For leaders of distributed teams whose work has to be done right
A week’s worth of work should produce a week’s worth of progress
Too much of that week goes to recovering context, reopening decisions, and getting everyone back to where the work already was.
You may recognise this
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 or a curious new team member.
A strong contributor transitioned out. The person who replaced her spent weeks rebuilding what the team already knew.
What work loses between conversations. 52 s
One leader said: “This team is too bright, too talented, to be missing like this.”
Each of these costs comes from the same condition: the team cannot reliably carry what it knows from one moment of work into the next. I call this work erosion.
We rely on people to carry all of the intent, objectives, decisions, progress, and what they’ve learned together and individually in their heads, in meetings, and in email and Teams or Slack. Any time they encounter an interruption, they reconstruct, re-explain, rehash, or restart.
Work needs a reliable way to retain all of that to survive time, distance, and interruptions.
Give your work a memory.
Give your work a memory, then a motor, then momentum.
Three rounds of lightweight practice, adopted one at a time.
For teams already doing real work, anything added must cost less than the erosion it prevents.
- Memory: work stops losing ground when interrupted.
- Motor: finishing becomes predictable with practices that keep work moving forward.
- Momentum: absorb volatility, help others pick up the thread, and inform what comes next.
What happens when you do
Your team will
- Reopen fewer decisions
- Give clear answers about progress
- Ramp up quickly after a handoff
- Finish what they start
A week’s worth of work delivers a week’s worth of progress.
Start here
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.”