Quoteable
The things I talk about over and over again.
There are two post-its on my monitor to remind me of keeping my cool.
Everyone is doing the best they can with the resources that are available to them.
The phrase reminds me to be kind, even when it feels like another person is actively sabotaging a project or a situation. Maybe they are missing information, maybe their English isn’t good enough to appreciate the nuances in communication, maybe they only know their own backyard.
So be kind, educate, and know when to step back. Not everyone wants to learn something new. Which leads us to:
Is this a you problem, or a me problem? (or: Is this a you problem or a them problem?)
This is about boundary setting. You are not responsible for every problem that washes up at your doorstep. You can give advice and step back. You can acknowledge and, radically, not act. This is a difficult lesson, especially for women who have been socialized to preempt and solve everyone’s discomfort.
Things I talk about - all the time
Hat tip to Lee Price (Proncipal at Viewfinder Partners) for this exercise - she got it from Pamela Slim's Tiny Marketing Actions newsletter: I slightly modified the ChatGPT prompt to this:
“Review the blog posts on my newsletter empressofremote.substack.com and on my website remotethatworks.com Pull 10 of my most-repreated idea and make a list for a "quote page" for me.”
Unsurprisingly the result was underwhelming, and mostly a starting point for my own review. So here are some some quotes that represent in a nutshell the things that I talk about a lot and have opinions about.
Remote work reveals poor management - it doesn’t cause it.
Basically, remote management skills are learnable skills, though they differ substantially from in-office management skills. You can teach your managers to lead remotely, and you have to make sure you implement the processes to support them in their path to excellence.
Remote is about location, flexibiliy is about schedules.
In a nutshell:
Location is all about where work happens: in specific location, a specific country, a specific time zone, or anywhere.
Schedules is about when work happens: during business hours, around core hours, anytime.
These two dimensions impact every single process and policy in your company. And the clearer you are about your position on both dimensions, the easier it is to hire the right people and create the right process.
More about that distinction in the Dimensions of Distributed Work:
Make it easy to the the right thing, make it annoying to do the wrong thing.
This applies to cookies (to be stored at the far side of the fridge), documentation needs (templates are your friend), shared snippets for frequent questions, and calendar scarcity (the more you block your calendar, the more people end up asking in writing - often clarifying their own thoughts in the process).
And I should probably start a quote file for myself, just like I have one for my kids. Or, to quote my daughter: “I don’t like songs that have too many stairs in them.” 🤷♀️
Oh, and if you want me to talk about any of those things at your next event, here’s more information.