
Discover how to manage remote teams by prioritizing clarity, feedback, and trust, balancing effectiveness over efficiency, and embracing deliberate video-call communication.
Clear delegation uses in-person or video conversations to observe reactions and scope tasks precisely. This builds feedback loops and accountability, making clarity a high-leverage practice.
Learn a three-step delegation framework for remote teams: define what's enough, what's too little, and what's too much. Clarify expectations to prevent under-delivery and over-delivery, ensure follow-up, and improve engagement.
Learn how delegating core values on onboarding uses hypotheticals to pit metrics against values, reinforcing safety, ethics, and respect for people while walking the talk and protecting the bottom line.
Set clear boundaries and explicit deliverables to empower delegates, build trust, and reduce miscommunication by specifying standards and expectations, and by owning and clarifying errors when needed.
achieve superclarity by being specific, over-communicating, and validating understanding through in-person rephrasing; calibrate guidance with a three-step process: set an optimal success rate, adjust style, and recalibrate for motivation.
Learn how to turn abstract corporate statements into concrete, actionable guidance by using specific examples, relevant actions, and explicit expectations for every team member.
Clarify which sub-tasks your subordinate controls when delegating tasks with limited authority, such as securing town hall approval, to ensure accountability, motivation, and successful follow-up.
Develop clear, specific training and delegation to overcome discomfort in giving negative feedback, and build confidence by trusting your preparation and holding remote team members accountable.
Turn feedback into action by making it specific and small, with concrete steps that subordinates can take, and collaboratively determine next steps to avoid inaction.
Calibrate your feedback by observing the recipient's reaction and adjusting specificity accordingly. When action follows, offer a bit more freedom; when inaction occurs, make guidance more specific and action-oriented.
Give actionable, helpful feedback that builds trust, twice as much positive as negative, avoids fixed structures, and explains why it matters while inviting ongoing input.
Managers should act as coaches, offering feedback and guidance to subordinates to improve skills, foster teamwork, and set subordinates up for success through two-way, helpful conversations.
Review your remote team's work at a level to uncover obstacles and why outcomes occur. Build trust through close knowledge of their jobs and problems, asking questions to guide feedback.
Manage remote teams by following up after delegation to catch misunderstandings early, schedule concise early check-ins (10–20% of time) to validate direction, be helpful, and prevent rework.
Give more frequent feedback to improve specificity and balance, with follow-ups within 24 hours and quick acknowledgments to reinforce meaningful work and maintain motivation.
Balance effort with results by giving clear, actionable tasks and the necessary know-how, while acknowledging effort, guiding efficiency, and preventing burnout through focused, shorter outputs.
Build trust to enable helpful feedback and effective follow-ups by delegating clearly and showing fairness and empowerment. Trust, not control, shapes how subordinates respond.
Managers build trust with remote teams through consistent, fair actions: delegating for success, giving actionable feedback, listening, and keeping promises, not through icebreakers.
Deliberately create serendipitous moments to build trust in remote teams, replacing scalable surveys with one-on-one video calls to collect actionable intelligence. Ask specific questions about mood, doubts, and workload.
as a manager, build trust among colleagues by fostering helpful interactions and actionable feedback, with clear expectations and fair processes, while addressing envy, rivalry, and frustration through coaching.
Foster trust by building relationships in remote teams through personal sharing, balanced boundaries, structured or unstructured moments to talk, and at least one annual in-person meeting.
Identify frustration incidents among remote team members and investigate their root causes to preserve trust and motivation. Implement preventive actions to address underlying operational problems, improving efficiency and employee effectiveness.
Learn to coach rather than just train: tailor skills to your team’s remote context, practice with feedback, and secure commitment to apply improvements, especially in meetings.
Identify why coachees don't improve: know-how gaps, insufficient practice, or drift when you look away. Assign tiny, specific steps to prove the skill's worth and encourage practice.
Coach remotely via video to read body language in groups or individually. Use share screen to illustrate good and bad emails or presentations with annotated examples in red and green.
Teach personal judgment through hypotheticals and feedback beyond procedures and training to help remote teams decide confidently in real situations.
Size tasks to match a delegee's engagement, assigning smaller steps when resistance appears. Use a trajectory from now to year-end with short-term milestones and regular feedback to maintain momentum.
Hold three additional quarterly performance reviews alongside the year-end review to provide explicit feedback on progress toward year-end objectives and enable timely corrective action.
Schedule frequent one-on-one meetings every two weeks, and spend time on long-term growth topics: career and skill development, process improvements, and efficiency, rather than just to-do lists.
Managers reduce frustration by improving processes and tools, coaching execution, and identifying unnecessary actions to boost efficiency; when improvement isn’t possible, explain why the task matters and requires effort.
Build trust during onboarding by demonstrating consistent adherence to core values and processes, and use hypotheticals to show doing things right benefits the bottom line despite short-term costs.
Learn how asynchronous collaboration and real-time and one-on-one meetings balance efficiency and clarity, with training and coaching to ensure teams use tools well and onboard effectively.
