Redefining Leadership in a Remote World

There was a time when leadership was largely a physical experience. A manager walked into the office, greeted the team, looked around, asked a few questions and somehow knew what was happening. You could tell who was having a difficult day, who was overloaded, who was disengaged and, occasionally, who was simply trying to look busy. A conversation over a cup of coffee could solve a problem before it ever appeared in a management report.

Then came remote working, accelerated dramatically by the pandemic, and suddenly the traditional definition of leadership was challenged. People were working from bedrooms, dining tables, home offices and different cities. Meetings moved to screens. Informal conversations became messages. The manager could no longer simply walk over to someone’s desk and ask, “How are things going?”

And this raises an interesting question: Can you really lead your team at a distance?

My answer would be yes—but only if we are prepared to redefine what leadership actually means.

The first thing that remote working has challenged is our obsession with visibility. In traditional offices, we often confused being present with being productive. Someone sitting at their desk from 9 in the morning until 7 in the evening was perceived as committed. Someone leaving at 5 was sometimes perceived as less committed. But remote working has exposed the weakness in that assumption. A person can spend ten hours online and achieve very little, while another person can work with remarkable focus for six hours and deliver something that makes a significant difference to the organisation.

Microsoft, for example, has publicly discussed the enormous growth in digital communication and meetings through Microsoft Teams during the shift towards hybrid work. The interesting lesson was not simply that people could work remotely. It was that organisations had to rethink how collaboration, productivity and employee experience were measured. The screen could tell us whether someone was online; it could not tell us whether they were creating value.

This is where leadership has to move from monitoring activity to managing outcomes.

Imagine two managers. The first starts the morning by checking who has logged in, who is available on Teams and who has responded to messages. Throughout the day, he sends reminders and asks for status updates. At the end of the day, he feels that he has managed his team because he has remained connected with everyone.

The second manager begins differently. She tells her team what needs to be achieved, explains why it matters, agrees on deadlines and makes herself available when someone needs support. She does not need to know whether someone is sitting at their desk at 10:15 or taking a break at 3:30. At the end of the week, she looks at what has actually been delivered.

Which of the two is really leading?

I would argue that the second manager is.

But this does not mean that remote leadership is about simply giving people freedom and saying, “I trust you.” Trust without clarity can quickly become confusion. People need to know what is expected from them, what they own, what decisions they can make and when they need to involve others.

The challenge, therefore, is not choosing between trust and accountability. Good leadership requires both. Hybrid working makes this even more interesting because it introduces another problem—the danger of creating two classes of employees.

Consider a senior management team having an informal discussion in the office over coffee. A decision is gradually shaped during that conversation. The people sitting around the table understand the thinking behind the decision, while three colleagues working remotely receive the final decision later by email.

Nobody deliberately excluded them but they were excluded from the conversation.

This is one of the hidden dangers of hybrid organisations. Some of the most important organisational communication does not happen in formal meetings. It happens before the meeting, after the meeting, in corridors, over lunch and during those five-minute conversations that nobody puts into the calendar.

A good hybrid leader therefore has to ask a slightly uncomfortable question: If I were working remotely today, would I have access to the same information, opportunities and leadership attention as the person sitting in the office?

If the answer is no, the organisation has a hybrid problem.

The same issue applies to career development. A young employee sitting in the office may naturally get more exposure to senior people. They may hear conversations, observe how decisions are made and get an opportunity to participate in an unexpected discussion. Someone working remotely may complete exactly the same job but miss these informal learning opportunities.

This is particularly important for younger employees. Organisations sometimes assume that because a person is digitally connected, they are also professionally connected. They are not necessarily the same thing.

I remember the early stages of my own professional career when some of the most valuable lessons came not from formal training programmes but from watching experienced colleagues deal with difficult customers, demanding bosses, difficult employees and unexpected situations. You cannot always learn those things from a PowerPoint presentation.

This is why mentorship, coaching and regular one-to-one conversations become even more important in a hybrid workplace.

There is another issue that deserves attention: meetings.

Remote working has created an entirely new phenomenon—the meeting that could have been an email. We now have calendars filled with video calls, followed by another video call to discuss what was decided in the previous video call. People spend hours looking at small boxes on a screen and then complain that they don’t have enough time to complete their actual work.

Technology has made communication easier, but it has not necessarily made communication better.

One of the most important disciplines of hybrid leadership may therefore be knowing when not to call a meeting.

A simple message may be enough for an update. A short one-to-one may be better for a sensitive issue. A face-to-face meeting may be essential for an important strategic discussion. The leader’s job is not to maximise communication rather It is to make communication effective.

And then comes the biggest question of all: What happens to organisational culture when people are no longer physically together?

This is where companies such as Airbnb offer an interesting example. Airbnb made remote and flexible working a significant part of its employee proposition, while simultaneously trying to preserve opportunities for people to come together physically. The underlying message was important: remote work does not necessarily mean that physical interaction becomes irrelevant. People still need relationships, collaboration and shared experiences.

This is perhaps the future of hybrid work—not choosing between the office and the home, but understanding what each environment is good for.

The office can be valuable for collaboration, mentoring, relationship building, creativity and organisational connection. Remote work can provide flexibility, concentration and autonomy. The mistake is expecting one environment to deliver everything.

The leader therefore becomes something more than a supervisor.

The traditional manager often asked, “Are you doing your job?”

The modern leader needs to ask, “Do you have what you need to do your job well?”

That is a significant shift. It moves leadership away from supervision and towards enablement.

A good leader in a hybrid environment provides clarity, removes obstacles, develops people, creates accountability and makes sure that nobody becomes invisible simply because they are not physically present and perhaps remote working has given us an unexpected lesson about leadership.

If your people only perform when you are watching them, you may have a management problem.

If your culture only exists when everyone is sitting in the same building, you may have a culture problem.

And if your employees are afraid to make decisions unless their manager is physically nearby, you may have a leadership problem.

Remote and hybrid working have not made leadership less important, In many ways, they have made leadership more important because when you cannot rely on physical presence, you have to rely on something much more powerful—clarity, trust, communication and relationships.

Ultimately, leadership has never really been about sitting in the same room.

It has always been about getting people to believe in a common purpose, giving them the confidence to perform, helping them grow and creating an environment where they want to contribute whether your team is sitting across the table from you or sitting 500 kilometres away, the fundamental question remains the same:

Do your people know where they are going, do they trust you to lead them there, and do they feel that you are walking the journey with them?

Perhaps that is the real test of remote and hybrid leadership.

Not “Can I see my people?”

But “Can my people see the leadership in me?”