Managing a Remote Team
Climate Community, Part 4
In Part 1 of this community series, I wrote about how thoughtful, outcome-oriented community can help with climate change's coordination problem. In Part 2, I shared the high-level details of the first climate network I built. Part 3 shared more details about goals, culture, and tactical things we did and learned to do better.
This last part of the series covers remote team management. It’s become ever more important as climate companies become remote-first. Here are some of the best practices I’ve learned over the past couple of years of managing a remote team.
Our Remote Team
Part of the beauty of the last community I built, On Deck Climate Community (ODCT) was that it was fully remote and more geographically diverse than in-person programs can be. We took advantage of the same benefits on our team. I managed a team of five incredible folks at the height of the program. Jack was our first hire on the team and served as a fantastic community builder and trusted advisor to our fellows. Leon (not pictured) was our first operations maven and a Fellow favorite for how he helped them navigate our products and workspaces. When I encouraged him to take a promotion and become a program manager of a different program at On Deck, we hired Jime, who became our no-code, infrastructure, design and strategic superstar. Denise came to us through the Edict internship and was hired full time for our general sectors team once she graduated a few months back. Arielle was our program partner, putting together phenomenal tracks and curated resources for our Fellows. Donte' zipped through hundreds of interviews and managed all things admissions, ensuring the quality and mix of people in each cohort remained excellent.
The team supported Fellows in leveraging our products, developing relationships, and navigating resources. We curated resources and mutually valuable matches to other Fellows, and we provided ideation, fundraising support, and intros to relevant experts as Fellows navigated their next steps. It was a stellar team, and I learned a lot about best practices for a remote team in the process.
Communicating with our Remote Team
To manage this excellent team, we built out personal user manuals, focused on doc organization in our Notion and Google Drive so we all had visibility (thank God for Jime and Arielle's help here), and were thoughtful about our async communications and meetings on the calendar.
Meeting Cadence
Clear, open communication is critical in a remote working environment, and I tried to err on the side of overcommunicating instead of under-communicating. As part of that strategy, we set up a consistent meeting cadence, both async and sync, to make sure we had the information we needed to do our jobs well.
Async Slack stand up (daily)
Intention: A quick way to see what folks are up to each day
Structure: Thread our daily updates, what we are working on, what our blockers are, if we need help, etc. If we remembered, we would comment at the end of the day with what we accomplished and what we had to push to another day
Monday Priorities Meeting (30 min weekly)
Intention: To help shape the week; a forcing function to think about team priorities and set up other meetings with others. We would discuss what we were all working on, what might block us, and how to get over those blocks
Structure: Everyone shares ~3 focus items for the week
Below is an example meeting document for those meetings.
Updates + Flags
Fill out here
List your priorities and be as specific as possible
Each teammate's name
Focus item
Outcome:
Focus item
Outcome:
Focus item
Outcome:
Thursday Team Meeting (1 hour weekly)
Intention: A deeper dive where we check in about project status and have important team-wide synchronous discussions.
Structure: Everyone updates the team on their focus items from Monday, and includes any discussion points in the agenda
Team members would fill out the meeting document beforehand with discussion items, wins, flags, and best practices / takeaways.
Manager 1:1s (weekly)
Intention: To create a space for discussing growth, issues/concerns, feedback,and planning for the future
We would share personal updates for the first few minutes before getting into what the other person was working on, what was blocking them, and their next steps and action items.
I never wanted to build a team that would take orders and execute, but instead, a team that would build each other up with generous offers and feedback regardless of seniority. As part of that ethos, we would challenge ourselves to give one piece of feedback, both ways, in each meeting.
For feedback, we used the COIN framing:
C- "Can I share feedback with you?" Ask the other person if now is a good time and provide context.
O- "I observed....." Use "I" statements and specific, factual descriptions of what happened.
I- Impact- How has their action affected their performance or the rest of the team?
N- Next steps- What agreements are made around what they can do to improve?
