DEV Community: Karine Sabatier

A personal manifesto for 2021

Karine Sabatier — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 22:12:59 +0000

My laptop sleeve.

It’s that time of the year again. Time to step back, review your priorities, sort things out, eliminate noise and simplify to focus. So I did a little cleansing recently in my life ;) and updated my manifesto. 2021 version looks like this

Be kind. I am not a kind person and moving towards kindness takes a real effort from me, I need constant reminders, helpers if you like. “Be kind” is a post-it on my desk, a phrase on my desktop wallpaper and it’s also printed on my laptop’s sleeve.
Think = Act. Most people tend to separate thoughts and acts. It turns out our brain is wired to (and stimulated by) our body and our body is partly controlled by our brain. We are a whole. A pack of nerves and we act and think simultaneously. In fact, it’s now proven that we think better when we move. And we move better when we focus. It’s an absurdity to consider that our legs are just a way of getting our heads to meetings.
Now > Later. (Now beats Later) Every single time. Most people live their lives like it’s a rehearsal for the Big Act. There is no rehearsal, you only get one shot and it’s pretty short. I won’t wait for anything, it’s here and now. And I avoid people who constantly repeat “let’s wait for…” or “it’s urgent to wait…” or “wait and see”. In fact, this is was scares the sh*t out of me. That’s why I love this other manifesto.
Die Empty, There Is No Plan B. A while ago I read that book and sawthat movie (in my top 3 of all time). Some people are constantly holding back, not giving their best, not saying everything, not sharing everything, not following entirely through. In Gattaca, Vincent wins the race not because he is better than Anton, but because he doesn’t save anything for the swim back. Live your life like it’s the only one. Because, well, it is. (And go watch Soul by the way ;)
Form > Function. (Form beats and shapes contents). I know you usually hear it the other way around : “form follows function”. Well I strongly disagree because I see it everyday : the How shapes the What (and even the Why). That room you hold your meeting into influences the meeting’s content, that restaurant decor shapes the conversation, those clothes you’re wearing shape your self-confidence, that medium you’re writing / drawing on shapes what you’re writing / drawing. So choose the How with care.
Enough = small + simple + beautiful. That’s a personal equation of course. You’ll have your own definition of enough. For me, “something does the job” if it’s small, simple and beautiful, 3 highly subjective notions. But if I feel one is missing, then it’s not sufficient.
Say what you mean, mean what you say. Take position and be yourself. Too many people say the opposite of what they mean (hypocrisy or lie), or don’t say anything (shyness or absence of position) or worse, return the question. To me, saying what you mean has become a mark of courage and intelligence. You certainly have an opinion, I’d like to hear it, even if I don’t share you point of view (especially if I don’t, heck! teach me something). I’m not expecting it to be your ultimate point of view (I assume we all can be wrong and all have the right to evolve in time), I’m just asking for authenticity. I want to have a conversation with *you* and *your* opinions.
Don’t forget the obvious. This is a trivial note for myself to remind me that people are not in my head (surprisingly). What is obvious to me is — most of the time — irrelevant to them. So if there is an elephant in the room, point it out nonetheless. Always go back to the basics and state what you are here for, what this conversation is about, why this email is sent. Also, I’ll appreciate if you return the favor and state “your obvious” to me :)
Attention to details + grit + care = love. Jean Cocteau used to say : “There’s no such thing as love; only proof of love.” Pierre Reverdy used to say “There is no love; there are only proofs of love. Whatever love I might feel in my heart, others will see only my action.” There is only one way to show people that you love them and care about them : it’s to dispense acts of love by paying attention to details, but with perseverance and over the long run. Short term acts of kindness is just a fling, a flirt. Things will go wrong and get ugly. If you can get past that, still pay attention to details and give care, then you’re giving love.

If you have a personal manifesto, a code of conduct, I’d love to read about it. That’s be lovely if you shared it.

Love,

Karine

Change vs disturbance

Karine Sabatier — Wed, 04 Nov 2020 17:08:29 +0000

One of the strong promises of going agile for a team (induced by the term itself) is to gracefully adapt to change. Agile methodologies place a bet: that by adapting to change the team will release a product that will eventually bring more value to its customers.

