McKenna Sweazey

September 2022

An accomplished global executive, both in corporates and start-ups and with a top-rated global MBA (INSEAD), McKenna Sweazey has had to hone her interpersonal relationship skills over Skype, Google Hangouts, Slack, good old-fashioned phone lines, and now Zoom. Her career has spanned successful start-ups, like Taboola where she spent five years and which is set to IPO in 2021. She also worked at the venerated Financial Times as head of global marketing. Currently she is the VP of marketing at an early-stage start-up..

A modern approach based on classic management styles for working and managing people remotely.

How do you manage a poor performer over Zoom? How do you casually deliver positive feedback via Slack? What’s the most professional use of a gif?

Management was hard enough pre-pandemic, and now, the difficulty in getting things done has dramatically increased. In face-to-face interactions, humans have thousands of indicators to tell them what the other party is thinking and how they are reacting. Resorting to purely digital communication obliterates these clues, stopping us from reading the subtle body language we’ve evolved to use in all interactions to become better leaders, kinder managers, and more effective cogs in the corporate machine.

How to Win Friends and Manage Remotely shares real-life examples, scientifically proven ideas, and distillations of tried-and-true business tenets—all mapped to a new virtual-first office. This book is a handbook—a step-by-step guide to common interactions in the workplace, using eight classic management examples: from digitizing your onboarding journey to helping new recruits to deliver useful feedback over video conference. Combining academic research and personal experiences across various companies, roles, and countries, this is a roadmap to get readers through the WFH (work from home) quagmire and help us all be more cognizant of others’ perspectives in this brave new world.