Create a Feedback Cycle

• Self-Awareness: be aware of your trengths, weaknesses, and values and displaying them to your team.
• Relational Transparency: remain genuine, straightforward, and honest with your team. Display the behavior you hope to see in your employees.
• Balanced Processing: stick to your values when making decisions, but remain open to discussions and alternatve options.
• Doing the right thing: focus on doing the right thing for the long-term success of the business, not yours.

• Communication: explain what the task is, what the expectations are, and listen to any questions and concerns.
• Giving Feedback: provide clear feedback on what they did well, what they struggled with, and why.
• Training and Assessment of Tasks:  make sure your staff has the skills and abilities necessary to perform the task. This might require some training.
• Trust: Lay out clear expectations, and provide feedback, but do not micromanage while the employee works on the task.

Intentionally design for the same interactions that would otherwise happen if people were in the office.

• Culture is what naturally happens when a group of people gets together for any period.
• A great culture happens with intentional design and influence. It's the reason you should make your company's mission, vision, values, operating principles, standards, and agreements visible. 
• Culture is experienced through emotions, including how your employees feel about the company, you, other leaders, and peers. That feeling is developed through human interaction at the water cooler, kitchen, or hallway conversations.

Your people need to feel your presence as a leader as they will have fewer opportunities to see you face to face when they work remotely.

• Regularly show up in a variety of forms that can include weekly video meetings, periodic company-wide emails, or presence in public channels.
• Err on the side of more communication rather than less.

There's only so much that you can achieve working on your own, that's why it's important to delegate effectively. To successfully delegate:

• Explain what your team's role and goals are. Or even formalize it in a team charter, which can also be useful for keeping the team on track.
• Think about the skills, experience and competencies within your team, and start matching people to tasks. 

Whatever approach you prefer to adopt, you also need to bear in mind that different people have different needs when it comes to motivation. 

One size does not fit all. Some individuals are highly self-motivated, while others will under-perform without managerial input, and you need to be able to handle both. 

The goal of an effective 1:1 is not an update from your direct report or for you to lay down some instructions. It's a conversation. It's a chance to hear about your direct reports' ideas for your product, their career goals, and possibly their opinion of their performance.

Keep a list of three potential topics ready for discussion. When they say they have nothing to discuss, you can jumpstart the conversation with one of your items.

Your most precious resource is your own time and energy. When you spend it on your team, it helps build healthy relationships.

Your job as a manager isn't to give advice or 'save the day.'' It's to empower your reports to find the answer themselves. If you want to understand what's going on, ask. Let her lead the conversation while you listen and probe.

Learning a new skill takes commitment. And there are certain limits to what you can learn. So, before starting working on a new skill, ask yourself:

• If your goal really is attainable
• How much time and energy you can give to this process.

Make sure the skills you've chosen are relevant to your career, your organization, or both. 

Gaining a new skill is an investment and you need to know upfront what the return will be.

Shifting our focus towards people and projects, rather than the time it takes for us to work on something is referred to as Attention Management.

Productivity is not a virtue, but just a means to an end, and it means nothing if the end is not worthy. Paying attention to your intrinsic motivation, on why you are excited about the project will make you push yourself naturally and achieve the goal.

Many studies show that bad weather days when it is too cold or rainy, keeps the working people glued to their work, being more productive as they are less distracted by the thought of going outside.

It’s crucial for your team to know exactly what is expected of them.

The unwritten rules about the level of quality expected in the work, and the depth of knowledge that needs to be displayed, are what defines a successful work project.

What are the boundaries of an employee’s responsibilities? What are and what aren’t the roles of the job?

What’s the preferred way of communicating, both formally and informally? What should be the frequency of communication? What are the protocols for communication at different levels – while reporting to the manager or even upper management?