The Pandemic Proved That Remote Leadership Works

It’s now been five years since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and the sudden upending of the way workplaces functioned around the world. In reflecting on this anniversary, there’s one under-the-radar innovation that emerged from the crisis that I believe has the potential to benefit organizations for years to come—but only if we’re thoughtful about how to maintain it. That innovation is the idea that we can now hire the best leaders from anywhere in the world and allow them to work remotely, not tethered to the home office or near most of their employees.

To be clear, since the pandemic began there have been ongoing discussions about the relative merits of remote and hybrid work and return-to-office policies. But these debates have largely focused on employees, without considering the implications of remotely based leaders and how they might need to work differently as they supervise performance and build culture from a distance. The challenges are real, but so are the benefits—which I’ve seen in my work as a leadership advisor to an array of firms.

For example, the new leader of a corporate function recently asked me to work with her team to develop a new strategy for supporting the business. We were organizing a big in-person work session with the team. Since the company is based in New York, I assumed that most of the leaders she managed would live in or near the city and suggested that’s where we should hold the meeting. She disagreed, thinking that maybe it would be better to find a more central location so that no one would need to travel too far. When I expressed some confusion, she went on to explain that while she worked out of New York, the leaders she managed lived in San Francisco, Scotland, Florida, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, and London. Her predecessor had focused on getting the best people with the most experience for the various roles, and didn’t require that anyone live near the corporate center. I heard from her and from other members of her team that they felt that the function was stronger for this choice.

This discussion made me realize that geographically dispersed leadership teams are common enough now that they don’t raise eyebrows. Indeed, many of the senior business or functional leaders in my client organizations don’t live near their corporate centers, or their teams, while pre-Covid, senior leaders who lived far from the corporate or regional business office were the exceptions rather than the rule. That change was swift, according to Tory Clarke, co-founder of Bridge Partners, an executive search firm in New York City: “Prior to March 2019, approximately 1 in 10 leadership searches that [we] undertook allowed for the incoming executive to be based outside the home office region. Today [in 2021], that data is flipped—it’s probably only 2 in 10 leadership searches that require a specific location.” Broader geographical searches for executives have continued even in the return-to-office era; the resulting expansion of the talent pool has been named one of the executive search trends of 2025 by JRG Partners, a leading recruiter of top talent.

The Benefits

For many years, organizations assumed that managers or executives needed to be located near their teams or leadership peers to provide supervision, coordinate processes, solve immediate problems, and be accessible for meetings. By definition, this limited the pool of potential applicants to people who already lived in these locations or were willing to move. (And as one of my senior clients recently told me, if his company had insisted that he move to the corporate headquarters, he wouldn’t have taken the job.)

The pandemic challenged this assumption. Leaders were still able to be effective without being in physical proximity to their teams or colleagues on a regular basis. In fact, research from 2023 showed that workers who were not physically near their supervisors were 15% more connected to company values and their direct managers than workers who were.

With geography no longer a limitation, organizations can look almost anywhere to find the best leaders for the job, broadening the applicant pool significantly. And recruiters can approach talented people who otherwise might turn down an opportunity that requires relocation—critical for star leaders who may have excellent alternatives.

This shift is also hugely beneficial to leaders themselves as they manage their careers and lives. As the head of a retained executive search firm noted, many executives “no longer want to move for work,” but rather prefer to maintain roots in a community and avoid disrupting their families. Perhaps that is why recent surveys have shown that 68% of “bosses” (middle managers, functional leaders, executives) would like to continue working remotely.

The Pushback

Despite the benefits of remote leadership, there are still plenty of objections. For one, managing employees from a distance—without being physically present—requires leadership skills that are difficult, don’t come naturally, and often aren’t taught in business schools or corporate universities. For example, leaders who manage remotely need to find different ways of building a cohesive culture, bonding with their people, managing social isolation and mental health, and making sure that processes are coordinated across groups. None of this is easy, which may explain why 70% of managers in one survey last year said that it’s easier to supervise employees in person.

Remotely based leaders can also become invisible to their people and to key stakeholders they need to influence, falling victim to the “out of sight, out of mind” syndrome. No matter how good they are at their jobs, they may not be asked to participate in key task forces or be considered for new assignments. So in many cases, it’s just easier for leaders to go back to the way it was.

