MC38 Tackling the asynchronous environment

yeah but also like i mean in the world that you and i lived in like you can't survive like you have to be in some sort of big organization where you can carry that sort of uh like a small business or on your own like if you act like that nothing ever happens that's the thing isn't it the thing with operating through meetings all the time especially to say in large organizations that a lot of stuff can be said and you can get away with saying a lot of stuff but not doing much i just love that image i have that image of what you were saying of someone coming in and talking a lot in the meeting and then just not doing anything about it but everyone remembers that that person said a lot of stuff in in the meeting which is why i like the asynchronous world because it seems to me especially for coordinating that in the asynchronous work you can distribute and this can when i'm talking about this i'm not necessarily the manager distributing tasks for the team gathering around tasks everyone distributes the tasks you can see what everyone is doing and in fact you've got to put your name down sometimes literally or you have to click on or create something that says task and that little bit of friction which doesn't exist in the meeting when you say oh i'll do it that little bit of having to sit down on your own and commit to the task this happens less i think i don't know i'm thinking i think part of it also is that focus on output you know that's something that like the remote community were hammering as a concept from very early on you know 10 years ago five years ago and so on because you have to shift from uh that presenteeism from from looking at people to looking at the output of their work and being able to see it and track it if you need to again like you're saying if you're operating that way asynchronously you know you have to find other measures of how things are going and whether they're on track or not which means you're looking at artifacts of work and it's hard to hide in that environment it's hard to do nothing yes and be considered to be doing a good job in that environment because you have the output yeah it has lots of challenges though i think when you're looking after a team especially the way that you and i like to engage with the team members with this personal connection with them looking after the development their growth and oh sorry team i forgot that we might have some listeners here with us because we really got we just started the conversation around one of my the favorite things i like to talk about as well but listeners welcome to the management cafe tim and i are here having a chat about an aspect of leading others or being in charge so you're very welcome to sit with us here for about 20 minutes and we started i don't know we had a conversation earlier on about meetings so now we shifted the other way to the the other environment of working with people and looking after people which is that asynchronous phase where we don't have that real-time contact with them neither online nor in person and how do you feel about that you were just talking about well the focus shifts almost there's a danger i think that the focus shifts so much from the person to the work that we forget about this other stuff that we love to talk about the growing up work i don't know how do you navigate because you've you know you've been doing this for looking after a distributed business for a while and you grew the team as well so now you hear your thoughts i've got loads yeah oh i bet i bet and i think you probably thought about it more than i have but in my mind there's work that you're just doing you don't need anyone around for that necessarily like you don't need anyone to be observing your work or supporting your work in real time like sitting next to you yeah most of the time and in fact there are benefits in not having that because it can be a forcing function for you to be more independent and resilient if you can't tap someone on the shoulder every time you get stuck then you have to try and work those things out for yourself oh that's sorry because we talked about different ways of helping people grow and that is a way i never thought of is actually help them to not be around other people but anyway i don't want to think what i derailed you no that's you're right sometimes you want people to uh to experience a little bit of friction you know the struggle and that at the fringes of their ability or their knowledge or comfort zone that's where that's where growth can happen so it can be good in that way and so the way i sort of think about it a little bit is is one sort of orbits you know so a lot of the time you know you know what you're doing and you can sort of go out on your little orbit and and you can do all of your tasks uh and then you're going to come back and the times that you come back is not the time that you're doing your tasks that's the time to replenish to reassess to uh to spend time with colleagues and so they're fairly clearly defined the differences between them where i think we run into uh trouble is is when there isn't that definition you know when it's not clear what we want to spend our async time doing and what we want to spend our async time doing you mean as an individual or as a or as a collective but like i don't know the individual needs to be clear about the team needs to be clear about the manager needs to be clear about you know the organization as well like if the individual thinks that their time with the team is to uh is to ask them how to look stuff up in the knowledge base which is something they could be working out themselves but the rest of the team think that that time is you know is to be talking about the hardest things that they couldn't sell by themselves and where they needed someone else's help you know then there's a friction that the person's not fitting in with the same dynamic of the team so one thing that i think is a challenge when you're leading a team where there's a lot of asynchronous communications whether they're remote or just dispersed or different schedules or for whatever reason it's the whole coaching aspect i think of management by which i mean being there for for people uh when they need you but also making sure that you can help them to figure stuff out themselves because also the way that you're talking as well it feels so much like that autonomy can also feel quite distant and then the person might come back to either you or the team but let's say come back to you with an issue for example when it needs to be solved and