who aren't viewed as essential to day-to-day operations are likely to be made redundant by senior leadership. Managers bias towards taking an overly hands-on, interventionist style, because that creates a lot more visible signals that they're not easily replaced. There's no incentive to build a well designed process that the team's empowers self-driven success. As often happens to programmers, that type of manager often finds that he's engineered himself out of a job. Much better to create busywork, lest senior executives start asking "what exactly would you say you do here". What often separates out great senior leadership is recognizing the pernicious influence of this bias. John D Rockefeller was famous for having tons of middle managers who barely worked at all, took naps in the afternoon, and the like.
- bfuclusion 6y ago
  I mean that works if all you want is to rise to middle management. When you start having actual revenue or project goals then that method falls apart.

raintrees 6y ago

The virtual version of Joel Spolsky's "Good managers move chairs out of the way to assist programmers getting work done" (heavily paraphrased from memory).

Nimitz14 6y ago

The primary role of leaders is communication, so I'm a bit confused by this idea that the leader is whoever "does" the most. You're not leading much of anything if you have time to do the work yourself I believe.

john_cogs 6y ago
In my lived experience at GitLab, leaders can deliver results through efficient communication that enables others to do their jobs successfully (rather than waiting hours to respond to messages), helping team members iterate on the scope of projects to ensure progress is made on goals, and modeling our company values which helps others better understand the values and incorporate them into their work.

SiempreViernes 6y ago

the WEIRD sample strikes again! I hope we at least have a round of reproducibility crises in management research within a decade, because evidently it's not reached them yet. > The researchers conducted a series of in-lab experiments with 86 four-person teams, and also traced the communications and experiences of 134 teams doing a semester-long project in a university class

triyambakam 6y ago
What is WEIRD in this context?
- phaemon 6y ago
  Look at weirdceo.com Wisdom, Emotional Intelligence, Initiative, Robot, Dastardly or something like that.
- bobbiechen 6y ago
  >Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/weirdest-people-in-the-world/BF84F7517D56AFF7B7EB58411A554C17 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain...
duckmysick 6y ago
Perhaps I'm ignorant and I'm missing something obvious - but how exactly are we going to apply this particular experiment to pre-industrial, uneducated population? We're talking about communication in remote virtual meetings. The original WEIRD paper contrasts the industrial societies with small-scale ones. Can we even find small-scale societies that do virtual remote work?
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  There's more than pre-industrial people in the complement to the WEIRD-collage population, you know? Like maybe start with real adults working actual jobs? You could also see how it works for Canadians, Indians, Chileans, Thai, Russians, Nigerians... all have developed enough economies that there are at least some remote workers.

steve76 6y ago

Remote work always ends up like this for me: A private room with the meeting always on opened with screen share. I'm online when I'm at my desk. Speakers on, so people can shout for me through my house. Everyone at home learns to either laugh at them or ignore them. No matter what someone else does, I don't criticize them. I learn quick to ignore people. I work through their chatter even people calling me by name. I always focus on the most important problem and nothing else. When that's done, I move onto the next. I don't leave until at least one of those are completely finished a day, regardless of other people. If I ask someone to contribute, and they mess up big, I just say "Great Job!" and redo their work. Don't expect any contributions of merit. Next time I give them something simple or just pay them and get rid of them. I now have a grave grim stare, like judges do. If it bothers people I don't look away on their time. I look away on mine. Even remote, people can still be very dangerous or just waste your time. At start I say no unless it's perfect. I often give an hour or two at no-charge if I don't know. I'm never afraid to walk away at the slightest problem. I'm here to make money not babysit or cleanup.

stakkur 6y ago

researchers conducted a series of in-lab experiments with 86 four-person teams, and also traced the communications and experiences of 134 teams doing a semester-long project in a university class This research isn't based on what's happening in the real work world, with real workers, in real companies. After reading the summary, I'm having a hard time giving this much weight.

supergeek133 6y ago

There is also another important factor... mutual respect. To be stereotypical, I'd go ahead and assume that a majority of people on HN work in tech and likely are paid a decent salary. The one thing I find in bad leaders (remote or otherwise), and relational in poorly run companies is the lack of trust. I've worked with leaders who micromanage as much/more than I was when I worked a minimum wage/high supervisory job. This is bad and holds back many employees/companies. It encourages "shared courage" and centralized decision making. I'm usually amazed at how much responsibility people are given who make over 6 figures, but yet how little decision power they are given. Even when the leader may not have the same knowledge level as their employee. I've had the pleasure of working with many people who respect that I know how to manage my time, that I know things they don't, and the understand that I appreciate the same about them. I can imagine how much the "wrong" side of this is amplified when you suddenly aren't around each other all the time.

zmmmmm 6y ago
> I'm usually amazed at how much responsibility people are given who make over 6 figures, but yet how little decision power they are given. It's an interesting distortion of the inflated tech-skill market I think. I have individual team members doing software who are paid more than entire group leaders doing other things but they are still very immature, and in no way can accept responsibility for more higher level things. I do agree about the responsibility / decision power point though. To me one of the most powerful motivating forces for tech people is giving them autonomy to make technical decisions themselves. It's somewhat tragic that this is so negative in the large - allow a whole team of engineers to each choose a different web stack and they'll love it, but you're in for a disaster.

eb3c90 6y ago

I suspect it is still important to get to know people and build trust in the flesh, even if having a remote leader can be good.

virgulino 6y ago

What's up with the books in the second photo?

spurgu 6y ago

> President Trump has set Sept. 15 as a deadline for the company's Chinese owner, ByteDance, to find an American purchaser, or it will face a ban in the U.S. I know it's been almost 4 years but I still have a hard time grasping that I'm not on The Onion when I'm reading sentences like this...

bloodorange 6y ago

Man, at some point, someone has to point it out. What the hell is with these clickbait headlines on HN. Is there no place on the internet saved from it? Even what used to be reputable news websites have it everywhere (and BBC of course shamefully is one of them). Does it help to flag these? Or is this now the new normal on HN? EDIT: I'm glad it has now been edited to be more sensible.