Rename agenda items as outcomes, not progress updates. In online meetings, define good versus bad ideas, set question norms, limit slides, keep cameras on, and invest in AV.
Identify ten common actions that kill motivation in remote teams, such as failing to monitor task completion, punishing speed, withholding praise, withholding full goals and feedback, and vague delegation.
Learn to manage remote teams by prioritizing outcome-driven focus through clear priorities and frequent conversations, rather than relying on excessive metrics that can be gamed.
Weigh your delegation approach by comparing your experience to subordinates, voice opinions with reasons, clarify success criteria, and balance autonomy with explicit requirements and acknowledgement.
Set your delegates up for success by ensuring they know the risks, leverage points, all relevant information, required skills, time, and resources to uphold performance and trust.
Conclude the managing remote teams course by inviting feedback to improve future topics and offering tailored one-on-one sessions and additional resources.
After this course, you'll know clearly how to tweak your interactions with your team so that they gain clarity, become more proactive, and trust you (and each other) better.
About Luca Dellanna
As a management advisor, Luca has 10y+ of experience helping organizations increase their revenue and lower their costs.
As a scholar, he published several books and papers on human behavior and risk management, and regularly teaches related subjects at a local university.
Luca holds a master's in automotive engineering.
What's inside?
41 video lessons that take about 2h30 to be completed. They cover most of the tasks of a remote manager: delegating, running meetings, managing performance, keeping engagement high, training and coaching, bringing clarity, and more.
An eBook, which contains the transcripts of the videos. It's helpful to take notes (and can be read instead of the videos, if they're not your thing).
What's not inside? Anything that could be better asked to a lawyer (e.g., remote employment laws), a recruiter (e.g., where to find remote talent), or an IT specialist (e.g., how to troubleshoot your video call software).
Some of my principles:
It's not about the tools but how they are used
Project management software, team meetings, one-on-ones… any management tool can bring clarity and effectiveness in the hands of a great manager or become a nuisance in the hands of a poor manager. It's not about the tools but how they are used. For example, when managers use these tools to delegate, do they clearly and concretely explain what they need and why?
Hence, in this course, I will not recommend any specific tool or software to assign tasks, provide feedback, or otherwise do your job as a remote manager. Instead, I will teach you how to delegate effectively, give helpful and actionable feedback, and build trust remotely, so that you can become a more effective manager regardless of the specific tools you use.
Trust determines how people receive feedback
Two managers might use the exact same words to give the same piece of feedback to the same employee and get two radically different reactions. The difference is in the trust the employee had in each of the managers.
If your people don't trust you, they won't work full-heartedly on the tasks you assign them, no matter how good your delegation skills, and they will react defensively to your feedback, no matter how well given.
It is necessary that you build trust within your team that you are a good manager.
During the course, I will explain exactly how trust works, how you can build trust as a manager, and particularly in a remote environment.
Clarity enables feedback
The less clear you are during delegation, the more likely there will be a discrepancy between your people's output and the output you would have wanted them to produce. Any discussion you have after the discrepancy will be frustrating for both parties involved.
But not having any discussion would also be bad, both for you and your report.
The solution to prevent this lose-lose situation is to be extremely clear during delegation, before it seems necessary.
And the right way to achieve it is not by adding unnecessary details or specifications but by being superclear about the essence of the work you want your people to perform. I will teach you how.
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Some quotes from the course:
Clarity is not micromanagement, but lack of clarity is lack of management.
People only voice a fraction of their doubts. The rest shows up later as indecisiveness, inefficiency, and ineffectiveness.
Employees love when their manager, while delegating a task, makes explicit what would be too little and what would be too much.
Don’t aim to be clear enough so that you can be understood, but aim to be so clear that you cannot be misunderstood. That’s superclarity.
Explain to each employee what abstract company objectives mean for them individually.
If you feel awkward while giving negative feedback to your subordinates, it’s probably because you believe the root cause of their mistake is an inadequacy of yours.
Unless you demonstrate to your subordinates that you are competent and trustworthy and have their best interests at heart, they won’t perceive your feedback as helpful, no matter how well you give it to them.
If you spot any signs of paralysis, lack of confidence, or other negative responses, make your feedback smaller, more specific, and in general, provide a small, clear, explicit first step for them to take that they feel they can take.
How good is a soccer coach who never attends his team’s games and training sessions, only meets the players in his office, and only evaluates their performance by looking at their report cards? He would be a terrible soccer coach. And yet, that’s how too many managers do their job.
The more you reward efforts without results, the more your people will focus on efforting rather than achieving.
Every time your actions demonstrate you are a fair, helpful, and effective manager, you build trust. And every time you waste your subordinates’ time, effort, or proactiveness, you break trust.
Meetings are not inherently wasteful; it’s that their attendees are not good at meetings. It’s your job as a manager to teach your subordinates how to be effective participants in meetings. You must coach your people.
Keep high standards for online meetings. They can and should be engaging and effective.
Personal judgment cannot be taught with procedures and trainings, because it is what happens outside of procedures and trainings.
During one-on-ones, spend at least 3 minutes discussing something more long-term: career growth, skill growth, sources of fatigue and frustration, etc.