then how do we strike in that coaching way of helping which is more like okay don't let me tell you what to do however if we're communicating asynchronously with them it's faster to give clear instructions back for example do you know what i mean that's what i find the trickiest and it might be that we have to come back to a real-time conversation to do that i don't know well i mean first of all we don't need to get it right every time you know we don't need to get it right most of the time and i remember when i was reading books about being a parent and one there's some book about you know how to treat your kids with a you know in the right way that they studied parent-child interaction and they said the very best parents there was this particular thing they wanted people to do um when the kids are upset and they said the very best parents get this right about i think it was like 40 percent of the time 20 percent of the time like in my mind i was expecting to say 100 percent but mostly they get it wrong but they get it wrong enough enough of time and so that's the first step i think is is that with this stuff we should give ourselves a little bit of grace that we're not going to get it right that often uh we just want to be heading in the right direction most of the time so there are going to be times when somebody wants support and they want support right now and you can't give it to them now that happens in a synchronous environment as well as an asynchronous environment yeah it's not great but it's part of it's just part of the cost that you pay for operating in that way and i think when we try and make it too formulaic you know and try and do too much pattern matching about these are the conversations i only have in this direction and these are you know i always treat these things in this other way that's where i think we can get a little bit unstuck you know to to a degree we are going to pattern match but also where i think we operate best is is when we actually try and take a little bit of time to think what might be happening in this situation and what what do i want to do what i normally do is that the right thing to do because has the person just started work you know maybe maybe i do want to support them a little more actively are they going through something in their personal life where they might have as much bandwidth or you know in their work life they have a lot of stress maybe uh maybe i do want to support them more directly just to remove any good from you know just make it a little bit lighter or you know it might be that in fact my well is a little bit dry and and so i'm going to try and push it to a synchronous conversation because because i want a little bit of that interaction yeah it's also contextual i think then that's the fact that actually it's a synchronous could mean that we can take a bit more time as well i think we have a setup where the communication is not always in real time it actually gives us space like you said to i mean there will be situations but it's not an issue and like you say a lot of these things uh normally we're going to be operating okay but i think that for times when we are thinking well how do i want to take this and it could give us a bit more time i think i forget about that the asynchronicity can also gives us as team leaders some space to think through oh well like you say and also i do overthink stuff sometimes but i think by thinking about it in advance it means that it can then become something that's more instinctive so everybody can overthink stuff but i mean you're absolutely right first of all that space if you're a leader in a a heavily synchronous organization good luck getting any thinking time you know you're in meeting after meeting after meeting after message after message after message you know it's a nightmare you're just literally just bouncing around all day and the only time you might get to think is when you're actually sitting in a meeting where you think you're not actually having to pay attention and that's like that's a good dynamic uh but in asynchronous work actually you'll carve out whole periods where you can focus on the things that are most important to you and your role which is a real gift but that overthinking that's something that i've noticed particularly in async is you know i do it myself for sure and i noticed it with some people more than others but there were people where i thought i can't let them stew on this because i'm not talking to them until tuesday and today was wednesday so that's going to be five days yeah and if they don't get it clearly now they could have gone all the way down the road in the wrong direction by next week but even within async there are still all sorts of techniques that you can use to try and correct for that you know the whole thing around over communication and painting done and trying to give all the additional context and maybe moving from short form messages to long form messages or recording recording video audio there are lots of ways that you can try and compensate for that that's another level of awareness that you need to have in that space as well is to not get stuck in one form of communication that's a very very good point i mean my worry is someone who's very comfortable with asynchronous communication in particular writing is that you can get also comfortable as a team leader around that and where where is the line so i'll give you an example i was listening to uh liam martin on the management team's podcast and he said he hadn't talked for to his assistant in four months because all the work they do is they sink and i thought i i don't think i don't well i think maybe i could do that then i started to reflect oh my god i had someone who was like a operational support for a couple of months and i did go maybe for two months not having a meeting with her she was very part-time so there was not a lot of overlap and she was in the u.s but still it's very easy i think basically to just for time to go by especially in a global team and so you haven't had for example a one-to-one with someone oh yeah for sure i remember talking to amir from duist at uh at one of the running remote there was a dinner at one of those running remote conferences and at one point they had no meetings into no meetings at all and then they felt like that was too much and they started to bring meetings back you know he still sometimes i'll see you tweet his calendar he's got virtually zero meetings it's pretty easy to slip into a habit and sort of take it to extremes but there are times in our life where it's okay you know we don't