The art of managing remote teams
Leadership · Distributed teams/
Seven years leading commercial teams across eight European markets, and what distance actually does to delivery.
I spent seven years building an international business division where the teams were scattered across eight locations, and where I managed a team of account managers in Dublin without ever sharing an office with them. At the time it felt like an edge case. It’s now simply how a lot of commercial organisations are built.
What follows isn’t about wellbeing, and it isn’t about whether people should be in the office. It’s about something narrower and more measurable: what distance does to delivery, and what a manager has to do differently so the commercial rhythm survives it.
Eight things that decide whether distance costs you delivery
Every one of them cost me something to learn.
01
Start by understanding what it’s like to be managed remotely
I’ve felt the downsides myself. Not hearing half the conversation because everyone else is in the actual meeting room. Realising you don’t get the same information your onsite colleagues do, because your manager is more comfortable sharing face to face. Finding it hard to reach your manager at all, because she’s permanently marked as busy, while the people who sit near her know exactly when to catch her in the corridor.
Having the empathy to understand that experience is what lets you adjust your behaviour, structure the process and build something inclusive. Without it, you’ll design for the people you can see.
02
Decide, consciously, that you manage a dispersed team
Trying to fit remote people into an onsite rhythm doesn’t work. Meetings have to be designed so everyone’s in the same format. Events have to be planned around dates people can actually travel on. Expectations have to be explicit enough that neither you nor they lie awake wondering about performance.
The first step to leading a dispersed team well is admitting that’s what you’re doing, and then designing for it rather than apologising for it.
03
Understand personality and cultural differences, and ask clarifying questions
Danish is my first language. I’m comfortable in English, but there are still phrases I translate directly without noticing. I had a manager who would stop and ask me to rephrase, and then coach me on saying it in a way a native speaker would actually understand. I’ve admired that ever since. Asking a clarifying question before concluding is one of the most underrated management skills there is.
The same applies commercially. Selling in France isn’t selling in Italy or Spain. I hired people to be local experts, so I try to ask for market input before I propose an approach rather than after.
04
Availability carries more weight than you think
Some weeks are simply busier than others. People in the same office can see you’re stretched, and they can still grab five minutes. Remote colleagues can’t. If you haven’t planned how to be reachable, you won’t look busy to them. You’ll look absent.
The best remote managers I know over-communicate precisely when they’ve got least time. A short note warning the team about a heavy fortnight costs nothing. So does a standing slot for quick questions, and being clear about what counts as urgent and how to reach you when it is.
05
Give everyone access to information at the same time
I once had a manager who was an excellent professional and a genuine partner to me, and I still heard about organisational changes from people in his office before I heard them from him. He was good at sharing over a coffee and less good at sharing over a call. I understand why. But being the last to know is one of the biggest reasons remote people disengage.
Sharing evenly is a decision you have to make on purpose. It won’t happen by default, because the default favours whoever’s physically nearest.
06
Community and belonging still work, they just need a different design
Pair people across locations on the same piece of work. Push collaboration across markets rather than within them. Reach out to the people furthest away more often than feels necessary.
The harder problem is the informal conversation, the one that happens near the coffee machine. Every well-functioning dispersed team I’ve seen solved it the same way: they deliberately chose a separate, lighter channel for the informal stuff, so it didn’t have to compete with work. The drivers of a strong team are identical whether it’s local or spread out. Only the design changes.
07
Make the meeting work for the people who aren’t in the room
If the technology is unreliable, nothing else you do will matter. People dial in late, microphones miss the questions from the floor, and anyone remote gives up on getting a word in while the room talks over itself.
If the equipment in the room isn’t good enough, have everyone join individually instead. An even playing field beats a good room every time. For larger sessions, use video, give speakers proper microphones, repeat audience questions so they carry, and give one person in the room the explicit job of watching the chat and speaking up on behalf of everyone who isn’t there.
08
Prioritise bringing people together anyway
Technology does a great deal and it doesn’t do everything. I ran a quarterly offsite in every team I led. Where only a few people were remote, I made sure they got one full day of meetings with colleagues and a second day for the team itself.
This isn’t complicated. It’s just the thing that gets cut first when the quarter is tight, and it’s usually the wrong thing to cut.
Some of this is a hiring problem, not a management problem
Openness, independence and a high degree of self-sufficiency matter more at distance, and so does plain written communication. But hiring well is your job regardless of where people sit, so I’ve deliberately not gone deeper here. What interests me more is what I can do differently once the team is in place.
Why this sits on leapforward.dk
Hybrid and distributed work is the subject of my other site, hybridledelse.dk, and that’s where I go into the ways of working themselves. This piece sits here because the question it answers is a commercial one: whether the work still gets delivered when the team is spread out. There’s a Danish version of this article too.
First published on leapforward.dk on 22 January 2020. Rewritten in September 2026: the substance is unchanged, the technology references and the framing are not.
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