David Burkus: The One Thing Remote Leaders Need to Know

David Burkus is a speaker, business thought-leader, professor, and best-selling author. His TedX talk, “Why You Should Know How Much your Coworkers Get Paid” has been viewed over 2 million times. He teaches courses on organizational behavior, creativity and innovation, and strategic leadership at Oral Roberts University where is an associate professor. He writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Psychology Today. I recently interviewed David about his new book, Leading from Anywhere: The Essential Guide to Managing Remote Teams.

Nir Eyal: Why did you write this book?

David Burkus: To some extent, all of my work thus far has been focused on using psychology to help individuals and teams do their best work. And the past year has put up some big roadblocks for most people to do that best work. One of the big ones has been the forced work-from-home experiment millions of people have been living (and working) through. At the same time, this shift in the way we’re working, and collaborating isn’t new…just the scale of it is. Remote teams have been around for a long time. At the same time, a new reality has set in that, whenever it’s safe to bring everyone back to the office, we’re not all going to come back.