University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
How to Win Friends and Manage Remotely
Book

How to Win Friends and Manage Remotely

McKenna Sweazey
Career Press, 2022
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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Well Structured
  • Overview
  • Engaging

Recommendation

Dale Carnegie wrote the classic self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People nearly 100 years ago. Here, McKenna Sweazey updates it and adds information to address today’s management concerns. She recognizes that supervising and relating to employees in distant locations is one of the biggest challenges managers face today. Leaders have various tools for effective virtual management, but as Sweazey reports, maintaining relationships as a remote manager demands empathy. She provides insight and advice on many issues that challenge long-distance managers, including how to make teammates feel enthusiastic about working together even if they never see one another face-to-face. 

Summary

Empathy makes you a better manager, especially for remote teams.

Managers must engage their remote team members and get them to cooperate positively with one another even though they may never meet.

A rank or two up the ladder, executives want to increase the involvement of their best managers – including those with remote teams – encourage them, coach them remotely and make sure they don’t quit.

Remote work undercuts personal connections, but it does have benefits.

One risk of remote work is that people you spend a lot of time with can lose their humanity and become two-dimensional images on a screen.While this personal distancing is a difficult side effect, employees appreciate remote work’s flexibility. Remote workers feel they can concentrate on their work while achieving a better work-life balance.

One result of remote work is that team communication, which once relied on the in-person nuances of body language, facial expression, eye contact and tone of voice, now operates in a whole new arena.

Virtual management requires understanding how empathy works.

Leaders have technological tools that ...

About the Author

McKenna Sweazey, a marketing strategy consultant for US and UK brands, is also a remote- and hybrid-management coach and writer. The former head of global marketing at the Financial Times, she also has experience with successful start-ups, including Taboola.

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