The Worst Assumption You Can Make

With a remote team, you can’t just cast an eye over the office and see how things are going. We get visual (and sometimes verbal) cues that things are progressing nicely. Or not. But when you work apart from the members of your team you are running on a mix of trust and assumptions. Trust, of course, is good. Assumptions are necessary to function, but there’s one assumption in particular that you need to watch out for: The notion that everyone thinks what you think and works the way you work.
Assuming everyone thinks like we do is not only natural, it’s encouraged. We are taught from a young age the Golden Rule—“Do unto others the way you want them to do unto you,” or some variation on that theme. The idea itself isn’t bad. It’s the ethical core of nearly every major religion and spiritual practice. The problem is that