The Art of Leadership

Chapter 18. A Distributed Meeting Primer

As a leader who primarily values team health, I place great store in the weekly 1:1 because it’s where I assess the health of my team members. It’s my highest-bandwidth meeting. Some of those meetings are held via videoconference with humans around the world. For years, there was a slight to significant lag omnipresent in these discussions that stilted the conversation. The lag was a persistent reminder of the distance between me and my teammates.

Combined with the incredibly predictable audio/video gymnastics that accompanied the start of these meetings, this impediment often led to the same frustrated thought: “There has got to be a better way.”

For the past three years or so, my perception has been that videoconferencing is a solved problem. The combination of mature networking infrastructure and well-designed software has mostly eliminated the lag and significantly decreased the A/V gymnastics.

Nevertheless, we still have work to do.

Remote

Let’s start with the word remote. Remote team. Remote worker. The word means “situated far from the main centers of the population,” which in the context of the workplace is usually factually inaccurate—a remote team or human is simply one that is not at headquarters. But it’s what most people think of when they say “remote,” and that’s the first problem.

Let’s start by agreeing on two ideas:

• Call these remote humans and teams distributed instead. Distributed is a boring word, but it is in that ...