What’s the best way to support managers in an organization with 1,000+ people?

You have several options: You could invest in creating homegrown learning development programs for your managers within the organization. Or, you could outsource your new manager training to an external vendor. You could even establish manager peer groups within your organization so that they can learn from one another.

You may have all of the above… or none of the above.

Whichever is your situation in your organization, you may feel that support for your managers is still lacking.

Here’s where Know Your Team can help 😀

Lately, we’ve been working with organizations with 1,000+ people, supporting hundreds of managers in their organizations. Through Know Your Team, we give managers a consistent framework to utilize for foundational leadership skills (e.g., …

An endless barrage of Zoom meetings. Non-stop Slack pings. This is your new normal, and it feels bleak. You think to yourself: “Communication best practices for remote teams must exist…right?”

You’re having a hard time imagining the way you’re communicating remotely right now is the way you want to continue to communicate at work. You’re drained working remotely, more than you were when you were working in-person — and your team is too.

As we dig our heels into remote work for the foreseeable future, naturally, we ask ourselves: Is there a better way for working remotely? …

Now, more than ever, the question, “How to build team morale remotely?” is one you may be asking yourself.

From your team’s body language on Zoom calls, you can just tell. Folks look work thin. Energy levels are depleted. And if you let yourself admit it, you feel depleted as well.

You’re not alone. Thirty-nine percent of managers in a recent KYT Workshop Live! session with hundreds of managers from around the world, described the current level of morale in their team as “low” (out of 140 participants in the poll).

These are uncertain times. Amidst the pandemic and US election and everyone now working remotely, a swirl of fear, anxiety, and malaise have seeped into many teams. …

“Lost in translation” only begins to describe the perils of giving feedback remotely. How do you tell someone that their tone needs to improve, without your own tone offending them and hindering the likelihood that they’ll want to improve? How do you give corrective feedback to a brand new employee, when the only interaction you’ve had so far is via Zoom one-on-one meetings?

Giving feedback remotely is tough. It’s hard enough telling a coworker something they don’t want to hear without it being through a screen.

Yet, the reality is, with most of us working remotely these days, giving feedback remotely is a critical skill that our teams depend on us for. How else will our team members know what could be better in their performance and the state of progress they’re making if we as leaders do not tell them? …

I won’t bury the lede: The one thing you’re likely missing from your remote onboarding process is what I call a “ work preferences survey.”

The concept is by no means novel. You want to better understand the working style of a new employee. What do they tend to get annoyed by in a work environment? What communication style do they default to? How might they prefer to receive feedback.

When you’re co-located, it’s easier to answer these questions. You can read body language to surmise that a co-worker is annoyed with you. You can sense that the atmosphere is tense during a group meeting. …

My heart is breaking. Yours might be too.

Last week was a reminder of how unfathomably messed up our world is. In the wake of the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery — and too many others — I’m disgusted, horrified and saddened.

If you’re like me, you may be trying to process what your role can be to fight racism and racial injustice. As a family member. As a citizen. And, as a leader of a team in your workplace.

That last role is an important one. As managers, we are leaders. Not merely taskmasters of when a deliverable is supposed to get done. …

An experienced manager will tell you that it’s always easy to manage a remote employee when they’re performing well.

But what about when they’re not? What do you do when a remote employee is underperforming?

Answering this can feel complicated. Given the uncertainty and fear during these times of COVID-19, some of our team members might be experiencing greater mental burden and emotional distress than usual. Many employees are caretakers for others right now, and others may be having a difficult time coping with the social isolation and the precarious state of our world.

As leaders, we want to be sensitive and empathetic to the fact that these are indeed challenging times for us all — and yet at the same time, we have standards, expectations, and goals that we’re accountable to. It can feel hard to know precisely what to…

If I told you, of all the things you were transitioning from being in-person to online, that your remote one on one meeting would be most critical…

Would you believe me?

To be frank, I’m not sure I would believe myself. When it comes to remote leadership (or leadership in general, for that matter), there are no silver bullets.

Yet, if there’s one thing a remote manager should spend a disproportionate amount of time investing in, the data points to remote one-on-one meetings.

Based on our 2018 survey of 1,182 managers, 88% of them said that their one-on-one meetings positively affect their team’s performance to a moderate or somewhat high degree. Additionally, Google’s famous 2009 manager research code-named “Project Oxygen” affirms this, as they found that higher-scoring managers were more likely than lower-scoring managers to have frequent one-on-one meetings with their team members. …