Many traditional teambuilding activities don't work the same with remote teams, but certain strategies can bring remote teams together. Heather Morgan, co-founder and CEO of Endpass and a serial software entrepreneur who has managed remote teams for a decade, has some culture-enhancing tips:

• Have a shared mission: Beyond objectives and metrics, a compelling mission engages people even when no one is watching.
• Hire for fit: Onboard people who reflect your company’s values and operating style.
• Facilitate ongoing learning: Encourage team members to share new knowledge and resources.
• Provide opportunities for feedback and self-reflection: This is especially important for remote teams, as not everyone is proactive enough to reach out to a manager to get the help they need.
• Publicly acknowledge wins: Celebrate wins by teams or individual team members by posting on your company’s messaging platform.
• Create a virtual water cooler: If you use Slack, consider having different channels, including one that is #random, where team members post jokes, photos, and personal projects.
  
  

Of course, the key to all such strategies depends on communication. Our recent article in Fast Company details best practices for communicating with remote teams, whether you're collaborating remotely due to Covid-19, or you typically work this way. What suggestions do you have for uniting remote teams? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

What turns individual contributors into effective new managers? Google spent years finding out by analyzing over 10,000 manager impressions including performance reviews, surveys, and nominations for top-manager awards and recognition. The following are six key attributes that Google instills in its managers:
 

1. Mindset and Values – a growth mindset that believes skills and abilities can be cultivated
2. Emotional Intelligence – the ability to leverage self-awareness to manage behavior and relationships
3. Manager Transition – a willingness to share challenges and vulnerabilities with peers
4. Coaching – the ability to listen actively and empathically, ask open-ended questions, and be motivational
5. Feedback – the ability to offer consistent, bias-free feedback, and to be authentic and appreciative
6. Decision Making – Google has established a routine for making better decisions that includes asking, “What are you solving for?” “Why is it important?” and “When can a decision be expected?”

 
Google reported a statistically significant improvement in 75 percent of its underperforming managers after implementing the program.
 
What do you think is the most challenging part of transitioning to a management role? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

Darwin said the fittest survive, but what kind of fitness counts most? Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, researchers at Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, believe species that have thrived and successfully reproduced haven’t done it by beating up the competition.

Their new book, “Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity,” posits that species endure — humans, other animals and plants — based on friendliness, partnership and communication.

“Dogs are exhibit A,” Hare says. “They are the extremely friendly descendants of wolves. They were attracted to humans and became friendly to humans, and changed their behavior, appearance and developmental makeup. Sadly, their close relative, the wolf, is threatened and endangered in the few places where they live, whereas there are hundreds of millions of dogs…”

The authors also point to the success of bonobos, apes that are often confused with chimpanzees. Chimps make war, but bonobos are natural sharers. “The most successful bonobo males have more offspring than the most successful alpha male chimpanzees.”

What does all this mean for us? For humans to continue to evolve successfully, Hare says, “friendliness is the winning strategy. Social problems require social solutions. The secret to our species’ success is the same as it is with dogs and bonobos. We are the friendliest human species that ever evolved, which has allowed us to outcompete other human species that are now extinct. When that mechanism is turned off, we can become unbelievably cruel. When it is turned on, it allows us to win. We win by cooperation and teamwork. Our uniquely human skills for cooperative communication can be used to solve the hardest social problems.”

Can you recall a time when friendliness helped you get ahead? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

Caught up in a vicious cycle that starts with frustration, leads to stress, and winds up causing workplace wars? This can engender more frustration, until the whole syndrome starts over. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Annie McKee, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and the director of the PennCLO Executive Doctoral Program, offers a three-step process for interrupting such vicious cycles):
 

1. Develop self-awareness: Understand your triggers. Learning what causes you to feel thwarted, scared, or threatened and what drives you to the battleground can help you get a grip on your reactions.
2. Employ emotional self-control: Once you’re aware of the emotions that drive your behavior, you can employ emotional self-control, checking and channeling your emotions so that you don’t get stuck in a permanent fight or flight response.
3. Build friendships at work: To minimize stress and conflict at work, we need to stop seeing each other in terms of what we can get and replace it with what we can give. This shift would result in less stress and fewer negative emotions. It would also lead to warmer, friendlier relationships — something most people need and want at work.

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“Developing self-awareness, increasing your emotional self-control, and recharging relationships at work takes commitment,” says McKee. To lay the foundation, build mindfulness practices into your daily life, schedule time for self-reflection, and tap into empathy that allows you to see the world through others’ eyes.
 
Have you found that taking more responsibility for your own feelings and actions can help reduce frustration, stress, and conflict? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.

We all like to think we’d speak up if we saw something objectionable happening at our workplace—perhaps something ethically questionable or some evidence of discrimination. In fact, research suggests that most people tend not to act, and rationalize their inaction.
 
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Heidi Grant, Associate Director of Columbia University’s Motivation Science Center and author of Nine Things Successful People Do Differently, offers suggestions for those who do want to be diligent employees and lend their voice to the conversation:

• Recognize it will be difficult, and worthwhile: When people set out to do difficult, personally meaningful things, they’re more likely to follow through if they expect that the task will be challenging. 
• Make an if/then plan: Identify in advance the kinds of situations that could occur when you speak up. Then decide how you might handle each. Of course, you can never plan for every specific possibility, but feeling prepared will keep you from freezing up or backing out.
• Work to lessen the social threat that speaking up may create: Especially if you are communicating up the chain of command, make it clear that you’re not out to get anyone, or necessarily attributing ill will to anyone. Provide feedback about impact, without making any assumptions about intent.

 
If you have spoken up at work, what were the results? To join the conversation, click "comments" above.