Strategic Direction (Monthly)
Intention: Decide on 1 focus area or goal individuals wnat to accomplish that month and discuss high-level strategy
Structure: Each person would clarify how they would know if they reached their goal and lay out specific action steps.
We also planned hour-long socials with our team to play remote games and get to know and care about each other.
Project Management and Tools
In the first iteration of the Fellowship, Jack, Leon and I knew everything that we were all working on and decided on the fly who was going to do what. It worked, but it quickly became a problem as the team grew and streamlining became more important. So, with Arielle's suggestion, we built clear roles and responsibilities for the team using the Batman and Robin framework, similar to the idea of a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) at Apple.
Tools like Slack, Notion and plain old phone were key to communicating as a team.
I set everyone on my team to emergency bypass on my phone so their calls would ring even on silent, and they knew they could call me if there were ever a true emergency and vice versa.
We used Notion to document, project manage, and take meeting notes.
While Notion was our space for documentation, Slack was our space for discussion and served as our main async form of communication.
We defaulted to using async ODCT channels instead of DMs for team visibility and clarified priority and urgency levels for task messages and asks
We leaned into Slack threads; any post longer than a line would be threaded, or replied, into the first message. This streamlined discussion of each topic into a long thread
I got more comfortable with emojis – it's hard to tell someone has positive intent when you can't hear the tone of voice or see a smiley face. Luckily, smiley faces fix that :)
In-Person Retreat
After a team-wide On Deck retreat, our team spent three days getting to know each other better, thinking strategically, and planning for the year ahead.
We spent the first day of the retreat focused on team building. This included understanding our own and our teammates’ strengths and challenges in team settings through the lens of the Enneagram. We discussed what other team members might need to know to make working together a great experience, what kind of feedback they like to give and receive, how they might deal with conflict, and what the best team they had been on was and why it was so great.
Then we dove into team agreements and came up with a list that included agreements like:
We see feedback as a gift.
We seek feedback actively, and we share it feedback generously and warmly.
We respect how teammates wish to receive feedback by checking their preferences in their user manual.
We agree not to take feedback personally, and make time to reflect on it.
We prioritize our health and well-being.
We share when we need help, are overwhelmed/at capacity, or don't know what to spend our work time on.
After focus/deep work time, we celebrate that time in some way with a break!
We honor our time off, and expect and plan for "re-entry time" after vacations,
PTO, family leave, etc. Catching up happens on our first work day back, not the last day of time off.
We spent the second day coming up with a clear mission, vision, OKRs, and areas for growth and improvement.
The third day was spent digging into priorities, timelines, and responsibilities for the year ahead. We discussed how we wanted to grow in our roles and created roles and responsibilities based on people's strengths and growth goals.
And each night, we played board games or explored the nature around our AirBnB. That retreat was a highlight of my time at On Deck and a fantastic way to get to know and work with my team.
There’s more for me to learn about managing a remote team and more I could have shared here. Feel free to reach out with your tips and tricks or questions on anything I did or didn’t mention here :)
Temp Check: My Favorite Recent Reads
In this section of every edition, I'll share at least one non-climate piece of writing that feels essential to climate work and one climate-focused piece that has changed or expanded my thinking.
🔥 A Sneaky Form of Climate Obstruction Hurts Pension Funds
I had no idea this has been happening: "In several Republican-led states, the officials who oversee pension funds for millions of state workers are being told, or may soon be told, to ignore the financial risks associated with a warming world. There's something distinctly anti-free market about policymakers limiting investment professionals' choices — and it's putting the retirement savings of millions at risk."
This article on ecological grief is worth a sit down read. This part is particularly relevant: “Reciprocity builds bonds. A network of bonds is a community. We think about this in our intimate relationships with each other, but less so in our relationship with nature. This "moral covenant" of reciprocity, as Kimmerer describes it, could be crucial to managing our grief.”
For more on ecological grief, watch Caroline Hickman’s talk we hosted on Climate Psychology