There are different kinds of change though, for which going agile is relevant:

Change of product positioning (a strategic change)
Change of priorities (a tactical change)
Change in the market stakes (induced by competitors for instance)
Change in the Business Model (repositioning value in your model)
Change induced by uncertainty (disruptive innovation context)
Change in the technical approach (a need to update the tech choices)

"Good change" builds confidence in the future for the team and helps navigating from uncertainty to less uncertainty.

Lacking product vision, changing your mind 3 times about a feature, having no consistency on your priorities (or no idea what they are), continuously introducing emergencies, altering the proper functioning or the stability of the team... these are NOT change. This is disturbance.

Disturbance doesn't help navigating through uncertainty but it adds more noise to it.

To deal with disturbance, agile brings no answer. I'm afraid you'll have to look into self-discipline.

My first hacktoberfest

Karine Sabatier — Sun, 01 Nov 2020 13:25:40 +0000

Two months ago I heard the word 'Hacktoberfest' for the first time: Open Source contributors at Zenika were talking about having everyone in the company contribute to the event. I googled "hacktoberfest" and immediately loved the idea, although the first thought I had as a non-dev person was "This seems to be a dev thing huh?".

Turns out it's not and we (non-dev people like agile coaches, product managers and support functions) were able to make our small (yet symbolic) contributions with the help from our tech colleagues.

This is how they did it and how you could do it as well

If you're an Open Source advocate / dev and want to enroll noob contributors

Talk about it. A lot. For instance on your company's Slack dedicate a channel to the event and post frequently.
Have a dedicated onboarding program. Zenika has its "pimp your duck" project to help make your first PR.
Lead by example. I went to see some of our OS contributors' repositories to have a look at the projects they contributed to and found it inspiring to discover this community spirit and remote collaboration world.
Make a list of projects that could benefit from non-dev contributions (projects that need design, documentation, translations, sorting things out, etc.) I had a look at what Jean-Baptiste wrote on his blog for instance, very helpful. This is key, since the excitement can vanish very quickly if you don't find a project to contribute to.
Be the link between "them" (the project mainteners) and "us" (potential contributors)
Make it fun. We had several Hacktobefest nights (with pizza!!!) so that we could contribute and celebrate together!
Be patient :) Noobs like us are starting from scratch. Expect lots of dumb questions and epic fails. Turns out we WANT to learn and that's what brings us together.

If you're a wannabe contributor

Spend some time on github just browsing serendipitously from repo to repo. I did this without understanding anything to what was happening there but at least I had the feeling I was already into it 😁 Of course you can look for repositories that have the "hacktoberfest" tag but feel free to contribute to whatever project suits your interests.
Read the Hacktoberfest site for newbies There is a Beginner section at the end of this page. And lots of good advice.
Learn git. At least some of it: clone, fetch, commit, push, pull. Of course this is the trickiest part, and you can do without and participate through github's interface. But you can also innocently 😇 ask a colleague to spend 10 mns explaining git to you (in my case it turned out to be 2 hours, sorry JL ❤️). And then try again later because you have forgotten (and not understood) everything. You can trust your teammates to find a creative way to teach you git branching: I learned git branching with cherry tomatoes 😅 thanks to Guillaume❤️ and Anthony❤️

Insights and take-aways

pizza and being together are NOT optional 😍
Learning git is what made the whole experiment spicy and motivating for me. Of course I am happy to have joined the projects but I know my contributions are not critical (such as adding a new feature or resolving a critical security breach). And though I still think git is a tool designed for tech aliens, I'm starting to enjoy the possibilities it opens for me.
As usual good communication is key. Although the hacktoberfest onboarding is really good, I had much trouble finding projects to contribute to. It's hard when you're not a developper to spot projects that you understand 😜 AND that could benefit from your skills.
The best piece I read about first-time contributors is here and I saw it very late. Too late actually. Also found out too late the #beginners-friendly, #newbie, #newbiefriendly and #first-timers tags 😩
Mainteners, please provide a "How to contribute (for dummies)" guide. I had the chance to make my first PR on the Kaamelott Soundboard project which has a very explicit "how to contribute" section. Gave me a little bit of confidence (although I managed to screw up my first PR nonetheless)

So what's next?

Hacktoberfest was indeed a fest, thanks to the events we put up around it. I'm not sure I would have enjoyed it as much if we hadn't gathered together at some point. Oh and I'll keep contributing to the 2 projects I joined (unless I get kicked out)... isn't this what you call progress?

