Managing Remote Teams Books

The #1 Amazon “Business Teams” Category Bestseller

Align your teams remotely with the questions worth asking and answering as a manager when everyone can’t get into the office

• What productivity is, when everyone is OOO
• How to align teams you don’t see
• How to radically improve your company’s delivery, knowing you’ll still be remote for a while

Books discussed on the podcast or relevant for managers

• Agile OKRs by Allan Kelly: Looking for a way to track your team’s progress? What about aligning and focusing people and resources? Read on. Allan Kelly’s Agile OKRs is a guide to help teams use the popular Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method, which is used by Google, Facebook, Hubspot, and many others to build successful products. The most important thing to remember about objectives is that they are guidelines. You should use them as a starting point for brainstorming and to help you focus your efforts, but they are not set in stone. You should always remember that the best way to be successful is to be yourself.
• Agendashift 2.0 by Mike Burrows: A book about combining the power of aligning an entire company wholeheartedly. It is a practical guide to provide insight and advice on how to successfully navigate the treacherous waters of modern day business. It shows you how to combine a great action plan with an equally strong set of goals for your company.
• The Art of Alignment by Patty Beach: One of the biggest mistakes you can make in your business is to be all over the map. It’s easy to get caught up in doing a million different things, but it’s much more difficult to find success with your business if you’re not aligned in your message. Patty pulls it all together in an eminently practical tome that is worth the read (even for a guy who wrote a book on alignment himself).
• Always Day One by Alex Kantrowitz: This book digs into the management practices that made Big Tech Big Tech. Kantrowitz give a lot of examples for the rest of us to be able to apply the key insights he’s learned from interviewing industry insiders and CEOs at the big Five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
• Objectives That Work by Nancy Slessenger: Great little booklet which goes back to the basics of exactly how to formulate objectives for managers, with loads of examples to draw on.
• Difficult People Made Easy by Nancy Slessenger
• Unmasked by Ryan Englin is a great book about behavioral interviewing, a technique of asking questions that test for cultural fit during a hiring process.
• Leading Successful Change by Cassie Solomon and Gregory Shea: Focusses on implementing change management at a large scale,
• Where the Action Is by Elise Keith is an excellent book on meetings, company culture, and making sure everything gets done.
• Why Managing Sucks by Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler is the manager’s perspective on managing the work not the workers. Full of useful insights that challenge a lot of pre-conceived notions traditional managers have, it’s a useful guidebook to where to start improving your company culture as you go remote
• Gamestorming by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo: The classic book for changemakers, it shows how to use visual collaboration to help groups of people create and discover together.
• The Culture Map by Erin Meyer, recommended by James Newson: Excellent book on cultural differences in business, which serve as a great jumping off point for discussing company culture.

Classic Managing Remote Teams books

• The Year Without Pants by Scott Berkun, a classic look at the company behind WordPress, arguably the first remote-first unicorn, from the perspective of an insider hired to become their first manager
• Remote by Jason Fried and DHH, the irreverent and opinionated duo with a contrarian view to a lot of things traditional work culture, probably the standard setter when talking about managing remote teams books