The best way to manage people is to not manage them at all

 “Compassionate people ask for what they need. They say no when they need to, and when they say yes, they mean it. They’re compassionate because their boundaries keep them out of resentment.”
  ~ Brené Brown


By @Sofiaqt in Techstars via Mattermark Daily

One of the wonderful things about building a remote company is that you have to learn to reject the urge to control people. Instead, you have to build real trust — trust that can be tested everyday and not break. 

…a team members called Juan types in your internal chat:
“guys I’m going to take a nap and come back later, I didn’t sleep well and have a headache.”
In a typical business setting there would be some sort of freak out, some peers would get offended by Juan somehow being lazy and not pushing through the day, others will keep tabs for the next 1:1 session with Juan, and in other companies Juan would get fired immediately.
Why do we want Juan to be tired at work? Make a bunch of mistakes and have a bad day? Wouldn’t it be easier for Juan to go, take that nap and come back when he is ready?
Most importantly, the team needs to feel confident that Juan will come back at some point, do a superb job and continue doing his thing. 

Productivity for me is to be part of a team I don’t have to control, a team that does more in less time because they are not exhausted, a team that gets involved beyond their job description because they feel good about helping others. 

If your team is driven by learning, by freedom and by achieving a common goal, all you need to do is to provide the best environment for those things to happen. The rest is noise. 

If trust didn’t scale, we all would be dead by now. We need to trust each other to function as a society. In business, you build trust by doing small things well… 

Accountability is an agreement not an imposition. 

Good organizations know how to set boundaries without making people feel caged. Trust is built everyday, with small but frequent reactions and interaction.
It took me many burnouts and failures as a leader to finally understand that the best way to manage people is to not manage them at all.