Getting started with Svelte

Karine Sabatier — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 19:28:10 +0000

A loooong time ago I used to be a developer. One of my last contacts with the coding world was with Ruby on Rails, one of the first MVC architecture frameworks. I remember loving the elegance and the conciseness of both Ruby and the Rails framework. What I also liked was that RoR was not suited for everyone or everything. DHH, the conceptor of Rails, had some strong takes on what Ror should and should not do. Rails even has a manifesto!

Time has passed, I am not a developer anymore. Code looks like a foreign language that I can vaguely read but not speak or write. From where I stand coding the smallest application has become awfully complex. I feel lost in the frameworks and languages jungle and am simply in awe of my expert colleagues. Just being able to keep up with one technology and staying on top of it is a labor of love of one’s life, and this forces my admiration.

When I took a job as a Product Manager at Zenika — cabinet of IT expertise — I felt the urge to get back to understanding (at least as much as I could) what my teammates were doing with those zeros and ones. At the same time, many environmental concerns started to arise at Zenika and we were a bunch of people wondering how we could somehow still work in the Internet Industry and yet be part more of the solution than of the problem. I now believe that Svelte could be part of an eco-friendly solution for a “low-impact Internet”.

Enters Svelte.

It’s simple, it’s smart, it’s concise, it’s compiled and it’s blazingly fast and clever. It also looks like we’re back to 1995 ❤.

Fresh.

Svelte was thought for reactivity and efficiency. I won’t be surprised to see a huge eco-conception movement gather around it. But that’s a bet for now.

So I spent some time during the lock-down to see if I could code something with Svelte (short answer : I did, but it’s awfully ugly and worthless). Turns out I could and that (surprise!) Svelte was not the hardest thing for me to figure out. Git and Javascript on the other hand… but that’s yet another story.

So here is a collection of links I used along the way during my brief — yet insightful — journey back to code. Hope it helps!

Svelte’s stance

There is a philosophy and a mindset behind every tool, every method and every framework. Svelte is a strongly opinionated framework / language / compiler. To understand Svelte’s stance, you have to refer to its creator Rich Harris who also is a very opinionated graphic editor at the NYT.

So be sure to start with Rich Harris and his “Rethinking reactivity” talk

Then, enjoy Rich’s storytelling skills on “Computer, build me an app” .

In French you have to watch Anthony Le Goas’s talk “Svelte, pourquoi tant de hype ?” where Anthony digs in to see what Svelte has under the hood.

Svelte the compiler

Now you get it. Svelte is different because it is a compiler and most of the “magic” comes from that. So you might want to check those really great posts about how it works.

Swyx, a prominent figure of the Svelte community, has made this video that inspired Tan li Hau’s (Svelte core contributor) first “Compile Svelte in Your Head” post. This is a good start. Also, lots of insights in Shawn’s “Why Svelte — short version” or Ryan Atkinson’s “Why Svelte”.

Head up to Tan li Hau’s website and his series “Compile Svelte in Your Head”

https://lihautan.com/compile-svelte-in-your-head-part-1/ https://lihautan.com/compile-svelte-in-your-head-part-2/ https://lihautan.com/compile-svelte-in-your-head-part-3/ https://lihautan.com/compile-svelte-in-your-head-part-4/

Now get your hands dirty

Time to code! 😱🥰

First, have a quick look at the Svelte repo. Recently MDN also opened a “Getting Started With Svelte” section and another one about Typescript Support in Svelte.

But the most precious resource to really get started is Svelte REPL . This is by far the more educational website I’ve seen in years (next to Brilliant on a totally different topic). I wouldn’t be surprised if the REPL was somehow inspired by Bret Victor’s work(build something to learn it and while building it have an immediate and visual feedback on what you’re doing). Also, with Rich Harris being a graphic editor at the New York Times, I suspect he is very picky and careful about the learning experience on Svelte : visual, progressive, and fun.

Hurry up to the Svelte tutorial and don’t come back until you’ve done all of it :)

You can then reward yourself with another fun & insightful video of Rich being invited by Jason Lengstorf for a “Let’s learn Svelte” session.

Then, you will let serendipity take you over to other very interesting videos and links on some Svelte treats : bind, actions, stores, animations and forms!

Introduction to Svelte, Actions and Stores — by Kevin Åberg

Svelte bind directive — A cheatsheet — by Marc Radziwill

Effective Transitioning — by Andrew Smith

Svelte-Forms — a lib by Kevin Åberg

Svelte’s ecosystem

Now, along this learning curve, you’ve probably stumbled across many satellites of Svelte. Here are some you might want to check.