necessarily need to be seen at work and we just want to do our work and go away but there's something a little bit i think dehumanizing about not having any personal connection with the people that you're working with or interacting with and maybe that's okay maybe that's a price that you're willing to pay but you should be doing it consciously knowing that if you're not going to have any personal interaction it doesn't necessarily have to be real time but you know i think it helps but if you're not having that personal interaction then i feel like there's going to be something missing there's going to be a level of engagement that's missing there having a meeting to talk about work that's personal enough for me but do you mean other stuff or i don't think i've ever had a meeting where we didn't we didn't get into something that wasn't work related it just always blends for me yeah that's a really interesting point and also this is the fact that for me because i'm not um i mean i'll talk about anything and if the conversation goes into a personal thing let's not say i don't have to say personal maybe a non-work related because i think that the reason why i'm very conscious if i become very asynchronous is that for me a personal thing is where you bring the whole person in and the whole person in is the at least the voice uh it's the the humor that comes up maybe more during a synchronous interaction than just an asynchronous it's the the thought processes as well i mean you can get a lot from asynchronous communication about how someone thinks but when you're with them in real time i think you get an even greater insight around that and something i've realized that in spite of myself sometimes is that i'm very insecure for example we are in one of the other podcasts that i do there's a team of three there were actually two of us maybe working together and i think for a year we communicated asynchronously in trello which is like so not even long form like task-based everything and then when we actually met because we wanted to discuss stuff we wanted to actually plan for the longer term which i think is wonderful to do i really enjoyed it when i saw her she's not with my brain and we didn't do any personal talk but it was really personal to see her and to be with her and spend some time and also to spend some time in listening to her and spend some time talking to her so but i forget i think it's quite it's common it's common but as human beings we're wired for connection you know it's actually it's painful for us to be two by ourselves you know think about in prison solitary confinement it's like the worst thing they can do to you there are rules around how long they can put someone in solitary confinement or because it's so damaging to the person so i think even in an asynchronous well certainly something we tried to do um at shield was try to provide lots of points for connection for those to be sort of welcoming you know like actively like not pushing people to do it but like just not nudging them you know to remind people that we want to connect you know you don't have to connect but we want to connect there are people here who want to connect because there are people here who care about you and they care about the work that you care about you as a person who is at work with us doing this stuff and i mean for me that that's a really important atmosphere and i think that that's important to notice where you sit in it because for example for me i don't need that much real time for me a lot of that sense of connection that you're talking about and not feeling alone comes from the asynchronous space as well like i don't know i saw something this morning made me really happy and it was a message somewhere and to be able to see that that is me and that's not for everyone in the team that's really important and it might not be as important for me to have a real-time conversation with a team member but it might be important for them because of the way that we experience connection so differently in both mediums now that we've layered the the way which we work together with this extra space i think the awareness needs to just turn up so many notches in this other way as well oh yeah like you said there's so much bias in terms of our own personal preference and how we feel is the appropriate way or how we want to be treated what we think is the best way for us to be at the right level of connection along that spectrum no we only want to be at this point i want to be any more connected we don't want to be any less connected we're liking this point right now for how we're feeling at this particular structure you know and then we'll slide all the way around but the danger is when we then think that that should apply to anyone but ourselves I think that's a hard lesson sometimes as managers as well is that we're getting a little bit away from async here but people can be happy or content in a way that doesn't look like happiness or contentment to you they can be happy in a way that you wouldn't be happy and sometimes they can be happy and you look at it and you're like I don't see how they're happy but if they tell you they are maybe they are I think that's a great point to stop this non-async conversation this is the thing also that again you can go backwards and forwards with asynchronous but you can cover so much in so many different layers in like 20 minutes of a coffee and get to really have a good conversation and really get to know someone through how they're approaching work so it's a yeah I suppose that yeah that balance it's so that constant awareness so listeners we'd love you to drop by the Management Cafe podcast website and tell us what you think we have a contact form there at managementcafepodcast.com or you can email us at managementcafepodcast.com well team any other synchronous thoughts that we have before we walk out the door no like you say it's interesting it's like an espresso espresso that's a espresso it's a tea drinker yeah that sharp burst of intensity can be enough right you don't need to drag your caffeine out all day you can just have an espresso wonderful analogy well with that coffee it's over for us now it's over to you that's risky when I'm trying to get a copy of that thank you for joining us at the Management Cafe remember you can subscribe to the show on whatever podcast art you use to make sure you get your weekly dose of reflection our website is management.caf and on Twitter we are at Management Cafe that's all for this episode from myself, Larr Oti and our fellow co-host Dave Burgess thank you for listening