Sean: I have a question about what you just said, because if leading is more like coaching and facilitating , and scheduling one-on-ones, and doing it and asking them how they're doing, and that takes time.

What about the legwork? How would a leader manage the legwork that he or she has? Plus doing those one-on-ones which you mentioned before that it would just happen in the water cooler. It would just happen because your proximity is zero when you're in the office.

Bret: So remote companies generally work radically differently too, even the way most companies are working now in this forced remote environment. Remote companies do not use synchronous communication for the most part, they use asynchronous communication.

So they don't expect an immediate response, which means I don't need to be present. I don't need to be available because I can respond whenever I like. And what remote leaders do very well is they agree with the individual. They agree with the project, they agree with the outcome and, they agree what needs to happen for that to happen.

And they say, "please go and do it. If you have an issue, come and talk to me." And what the best remote companies do is they break it actually down into tasks. They look at the tasks and go, have you done this task before? As an individual, to what extent have you completed a task like this before? Because if you haven't actually completed this at a task level, you're going to have to learn to do it at a task level, which means I'm going to either have to train you. I'm going to have to show you how to get done the way I want it to get done.

So leaders, they break it down to tasks. They understand where the person may not be that good at completing the project. They build the training for it. And they actually, that is part of their role. It's part of the grunt work, but they weirdly enough end up having more time because they don't have to micromanage. They don't have to do what was done. They don't, you know, if you're working asynchronously, it means you don't have meetings. You know, most well-run remote companies, avoid meetings at all costs because meetings take time to set up.

They take many hours and they are often ineffective. But if we have to do a meeting, then we make it highly effective. Actually leadership, in most cases in a remote environment, can actually be easier. And it can be easy to find time to do the work you do, because you're not in these meetings that most companies that have been forced to go into remote are. If you look at a company like Base Camp, the leaders of that company have three meetings a week maximum short meetings as well.

The business just runs itself. There's a system in the business that doesn't require oversight. It doesn't require too much micromanagement because we're hiring the people who can get on with the job. We analyze where they may need help. We then get in and help them at those stages and things progress very quickly.

But it's moving, it's moving from synchronous communication to asynchronous communication, which is actually a hard thing to do because we're designed for synchronicity.

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