Sapper : the framework for building web applications of all sizes, with a beautiful development experience and flexible filesystem-based routing.

Rollup : the bundler solution for Svelte.

Routify : Routes for Svelte, automated by your file structure.

ElderJS ** :** An Opinionated, SEO focused, Svelte Framework.

Svelte Community site

Svelte Radio

Svelte Society Youtube channel

Svelte School

Svelte Reddit Thread

Svelte Unofficial newsletter

Made With Svelte

Also, check out my Twitter list of people using Svelte

The Svelte Community

Ok you get it, there are plenty of links and resources out there about Svelte now. But there’s more : the svelte community is incredibly vivid, humble and welcoming. So be sure to drop by the Svelte Discord to say Hi!

Want to be part of the community? Lucky you :) Svelte Summit is less than 2 weeks from now. Be sure to save the date!

Svelte Summit : the virtual conference about Svelte

Now that’s a wrap. Thank you and see you there :)

22 tips for coaching remote teams

Karine Sabatier — Sat, 09 May 2020 13:16:58 +0000

Becky Hammon the first-ever female head coach in the NBA’s Summer League for the Spurs and the first female NBA head coach to win a Summer League title.

By coaching I mean guiding a group of individuals from “what are we here for again?” to “now that we stated the right problem and that we actually share the same purpose, let’s act on it” with simple tools and process.

For the past 4 weeks I have been remotely coaching 5 teams of 4 to 6 people and I must say it has been the most draining time of my pro life. I feel like one hour of remote meeting is probably equivalent to a 4-hour non-stop IRL workshop. After the first 2 sessions I realized I was totally worn out, really late on the schedule I had planned, quite unhappy about what came out of our group and simply clueless about how to deal with remote.

So, after each session I decided to make a quick retro with myself to come up with improved remote coaching guidelines. Here they are after a few retros, feel free to complete and challenge them. Let’s jump in!

Why remote work is hard

A word beforehand about remote. Going full remote is a harder way to work in groups (for now) and there are many reasons to it: we’re not all used to it yet, we have not found the optimal organization yet, some of our tools need improved UX, etc.

But the real reasons are mostly physiological ones that could be summed up by “we are simply not meant for that”. On video calls our eyes get sore quickly (a lot of people experience eye fatigue nowadays) and our brain doesn’t like at all the impression of being constantly watched by everyone. Also, while working remotely we are deprived of the perception of body language (especially if people don’t activate their camera during meetings). And body language is key to our comprehension of the other human being in front of us. Without body language, we become clueless and we spend more energy trying to communicate efficiently.

These articles about the Zoom fatigue are really interesting to read.

So more than ever, you need to prepare upfront.

When working with groups (2 people is a group) I usually set up a pretty detailed agenda and a bunch of facilitation tools. With time and experience you’ll get to know your basics and will be able to improvise and adapt, but still, I like to have my timetable and check list ready — but also, this (let’s jump in):

1. Don’t plan more than 90 minutes for a remote session.

Ninety minutes is already too much. If you need more time, reconsider your goals, split them and schedule more slots. I now plan 50 minutes of work. This gives people a 10-minute break in case they have to go on with another meeting.

2. Keep the team under 5–6 people.

This one is close to IRL limitations. If you want everyone to be active and committed, four is a good number.

3. Email upfront the agenda and purpose of the session.

Two or three days upfront, email the agenda of the session mentioning the working phases, deliverable, tools, and all things the group needs to prepare beforehand. Remind them what you expect to achieve together. Could be as simple as:

Our aim for this session is to share the same vision of what we’re here for and to agree on the approach and tools we’ll use to get to the action plan. Please gather in the shared drive (link to it) all the material you think is relevant. I’ll go through this material before we meet.

4. Don’t use Doodle (or equivalent) to schedule.

Having everyone playing around with time-slots, waiting for everyone to fill in and finding the right match is pure nightmare. Don’t spend your time on this, it is more valuable on other tasks (as you’ll see below).

Either impose a time slot (as long as it is planed way ahead, people can find room in their agenda) or make a list of available slots in your schedule and ask people to subscribe to them. Tools such as Calendly can help (which I use for one-to-one meetings).

5. Triple check that everyone knows when, where and how to meet.

Every organization has different remote tools (Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, etc.) Once the time-slot is set, make sure you send an invite to participants with the right connection link, check their replies.

