Work Together Anywhere

CHAPTER 8Facilitate Their Success with Leadership, Alignment, and a Full Arsenal

“You can form a great team, but that team needs leadership and alignment if they’re going to do great work.”

—LANCE WALLEY, CEO, Chargify

What does “leadership and alignment” mean exactly? Lance Walley elaborates on his point as it relates to his company, Chargify.

Long ago, we had a list of software development tasks that needed to get done. The tasks had no priority. The development team members could pick whatever they wanted. We thought this offered freedom and choice, but it did not work. The team wanted a team lead or product manager to decide priorities, so they could focus on doing instead of deciding.

More recently, we started working on alignment throughout the company. It’s harder than it sounds, but it makes a lot of sense: decide who our core customer is and what our company values are, and then make decisions around those ideas. And make sure everyone is aligned around these values and decisions.

A great team, aligned around the same goals, does great work.¹

What Lance describes in the above quote basically spells out the road ahead. And, indeed, it’s harder than it sounds. But fortunately we can be thoughtful and systematic in our approach—and then proceed by experimenting with small, reversible steps.

We return to the discussion of how to replicate in the virtual realm the benefits of the on-site realm. As it happens, many of the solutions available to remote teams can address ...