For leaders of distributed teams whose work has to be done right
Does your team put in a week’s worth of work but get less than a week’s worth of progress?
I know the feeling: this team is too bright, too talented, to be missing like this.
Work forgets between moments of attention.
Leadership asks for a progress report. You know the team is working hard on work that matters. You can’t word the update in a way that leadership will understand.
A decision the team made three weeks ago is back on the table. The reasoning didn’t survive two weeks away.
A strong contributor transitioned out. The person who replaced her spent weeks rebuilding what the team already knew.
This is what work erosion looks like.
What work loses between conversations. 52 s
Give your work a memory, then a motor, then momentum.
Three rounds of lightweight practice, adopted one at a time.
- Memory: work stops losing ground.
- Motor: finishing becomes predictable.
- Momentum: work absorbs volatility and gets smarter each cycle.
For teams already doing real work, anything added must cost less than the erosion it prevents. Sustained innovation is a product of the work design, not of the effort.
Lead the team that finishes what it starts, so a week’s worth of work delivers a week’s worth of progress. Effort once spent staying in place returns as capacity to innovate.
Where do you start?
I want to see if this might help my team.
I want to start with my own work.
Something is off, and I can’t locate it.
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About Amy Kennedy
Amy Kennedy spent 35 years in technical product leadership in financial services, including 25 years leading remote and nationally distributed teams before remote work became a standard management challenge. She learned what it takes to keep distributed teams from losing ground: decisions that “stick” across time and distance, progress that doesn’t fall apart between handoffs, and context that survives when people change.
She works with individuals whose strong work isn’t reaching the people who need to see it, with team leaders whose capable teams keep stalling before the work is complete, and with organizational leaders trying to build reliable performance across distributed teams. In every engagement, the goal is the same: a team that finishes what it starts, with decisions that stay made and progress that builds.
If that describes where you are, the diagnostic is the right place to start.
– Ron Fauquher, cofounder of Ontario Systems, worked with Amy for nearly 30 years.
Frequently executive leaders possess wisdom. And sometimes they just simply know how to coach and pull wisdom out of their colleagues by leading with the appropriate question. Amy Kennedy is one of those unusual individuals that can do both.”