How to Win Friends and Manage Remotely

by McKenna Sweazey

Overview

Harness Your Digital Empathy and Learn Skills to Be a Better Boss, Employee, and Colleague in a Virtual or Hybrid Office
  
How do you manage a poor performer over Zoom? How do you casually deliver positive feedback via Slack? What’s the most professional use of a gif?

Two things are certain with the shift in office structure: First, we will never go back to “the way things were.” Second, we all must learn to live in a virtual workplace. If we are managers, that means we also need to know how to communicate with, motivate, and coach virtual teams. In the words of Dale Carnegie, how do you “win friends and influence people” in a virtual office?

In face-to-face interactions, humans have thousands of indicators to tell them what the other party is thinking and how they are reacting. Resorting to purely digital communication obliterates these clues, stopping us from reading the subtle body language we’ve evolved to use in all interactions to become better leaders, kinder managers, and more effective cogs in the corporate machine.

How to Win Friends and Manage Remotely shares real-life examples, scientifically proven ideas, and distillations of tried-and-true business tenets, including why expressing empathy is the most important factor in managing and working with others—all mapped to a new virtual-first office.

This book is a handbook—a step-by-step guide to common interactions in the workplace using eight classic management examples: from digitizing your onboarding journey to helping new recruits and delivering useful feedback over video conference. Combining academic research and personal experiences across various companies, roles, and countries, author McKenna Sweazey presents a road map to get us through the WFH (work from home) quagmire and help us all be more aware of others’ perspectives in this brave new world.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632652027
Publisher:	Red Wheel/Weiser
Publication date:	09/01/2022
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	1,012,934
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

As an accomplished executive, both in corporate settings and start-ups, and with a top-rated global MBA (INSEAD), McKenna Sweazey has had to hone her interpersonal relationship skills over Skype, Google Hangouts, Slack, good old-fashioned phone lines, and now Zoom. Her career includes work with successful start-ups like Taboola, which IPO’d in 2021 and where she spent five years. She also worked at the venerated Financial Times as head of global marketing. Currently, she is a marketing strategy consultant for brands in the US and Europe.
 

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Section 1 Managing Yourself 5

Chapter 1 Improving Your Own Empathy 7

Chapter 2 Feeling Good Working from Home 29

Chapter 3 "Speaking" So Others Will Understand 43

Section 2 Managing a Virtual Team Using Digital Empathy 63

Chapter 4 Driving Real Connection with Your Team 65

Chapter 5 Giving Feedback Online 81

Chapter 6 Distributing Knowledge Asynchronously 97

Chapter 7 Distributing Knowledge Synchronously: What Do Good Meetings Look Like? 121

Chapter 8 Getting Someone to Quit 135

Section 3 Managing Cross-Functionally and Indirectly 153

Chapter 9 Interviewing Remotely 155

Chapter 10 Being Interviewed Remotely 171

Chapter 11 Networking, Mentoring, and Making New Digital Friends at Work 177

Appendix 189

Notes 191

Index 203