5 Habits of Highly Effective Remote Leaders that Get Shit Done

Charm and politics aren’t what wins over remote teams. Remote teams need someone who will instill focus, create progress, and listen.

We’re no longer eating lunch together, talking small talk, or venting about work problems in-person. You can’t stop by someone’s desk and give them some quick feedback on their work. We hop from Zoom meeting to Zoom meeting, and we’re communicating via chat.

That’s why it’s more important than ever to be intentional about overcommunicating, listening, and spending quality time with your team.

The top 5 habits of effective remote leaders are:

1. Taking the Team’s Pulse
2. Crafting Effective Meetings
3. Creating Clarity
4. Communicating Priorities
5. Scheduling Online Hangouts

Taking the Team’s Pulse

I often schedule chats with team members to see how they’re doing, what they think are the gaps in the product, and what they think we should be working on next. As a leader setting product milestones, you should have an opinion and use the team’s feedback to discover new information, adjusting your opinion accordingly to set the priorities.

I recently read Ask Iwata: Words of Wisdom from Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s Legendary CEO. Iwata gives the same advice:

In my time as president of HAL Laboratory, I spoke with each employee twice a year. This sometimes meant as many as eighty or ninety individuals. The time varied per person, with some meetings as short as twenty minutes and some people talking for almost three hours. I kept this up for six or seven years.

Interviewing your team members makes them feel recognized, seen, and understood. You’ll also learn more about the product’s gaps, team’s gaps, and learn more than you would have organically learned on your own.

Three questions I love to ask are:

1. “How are you?”
2. “What are the largest gaps you see in the product, processes, or team?”
3. “What do you think we should do next?”

As someone setting the priorities for the team, it’s good to understand how everyone is feeling about the work, and making them feel like their opinion is valued. You can then show that you’re taking action on the feedback by aggregating it from the team members, communicating it back to them, and showing how you’re incorporating it into the priorities.

Crafting Effective Meetings

People appreciate structured meetings that have an agenda and tangible action items. We’re trying to get shit done, people. Not have endless brainstorms and conversations.

The beats of an effective meeting are:

1. Preconceived agenda, communicated to the team beforehand or in the first few minutes of the meeting
2. A moderator (whoever called the meeting) to enforce the agenda and keep the discussion focused
3. A follow up email/chat with action items and notes, to help keep teammates accountable

Creating Clarity

Constantly define, communicate, and iterate the definition about what you’re trying to achieve.

The best ways to do this it to visualize a player journey of what your end goals are. Create mock ups of how the player will interact with your game, what they’re talking about with their friends when they’re not playing the game, and what they’ll do from week to week. A picture is worth a thousand documents. This way everyone on the team is on the same page and understands where the work they are doing is headed.

Once that is communicated, make sure to revise it and communicate it often.

Communicating Priorities

Once you’ve created clarity on what the long term goals are, you also need to make sure there’s a pathway to achieve the goal. You have to prioritize and make a plan, show the team what steps they are going to take and when, what you’re looking to test and learn from, and what questions you’ll be answering, always allowing for fluctuation.

One of my best tools has been to create monthly milestone documents that include:

• List of high level priority buckets
• Game loop chart with color coded statuses on each system to show if it will be complete, in progress, or planned by the end of the month
• Biggest questions to be answered by this work
• Hypotheses on what we’ll learn about players

Scheduling Online Hangouts

Having structured meetings is important, but sometimes you just need a good ole’ hangout meeting to shoot the shit or play a game. There are various online games like Jackbox or Gartic Phone to help create fun, laughter, and inside jokes.

Team members have meetings with work talk every day. Sometimes you need once a week for some water cooler talk, or even have lunch together over Zoom to add a little humanity to the mix

Now go get shit done and have fun.