Remind the when-where-how to meet from one session to the other. It is indeed frustrating to start a remote meeting late because of this, and even more frustrating to be late just because you don’t know where and when to meet.

In the chapter of “how” to work together, don’t stress people with fancy new tools unless you are absolutely sure they already use them. I made that mistake twice pushing Miro (a nonetheless super great tool) to the group, too soon and with no prep upfront. Don’t do that :) When one person has trouble using it, all the group feels rightly stressed out.

6. Share more ahead.

Don’t rely solely on the time you have together. Attention spans are way shorter when you work remotely so you will have to share more materials in between sessions and you’ll probably have to give ‘homework’ to the team to make real progress.

Yet, don’t overwhelm the team with too much resources to read upfront. Prefer short videos: people can “listen to” videos while cooking for instance, but cannot read while cooking. And yes, unfortunately, we all multi-task more.

When asking the group to prepare or deliver something for the upcoming session, ease the work by giving them simple guided templates. Pre-fill your template with sample answers, to set the tone and level of precision you expect. Make sure you are available for questions.

During the coaching session

7. Have a quick mood check.

https://medium.com/media/7a170ec9f64b80da4384bba9d47e634a/href

Although there are plenty of them, you don’t have to use fancy tools / cards / games / icebreakers to do this. A 2-minute chat with everyone can tell you a lot about the team mood and the individual moods. At least ask for the level of energy, in the chat for instance... (0 being “I’m totally worn out” to 5 “I feel really great”). Animated gifs work great for that as well.

8. Create rituals / habits.

Mood check is one. Having your session on the same day (every Tuesday afternoon) is another. Playing a song while waiting for everyone to check in is another one of my favorite, it’s fun and fuels the first conversations. When working remotely, rituals are even more important to reduce mental load. The less you have to think about the how, the more you can focus on the what.

9. Make sure the workshop guidelines and the process are crystal clear.

The process is how you designed the workshop (the steps participants will go through). The guidelines are the instructions to follow the path and the rules we are going to live by.

Make sure the process is crystal clear: explain upfront how you designed the session and why. Give / display the timing (once), so that everyone moves along more or less the same pace. Make “pitstops” : short breaks to make sure people can ask questions if they need to. Or have a glass of water.

Announce loud and clear when you are moving to the next step of the process. “Ok we just finished step 1 (remind step 1), time to move on to step 2 (describe step 2)”. Yes it takes time to do that every time but in the end you’ll gain commitment, clarity and focus. It’s important that people know when to close a mental door.

Make sure the guidelines are crystal clear: when working remotely, people are less concentrated and more tired. They have kids running around, a lame Internet connection, a delivery guy at the door, etc. Repeat the guidelines in various ways, and if possible, ask someone in the group to restate them.

https://medium.com/media/a3d5c55245ac1e42c13d9a6c09f4804f/href

Generally speaking, have an unequivocal, harsh and straight-to-the point language : explain who will be doing what. “We are going to work in 3 phases of 20 minutes”… “I’ll be taking notes and keeping time”… “We’ll gather our ideas in ten minutes”… “Andrea proposed herself to pitch the deck, let’s now listen to her”… “Who can pass on the slides to Sophie who’s not here today?”. Simple, clear (and a bit directive) language.

10. Forget about true spontaneity.

If you planned on spontaneity to achieve a task (a creative brainstorming for instance), you’d better move on to something else.

With remote you’ll lack everything that usually drives real spontaneity : direct interactions, body language and timing. In a virtual meeting, people are behind a screen and that split-second when you mind goes through all sorts of questions such as Can I interrupt to jump in? Do people hear me? Is there anyone else who want to talk right now? Is my mike open? Did someone already ask the same question in the chat? is enough to put all spontaneity down.

Of course you can drive some sort of impulse with dedicated tools (mainly imagery) but know that it’s “not the same” :)

11. Use the 2 microphones rule.

Allow only 2 microphones on at the same time. If a third person wants to speaks one of the two firsts needs to switch off. It’s a little messy the first time you try it but in the end it is as efficient as a talking-stick. And it saves bandwidth.

12. Always show the way.

https://medium.com/media/3193f97f2c1e7540776a42b197d5da2d/href

If you ask people to do something, do it first, show the way. Especially if you want to use icebreakers. Icebreakers are often intimidating and for the first person to go, it’s not easy to figure out where to put the cursor between fun and seriousness. So go first, set the tone and name the next person to go. People will jump right after you more easily.

