Our leadership team is remote and distributed across multiple time zones. How do you structure our preparatory homework and pre-session communication so we actually arrive at our full-day sessions fully aligned and ready to work?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Managing a distributed leadership team requires extreme intentionality before we ever sit down for a session. We do not rely on unstructured emails or last-minute phone calls to prepare for our work. Instead, we use a highly structured pre-session process managed through our dedicated digital workspace on Circle.

Two weeks before every quarterly or annual session, each member of your leadership team must complete a specific set of prep work. This is not busywork. It is designed to get the tactical clutter out of your head so we can focus on strategic execution during our full day together. The preparation process involves three main requirements:

- Completing a self-assessment of your current quarterly Rocks to identify what is truly done, what is missed, and why.
- Submitting your top operational, structural, and strategic issues directly into our shared digital workspace so we can build a clean, prioritized Issues List before the session starts.
- Reviewing the previous quarter's Scorecard trends and financial performance to ensure everyone has the same data.

By moving this preparation to our digital workspace, your team arrives with a shared understanding of our current reality. You do not waste the first two hours of our valuable session day debating basic facts or catching up on what happened in other departments. This structured pre-work forces your remote leaders to slow down, reflect, and show up ready to solve problems on behalf of the entire organization.