Remote Leadership
How to Accelerate Achievement and Create a Community in a Work-from-Home World
Remote Leadership is a timely business guide that suggests means of fostering strong organizations, even when employees work from home.
David Pachter’s business book Remote Leadership explores strategies for building cultures and connections in the work-from-home era.
Pachter’s recommendations are built on three pillars: reflective leadership, coaching mindsets and cultures, and peer learning. He calls all three essential components in creating and sustaining robust remote business enterprises, and he defines his terms clearly: a reflective leader is someone who is self-aware and conscious of their weaknesses, for example, who reviews the past, learns from it, and works to improve; and an organization that adopts a coaching mindset and culture empowers and mentors its employees. In turn, peer learning is forwarded as a means for an organization to foster trust and connection between its employees, even when they’re not working in the same space.
Pachter’s anecdotes are used to support his suggestions, as with a counseling session following Pachter’s wife’s admission to hospice, which becomes a lesson in self-reflection; and his choice to abandon his work responsibilities to go skiing with friends in his twenties, which becomes a lesson in determination and focus. And Pachter’s business practices, like creating intimacy by sharing personal and difficult experiences in virtual meetings, also amplify his points. Also covered are the means by which other companies have handled remote working, such as their ways of aligning the employee goals with their organizational visions.
Pachter likens business leaders to team coaches. It’s an engaging comparison that helps to show how practical his suggestions are. The book also considers different organization types in terms of the particular challenges each may face, noting that companies with employees numbering over one hundred have to find different means of building trust without face-to-face interactions. It also makes projections about the obstacles that companies whose full- or part-time employees work from home will face in the future.
Lists, such as one summarizing the factors that changed following the work-from-home boom, amplify the book’s points, pulling forth and highlighting its most important messages. And the text helpfully italicizes its key terms, including accountability, acquired wisdom, and autonomy. Ideas for cultivating reflective leadership and becoming an organizational coach are also separated from the text proper for clarity, while Pachter’s proposed action plans are organized in step-by-step stages that are easy to follow.
Still, there’s some repetition involved: the attributes of a reflective leader are covered more than once, as are qualities such as accountability and the role of coaching. More effective are Pachter’s recorded conversations with business leaders who have been successful in handling leadership and work-from-home issues; they cover challenges like hiring staff, holding virtual meetings, and being attentive.
Remote Leadership is a timely business guide that suggests means of fostering strong organizations, even when employees work from home.
Reviewed by
Edith Wairimu
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
