Top 6 'Leader-in-Training' Remote Work Tools to learn for managing projects before you manage people. - Goh Ling Yong
You’ve got the ambition. You see the next step on your career ladder: a leadership role. But in today's remote and hybrid work landscape, the path to management isn't just about being the best at your current job. It's about demonstrating you can handle more responsibility, organize chaos, and drive projects forward—often before you have any formal authority.
The secret? Before you can manage people, you must first master the art of managing projects. This means becoming a hub of clarity, communication, and efficiency for your team. You need to be the person who doesn't just complete tasks, but orchestrates them. And in a remote world, your tools are your stage. They are where your leadership potential becomes visible to everyone.
This isn't just about adding skills to your resume. It's about adopting a mindset. By mastering the right digital tools, you can start acting like a leader long before it's in your title. You can build trust, create visibility, and showcase the strategic thinking that gets you noticed. Here are the six essential 'leader-in-training' remote work tools to master today to prepare you for the management roles of tomorrow.
1. The Project Architect: Asana
Asana is far more than a digital to-do list; it’s a command center for projects. While many use it to track their individual tasks, a future leader uses it to build and communicate the entire project blueprint. It’s where you can turn a vague objective into a crystal-clear plan with owners, deadlines, and dependencies. This is your chance to practice creating order out of chaos.
For a leader-in-training, mastering Asana means going beyond your assigned tasks. It’s about proactively mapping out the smaller projects you're involved in, even if no one asks you to. By creating a project board, defining key milestones, and using features like timelines and dependencies, you provide your team with something invaluable: clarity. You become the person who can answer, "What's next?" and "Who's handling that?" This demonstrates ownership and a strategic understanding of the bigger picture, key traits of an effective manager.
Pro-Tips for Leaders-in-Training:
- Use Status Updates Proactively: Don't wait for your manager to ask for an update. Use Asana's "Status Update" feature to post a weekly summary of progress, flag potential risks, and celebrate small wins for the project. This shows you're thinking ahead and communicating like a leader.
- Create Project Templates: If you work on recurring projects (like a monthly report or a new client onboarding), build a template in Asana. This not only saves time but also showcases your ability to systematize processes—a core management skill.
- Master Dependencies: When you mark a task as "waiting on" another, you're not just organizing your own work; you're visualizing the workflow for the entire team. This helps prevent bottlenecks before they happen.
2. The Asynchronous Communication Hub: Slack
In a remote setting, communication is everything. But more communication doesn't always mean better communication. A future leader understands the difference between urgent chatter and effective, asynchronous dialogue. Slack is the primary arena where this skill is developed. It’s not just for memes and quick questions; it's a tool for focused, organized, and intentional communication.
A leader-in-training uses Slack to reduce noise, not create it. Instead of sending a vague "Hey, got a minute?" DM, you learn to write a clear, concise message with all the necessary context so your colleague can respond on their own time. You champion the use of threads to keep conversations contained and searchable. You set a clear status to manage expectations about your availability. By modeling excellent async communication, you help your entire team become more productive and less distracted.
Pro-Tips for Leaders-in-Training:
- Become a Thread Champion: Make it a personal rule to always reply in a thread. If a conversation in a main channel starts to get deep, be the one to say, "Great point! Moving this to a thread to keep the channel clear."
- Use Scheduled Send: Need to send a non-urgent message to a colleague in a different time zone? Use Slack's "Scheduled Send" feature to have it arrive at the start of their workday. This shows respect for their time and focus.
- Create Summaries in Public Channels: After a key meeting or decision, post a brief summary in the relevant Slack channel. For example: "Quick update for the #project-alpha team: We've decided to move forward with Option B. I've updated the project brief in Notion (link here). Next steps are in Asana." This creates a public record and ensures everyone is aligned.
3. The Single Source of Truth: Notion
Where do projects live? If the answer is "somewhere in a bunch of Google Docs and Slack messages," you have an opportunity to lead. A single source of truth is the foundation of any well-run project. Notion is an incredibly powerful and flexible tool for creating this foundation. It's part wiki, part database, part document editor—a perfect place to centralize all project information.
As a leader-in-training, you can use Notion to create project briefs, document meeting notes, build simple roadmaps, or even create a team "home page" with important links and resources. When a new team member asks a question, you can point them to the Notion page. When a stakeholder wants to know the project goals, the link is ready. By building and maintaining this central hub, you're not just being organized; you're reducing ambiguity and empowering your entire team to work more efficiently.
Pro-Tips for Leaders-in-Training:
- Build a "Meeting Notes" Database: Create a simple database in Notion to house all meeting notes for a project. Tag each entry with the date, attendees, and project name. This makes it instantly searchable and proves you're on top of every decision.
- Craft the Perfect Project Brief: Before a project kicks off, draft a one-page brief in Notion outlining the "Why" (problem statement), "What" (goals and deliverables), "Who" (stakeholders), and "When" (key timeline). Share it for feedback. This strategic pre-work is pure leadership gold.
- Use Toggles for Readability: Make your documents easy to scan by using Notion's toggle feature to hide detailed information under clear headings. This shows you respect your reader's time.