The biggest constraint to remotely based managers, however, is the general perception that allowing people work remotely is bad for culture, morale, and productivity. In this context, many of the CEOs who I spoke with over the past year felt that people working remotely were not sufficiently productive, or didn’t understand the fundamental values of their company, or hadn’t built relationships with other areas of the firm that they needed to interact with. Almost all of these cultural worries seem to center around the workforce, and not the leaders, and many have been refuted in research. Still it’s hard to tell workers to come back to the office and exempt their bosses (though that seems to be happening too). Thus, the kneejerk reaction, in many cases, has been to mandate that all employees—including leaders—limit their remote work and return to the office, at least for two or three days per week, if not full time. This has been the approach taken by three quarters of large U.S. organizations.

Good Remote Leadership

Although our collective experience is still somewhat limited, let me suggest several ways in which remote management needs to be different if it’s really going to work.

More conscious planning and use of time

First, and perhaps most obvious, is that managing remotely requires much more travel, which may cancel out some of the stay-at-home or flexibility benefits of being remote. But it is necessary for making your leadership visible.

In the client organizations that I’ve been working with over the past couple of years, remote leaders have not only been making appearances in the office (on some of the days that employees need to be there) but also traveling to offsite planning sessions with other senior leaders, periodic group meetings and conferences for larger groups of employees, client meetings, professional conferences, and more. Each of these trips requires not only time, but pre-planning to connect with the right people and have the right agendas. In other words, managing from a remote location takes real work, planning and thinking—more perhaps than just coming to an office on a regular basis.

One of my clients, who lives on the east coast but manages large concentrations of people in several other locations, told me he is very deliberate with his travel planning, arranging meetings and even unstructured time in advance. He organizes a town hall at each site each quarter so he and other leaders can share information with each other and have unscripted time with their teams. He has also shaped the team so that he has strong business and HR leaders at each site to help him consult with them ahead of a visit about how to best leverage his time.

Monitoring performance through technology and greater structure

Without immediate visual cues and interaction, leaders need to rely more on technology-generated reports and pre-scheduled virtual meetings to monitor employees’ performance and output—without the efforts backfiring.

One senior leader I work with holds a weekly Monday morning virtual meeting with his direct reports, who are located around the world. They go around the “room” quickly with each person giving an update on key performance goals and any issues that need attention. It’s a major time commitment every week but it means the team won’t get out of sync with each other.

Listening and creating connections

The third way that remote managing differs is that it may require a more intense and targeted effort to really understand what each team member and colleague needs and how to help them be successful. Direct contact with teams and colleagues on a day-to-day basis gives leaders a reasonably good understanding of people’s motivations, career ambitions, strengths, weaknesses, and the interpersonal dynamics between them. In a remote setting, this contact becomes virtual and less frequent and these signals diminish.

To combat this, leaders need to intentionally and consciously talk to their people, listen to them, and devise ways to help them succeed. Be proactive about reaching out if you have even a minor question or concern, don’t cancel your one-on-one meetings, and take advantage of moments just before a virtual meeting begins or after it ends to foster connection and hear what’s going on. Most importantly, don’t limit the interaction to work issues. Be deliberate about finding out what’s happening in their community or in their lives.

This kind of intensive listening, however, doesn’t come naturally to everyone, and may be quite difficult for some managers. But without it, managing remotely may not work.

For example, at Nationwide Insurance, where 90% of employees either work remotely or have a hybrid schedule, leaders are trained in storytelling to convey the culture and values. They also are encouraged to ask their team members not just about their work experience but also their full life experience, which can be harder to grasp when people are working away from the office. Similarly, at Edward Jones, a financial advisory firm where the majority of employees work remotely, leaders are asked to focus on building relationships with their people, even when the interactions are mostly virtual. As their head of HR notes, “It really is about listening, deeply understanding and ensuring that we are able to meet their needs where we can.”

The pandemic experience taught us that leaders can be recruited from anywhere, and do not necessarily need to be located at a corporate or business center. If we’re going to take advantage of this broader pool of leadership talent, however, we have to recognize that remote management requires different skills and disciplines. And unless we develop those remote leadership skills, it will be easy to lose the opportunity.

Copyright 2025 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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