LM-110
First Ninety Days as a Manager
Move from doing the work to leading it, with the conversations and structures that make the first three months count.
Beginner with Ilene Castorena
Leading Hybrid and Distributed Teams
Keep a team that sits in different rooms, cities and time zones working as one, without adding more meetings.
- Level
- Intermediate
- Duration
- 8 weeks
- Price
- $449
- Course code
- LM-240
Overview
Distributed teams rarely fail because people are lazy. They fail because decisions get made in rooms that half the team is not in, because context lives in someone's head instead of a document, and because the same two people always take the six in the morning call.
This course treats those as design problems with known fixes. Over eight weeks you audit how your team currently decides things, move the important decisions into writing, cut the meeting calendar back to what genuinely needs live time, and put working agreements into a document your team helps write.
It assumes you already manage people. If you are in your first year of managing, take First Ninety Days as a Manager first. The two courses are designed to run back to back across two cohorts.
Who this is for
- Managers of teams split across offices, homes or countries
- Leads whose team went hybrid and has not settled since
- Managers hiring in a second time zone for the first time
- Program leads coordinating people they do not line manage
Next Cohort
Applications open- Q4 2026Monday 5 October 2026
- Q1 2027Monday 11 January 2027
- Q2 2027Monday 12 April 2027
- Q3 2027Monday 5 July 2027
Applications for the Q4 2026 cohort close on Friday 18 September 2026. We reply to every application within two business days.
Ilene Castorena
Manager transitions and team performance
Every session ends with a sentence you have to say to a real person that week, and the next session starts with how it went.
Intermediate, assumes working experience. One live session of ninety minutes each week, plus about three hours applying it to your own work. Sixteen seats. Full details on how enrollment works.
Module plan
8 modules across 8 weeks.
Each module has one live session and one piece of practice applied to your own work.
- Week 1
Where Distributed Teams Actually Break
Running an honest audit of your team before adding any new ritual, and the four failure points that show up almost every time.
- Week 2
Written First Decision Making
Moving choices into short documents so that nobody needs to be in the room, and so the reasoning is still there in March.
- Week 3
Designing the Meeting Calendar
Deciding what deserves live time, what becomes a document, and what disappears entirely. Includes the recurring meeting you should cancel this week.
- Week 4
Trust Without Line of Sight
Measuring output honestly when you cannot see the work happening, and why activity tracking makes the underlying problem worse.
- Week 5
Inclusion Across Time Zones
Rotating the inconvenience, protecting the overlap hours you have, and making sure the quiet half of the team is heard on purpose rather than by luck.
- Week 6
Onboarding Someone You Will Not Meet
A ninety day plan for a hire in another country, including who they talk to in week one and how they find out what is normal here.
- Week 7
Conflict That Started in a Thread
Spotting the message thread that needs to become a call, making that call well, and repairing afterwards.
- Week 8
Your Team Operating Manual
Writing the working agreements document with your team, then agreeing when and how you will revisit it.
Outcomes
What you will be able to do.
By the last session of Leading Hybrid and Distributed Teams you will have practised each of these on your own work, not on a case study.
- Audit your team honestly and name the specific points where information stops moving
- Convert a recurring decision meeting into a written decision process
- Cut a team calendar without losing the coordination the meetings were doing
- Onboard a remote hire to useful contribution inside ninety days
- Distribute the cost of time zone overlap fairly across the whole team
- Produce a working agreements document your team recognizes and uses
Same field
Also in Leadership and Management
Courses for people who have just started leading, or who inherited a team that needs steadying.