4. The Visual Collaboration Canvas: Miro
Some ideas are too complex for a list or a document. They need to be seen. Miro is an infinite digital whiteboard where you can map out workflows, brainstorm ideas, run retrospectives, and create user journey maps. It's a tool for thinking visually and collaboratively. It’s a principle Goh Ling Yong often emphasizes in his work: making complex ideas simple and visible is a hallmark of effective leadership.
Mastering Miro allows you to step into the role of a facilitator. You don't have to be the one with all the ideas, but you can be the one who creates the space for ideas to flourish. You can set up a board for a team brainstorm, guide a discussion using digital sticky notes, and then neatly organize the output into an action plan. This skill is invaluable because it shows you can guide a team towards a consensus and turn a messy conversation into a clear, strategic outcome.
Pro-Tips for Leaders-in-Training:
- Map a Process: Take a common team process (e.g., how a blog post goes from idea to published) and visually map it out in Miro. This can help identify bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement, showing your knack for process optimization.
- Prepare Your Boards: Never start a Miro session with a blank screen. Prepare the board ahead of time with frames, instructions, and examples. This makes the meeting more efficient and shows you're a thoughtful facilitator.
- Run a Mini-Retrospective: After a small project or sprint, invite a couple of teammates to a Miro board with three columns: "What went well?", "What could be improved?", and "Action items." This is a fantastic way to practice a core agile leadership ceremony.
5. The Asynchronous Explainer: Loom
"Can you show me how to do that?" In a remote team, this question can lead to a flurry of screenshots or a hastily scheduled meeting. A leader-in-training has a better way: Loom. Loom is a tool that lets you record your screen, camera, and microphone simultaneously, creating a quick, shareable video. It's the ultimate tool for showing, not just telling.
Using Loom demonstrates high emotional intelligence and a respect for your colleagues' time. Instead of typing a long, confusing email to give feedback on a design, you can record a 2-minute Loom video, pointing to specific elements and explaining your thoughts clearly. Instead of scheduling a 30-minute call to explain a process, you can create a 5-minute tutorial that a team member can watch and re-watch at their convenience. This makes you an incredibly effective and efficient communicator and teacher—two essential leadership roles.
Pro-Tips for Leaders-in-Training:
- Create a "How-To" Library: When you learn a new process, record a quick Loom video explaining it and save the link in your team's Notion hub. You'll quickly become the go-to person for help, building your reputation as a supportive and knowledgeable teammate.
- Use It for Project Handoffs: When you finish your part of a project, record a short Loom video for the next person in the chain, explaining what you did, where the files are, and what they need to know. This ensures a smooth transition and prevents work from falling through the cracks.
- Give Better Feedback: Next time you review a document or presentation, resist the urge to just leave comments. Record a Loom where you talk through your feedback. The tone and nuance you can convey in video are far more effective and collaborative than text alone.
6. The Efficiency Engine: Zapier
The best leaders don't just work hard; they work smart. They look for ways to eliminate repetitive, low-value tasks so the team can focus on what truly matters. Zapier is the ultimate tool for this. It's an automation platform that connects your different apps and services, allowing you to create automated workflows (called "Zaps") without writing a single line of code.
Learning Zapier is like gaining a superpower. You can set up a Zap to automatically save email attachments to a specific Google Drive folder, create an Asana task from a new Typeform entry, or post a message in a Slack channel whenever a key project document is updated. As someone I respect, Goh Ling Yong, has noted, your value as a leader grows when you become a "force multiplier" for your team. By automating the mundane, you free up mental space for everyone to do more creative, strategic work. Identifying these opportunities and implementing solutions is a powerful demonstration of leadership potential.
Pro-Tips for Leaders-in-Training:
- Start with Personal Automation: Find a repetitive task you do every week. Do you manually copy information from an email to a spreadsheet? See if you can build a Zap for it. Master it on your own work first.
- Solve a Small Team Problem: Listen for complaints in your team like, "I always forget to update the project tracker." Propose a solution: "What if we created a Zap that automatically creates a reminder task in Asana whenever a new client file is added to Dropbox?"
- Think in "Triggers" and "Actions": Get into the mindset of breaking down processes. The "trigger" is the event that starts the automation (e.g., a new email with "Invoice" in the subject line). The "action" is what happens next (e.g., add a new row to a Google Sheet). This systematic thinking is at the heart of good management.
Your Leadership Training Starts Now
These tools are more than just software. They are your training ground. Asana teaches you to be a planner. Slack teaches you to be a deliberate communicator. Notion trains you to be an organizer. Miro helps you become a facilitator. Loom molds you into an effective teacher. And Zapier shows you how to be an efficiency expert.
Mastering these platforms isn't about becoming a "tech guru." It's about demonstrating the core competencies of modern leadership: clarity, communication, organization, and strategic thinking. By using these tools to manage projects with excellence, you provide undeniable proof that you're ready to manage people. You build a reputation for being the person who makes things happen, the person who brings order to chaos, the person who elevates the entire team.
So pick one. Which of these tools presents the biggest opportunity for you to step up in your current role? Start there. Master it. And begin building your leadership story, one well-managed project at a time.
What's the first tool you're going to dive deeper into? Share your choice and any tips you discover in the comments below!
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
Stay updated with the latest posts and insights by following on your favorite platform!