That’s the same for other types of exercises: if you ask people to present something shortly, go present something shortly so that they see what level of details you expect. Same rule for chat use.

13. Have some stand-up sessions.

Depending on the time of the day, you can propose to have a stand-up meeting. When working remotely we tend to sit way more than usual and our brain gets lazy when seated. Having a stand-up session feels weird at first but you’ll notice the difference.

14. Note everything down.

(Or record if you can) Live coaching is hard, remote coaching is exhausting and there is a good chance you won’t remember everything that happened / was said. Taking thorough notes will tremendously improve your context switching and thus your coaching focus.

15. Make progress observable, not measurable.

I’m not a big fan of measurable goals, KPIs or even OKR. They are narrowing our perception of a complex reality to simplistic indicators and prevent us from paying attention to details or interesting side tracks.

https://medium.com/media/6921b2d843ab1e83b02411750d8d4cda/href

Everything that can be measured is not necessarily important. And most important things cannot be measured easily. And let’s face it, we are very bad at dealing with data, correlation, causality, biases, etc.

Plus, living by one or two KPI makes you miss the whole context. Don’t fall under the Law of Instrument with data and KPIs, reality is more complex than a bunch of indicators. Plus, to figure out your way in complex environments, you’d need way too many data you don’t have anyway.

So lead the team towards observable actions. Not measurable actions. Ask them *what* they want to observe as a result of their actions.

Important things in life such as happiness, joy, commitment, expertise, even rebellion, are easily observable but not measurable. Observables are proof. KPIs usually stay as intentions.

16. Show twice as much appreciation.

Remember that as living creatures, we usually evaluate interactions mainly through our non verbal attitude. Working remotely, we are deprived of this superpower and we can’t show appreciation through this body language (eye contact, smile, etc.).

https://medium.com/media/ff407e65c28279636b653b8bfcd565b1/href

Remote group work is hard, so show a lot of unequivocal appreciation for the group’s work. For instance “I’m very happy we met our target today, it was not easy and we did great.” or “Thank you all, I learned a lot today and had much pleasure listening to your ideas and guiding you through the process.” Take time to thank everyone, even if it’s just one sentence. “I really appreciate the time we spent here, thank you for your energy / humor / focus / time.”

Of course, mean it.

17. Invite for real feedback and questions.

Preferably asynchronously. Don’t wait for the last 5 minutes to get feedback: as you will probably be late on your schedule (at least the first 3 sessions), people will be tired and not in the mood to give you proper feedback, even more so if they feel in a hurry.

Here are ideas on what you can do :

ask feedback by email
or with a simple form
or with a ROTI
or at the beginning of the following session “what’s your feedback / feeling about what we did last time?”
or open an 24/7 idea box (include the link in every agenda invitation)

18. Have conversations, not slides.

Draw. Talk. Sing. Use photos. Gifs. Nothing. Whatever. But not slides.

19. Make a wrap up.

It’s as simple as

This is what we were here to do. This is what we did / produce. This has been clarified. This still needs work. Here are the next steps.

20. Finish 5 minutes early.

During lock-down most of my days were packed with 5 or 6 virtual meetings. I double appreciated the ones that finished 5 mns early. Do as well for your sessions.

After the session

21. Surprise and gift

While sending the minutes of the session (usually by email) — or the next invite — include something surprising or fun or useful in your email as a PS. I do this almost all the time and it’s another way to bond with people (through humor often) and to show genuine care. Of course, pick something that is relevant to their situation.

People will remember more easily the session with what you sent (I get this kind of message afterwards: “I’ve worked on the topic auto-organization… you know, when you sent the Trello link / TED video / fun template you sent”)

22. Be available for one-to-ones.

Even if you were asked to coach a team, make sure everyone feels secure to reach out to you for one-to-one conversations. You want to enforce psychological safety in your team and that’s one way to do it. You’ll get a lot from these.

Now your turn :)

As you can see there is a lot to think about to help a team work remotely. And surprisingly, it doesn’t require much fancy tools to do great work. The best thing you can give is your plain attention and dedication, sharp focus, and authentic care. And, bonus! All this applies to IRL workshops as well :)

I hope these tips can help you get started. It’s a fabulous experience, so diverse and incredibly fulfilling. One that makes you feel useful and human.