Thoughtful Thursday: Your audio coach to leading remote teams

A special episode today and, let’s be upfront about it: a promotional one.

Thinking Remote: inspiration for leaders of distributed teams is a book for those of you managing, leading, or championing your remote team, or transitioning, or considering transitioning to an office optional approach. The book is a collection of articles written by Pilar Orti and Maya Middlemiss giving an overview of different aspects of leading remote teams. And at the end of each chapter, there is a set of leadership reflections, which are questions to help you think through what you have read - or listened to, if you go for the audiobook - and help you take the next steps. The best way to support people at a distance, we believe, is by adopting a coaching mindset, and that is exactly what we've done with this book.

And for some readers it has worked! If you want to read about how, I encourage you to read Teresa Douglas’ thorough review over at her site . She covers what she took from three of the chapters and ends with a sentence that we could only have dreamt of:

‘Thinking Remote’ is a thoughtful, thought provoking work that belongs on the shelves of any leader who manages office optional workers.

The chapter included in this episode was written by Maya, and if you want to listen to a bit more before you buy (or if actually two chapters will do you nicely) then check out the sample of the book on any of the audio retailers, as that is the chapter on Psychological Safety, which was originally written for Online Meetings that Matter - which is taking me so long, but hopefully will come out this October - and will include that chapter again, I have to admit.

The book is available on Audible, through your subscription, also in Amazon to purchase, iTunes and other audiobook distributors; and it's really not pricey, it's going to take us ages to make the production money back - also, check out your local library, because we've also done our best to distribute it to them.

05.14mins
“Is Work Causing You Stress? Going remote is not a magic pill,” from the section of the book on Remote Wellbeing.

15.32mins

if you’ve enjoyed that and fancy 12 chapters more, check out the different book formats here.

As mentioned earlier, seeing as we’re here in a promotional episode for Virtual not Distant, Pilar will talk about who we work with. Maybe we could work with you…

We work with curious professionals - this is very important to us, because we’re not the kind of company that likes telling others what to do - we prefer to help them discover what they should be doing. So, we need to work with people who are curious. We focus on helping managers of remote teams - virtual teams, distributed, dispersed, and also hybrid teams, those where some people are colocated (in the same space) and others not. And we look to help those who are transitioning to remote, or as we say, in not the sexiest of ways, but we can’t find another term - office optional. And interestingly, in the next podcast episode you will hear from the person who we stole that term from, Chris Slemp.

We help to introduce remote teamwork practices, we help managers adapt their leadership styles to the remote space, in a number of ways. First off, for you the individual, we have loads of inspirational stuff for you to read or listen to here on our website - and we’re now creating some online courses and we’re going to build that little online academy slowly. And we’ll continue publishing books, blog posts, podcast episodes and we have a monthly mini-publication which maybe you’d like to sign up to.

We also have coaching services available if you are a manager of a remote team and would like some one-one professional development.

Furthermore we help organisations by working closely with HR and Leadership and Development, or the training department. And there we can deliver in person workshops, online workshops too, we can do a little bit of handholding through consultancy, but always adopting a facilitative style. We bring our knowledge - we have some in this very fast evolving space - to help you find out what the best way forward will be that will fit your culture, your set up, and the plans of your organisation - both at a developmental level and a strategic one. We can also facilitate team discussion that leads to a team plan on you will work when you’re not all in the office together at the same time.

We’re also investigating how podcasting, or the creation of audio can help team members feel closer together, and also how it can create a sense of belonging in organisations - so if that’s of interest to you, get in touch.

Thank you very much for reading and listening - wherever you are whatever you’re doing , enjoy.