Remote-Leadership

My most meaningful conversation today was with a 10kg Jack Russell who has anxiety challenges. He didn’t offer much in the way of strategic feedback, but he’s an excellent listener and he never schedules a 5pm Thursday call.

The only other person I spoke to was the woman at the bakery. She asked if I wanted the usual. I said yes. That was it. That was my human interaction for the day, unless you count Slack, which I don’t, because typing into a void and waiting for a reaction emoji is not the same as talking to someone.

I watched a CTO tell his fully remote team that he had an “open door policy.” He said it in a Slack channel. I sat there for a moment, staring at my screen, trying to work out where the door was.

He meant well. Of course he did. He was trying to say “I’m approachable, come to me with problems.” But what he actually created was a channel where three junior developers pinged him every time they hit a snag, two senior engineers never said a word until things were properly on fire, and he spent his entire day context-switching between half-conversations that could have been, and I’m sorry but it’s true, a Google search.