What Makes a Good Remote Team Leader

The research is clear. The number one thing that motivates people at work is a good relationship with their boss. Number two is the atmosphere. As a remote team leader, you’re responsible for both. Especially if you don’t want to lose good specialists you’ve spent time and money training. Especially if you don’t want to hand them to your competitors.

And it’s the traits of a good remote team leader, soft skills included, that:

• build shared ownership of the project’s, the team’s and the organization’s success,
• get people genuinely engaged in their work,
• shape the quality and efficiency of each person and of the whole group.

Without them, your team is just a springboard to the next job. So you’ll want to know:

• how to stop people leaving for other companies and give them a stronger sense of belonging to your team and your organization;
• what should guide you when you build relationships, and how much you need to know about each person’s working conditions;
• which tools help you bring together people who never see each other.

Plenty of distributed team leaders struggle with exactly this. Leading this way is harder, but it’s also more interesting. Relax… Every one of these problems can be solved. I’ll show you how.

What you’ll learn

In short
What the leader’s yin-yang balance is	A good remote team leader combines matter-of-fact performance management (yang) with empathy and a real grasp of each person’s situation (yin).
How to work one-on-one with each person	Regular 1:1s that never get cancelled, with feedback going both ways, build trust and stop problems from escalating.
What your role is in front of the team	The leader shares the vision, keeps information transparent and models the behavior they expect from everyone else.
How to look after relationships in a remote team	Social channels, team-bonding standups and steady rituals keep a distributed team connected.
Why you should delegate	Swapping micromanagement for macromanagement raises engagement and ownership.

Let’s start with:

Find the balance between yin and yang

A good remote team leader combines two attitudes: down-to-earth, fact-based management and an empathetic understanding of people. Your yang is the concrete, no-nonsense manager who talks facts, evaluates and gives instructions. It’s the side of you that reads a situation through hard numbers. But that’s not enough. Let your yin have a say.

Yin is your emotional side, the one that lets you put yourself in your teammates’ shoes. It tells you about more than their aptitudes and skills. It also tells you:

• what their setup at home looks like: do they work from home, from a coworking space, or maybe under the Italian sun or in Bali;
• what their working rhythm is: are they daytime people, or do they get more done at night;
• how their home situation affects their output;
• whether they have the right tools to get the work done, like a decent computer and fast internet.

Why do you need to know all this? Will it make you a good distributed team leader? Of course it will, because with it:

• you’ll know the context behind how each person behaves, which makes it much easier to understand why they act the way they do;
• you’ll earn their trust, which keeps people on the team for longer, and they’ll be more willing to come to you with problems;
• you give yourself a chance to react early and head off a crisis. If a team member is looking after a sick child at home, for example, you’ll know their availability is about to drop;
• you’ll reassign work before a deadline slips.

How do you get there?

You and each team member

Your relationship with each person on the team is the first place where the traits of a good remote team leader show. How your working relationship with each of them develops is up to you. What’s more… As a remote team leader, you have the biggest influence on how relationships between individual people take shape. You’re the one responsible for bringing the team together, for defusing conflicts and for keeping the atmosphere good. The energy you put into building mutual trust will pay off. That’s why…

Make time for 1:1s

How do you become a good leader?

Build relationships with your people.

Regular meetings are a non-negotiable part of that.

They’re there for:

• reviewing how the person’s work is going;
• finding out what they need;
• two-way feedback – you have to be open to opinions about you and what you do, too;
• coaching.

In these meetings you shape a picture of the future for each person on the team and the direction they’ll grow in. Remember that a lot of people quit to look for growth somewhere else. Give them that growth in your company and you’ll keep a stable, committed team. That’s how you build one of the most important traits of a good remote team leader: caring about how each person is doing.

Pick a format that lets you see each other and pick up on body language. A video call beats a faceless phone call.

What gives 1:1s real value:

• They’re like a doctor’s appointment: non-negotiable

Don’t cancel them, and don’t let the other person cancel either. At most, reschedule. That way you keep a space for dealing with problems, conflicts and unclear points as they come up, before they escalate.

• It’s not a time to talk only about tasks

A 1:1 can’t turn into a session that’s purely about the person’s work and the status of their tasks. If it does, it becomes surveillance and over-control. Use it to talk about how satisfied they are, their vision, their comments and what they’ve noticed. And whatever you do, remember: be open to criticism.

• What happens before the meeting matters as much as the meeting itself

Make a list of what you want to talk about. If you need extra data, files or analysis, pull them into an agenda you can both access, in Asana for example. It shows you’re invested in the relationship with that person.

• Take notes IN REAL TIME, but…

…so the other person can see them too. It builds trust and makes sure you’ve understood what they expect. And there’s a bonus: you can refresh your memory any time. That’s especially useful in bigger teams, where you’re keeping up relationships with a dozen or more people.

• Feedback is a two-way street

Constructive feedback is priceless. For you too. What your team member tells you helps you grow as a leader and build an even more effective team of engaged people who back each other up.

Meetings with new team members

A new team member needs special attention. For a few reasons:

• they want to feel valued;
• they need a guide who helps them fit into the team;
• they want to know their leader understands them, the specifics of their work and their habits;
• they need a sense of stability.

A good leader makes the effort to get to know each person individually. There’s a practical side to this, too. It gives you the full picture of how your team works, so you can fit your asynchronous communication rules and your processes to what you’re actually able to do and what you need.

Here, too, 1:1s work best. Hold as many as it takes until you’re confident you know the person well enough.

Copy the questions below if they’re useful. They’ll help you open the conversation and steer it toward what matters most in your working relationship and the new person’s role on the team.

• In your own words, what’s your mission and your goal for Q1?
• Why did you decide to work with our company/team? (for a contractor or freelancer)
• What motivates you most about what you do?
• How often should we meet like this, and how long do you think these conversations should be?
• What do you expect from these meetings? Will they help you work more smoothly? Will they make it clearer where we’re heading and what’s expected of your work?
• Do you see anything that could get in the way of your work in the near future?
• What do you need to do to finish your planned tasks on time?
• What could I do that would make our work together better?

These meetings have to become a fixed part of onboarding new people to your team.

Prepare a set of questions

You can gather all these topics into one list of questions and send it to your teammates to fill in.

Sample questions:

• Do you work from home or from a coworking space?
• Do you prefer working at night, or are you more productive during the day?
• Do you have family commitments we should plan around?
• When are you available, and which hours would you rather keep free of messages?
• Do you like working weekends?
• Is your vacation strictly family time, or do you like to check your inbox to keep a finger on the pulse?

Don’t push, but do give a specific, fairly short deadline.

Some people won’t be ready to share this kind of thing. There will also be sceptics who don’t see the point.

Don’t give up.

Over time, the trust you build will speed up how your working relationship grows and make problems easier to solve. Without it, those problems stay hidden and eat away at your team like a Trojan horse.

You and the team

Your role as a remote team leader doesn’t stop at your relationships with individual people. Where you stand with the whole group, and how they see you, matters just as much. So what makes a good remote team leader? Here are the absolute basics:

Have a vision and make it contagious

You need to know what your goals are and where you’re heading. Only then can you set clear expectations and hand off tasks and responsibility cleanly.

Your vision should cover the team itself:

• how it communicates;
• how you bring new people on board;
• how you react when things go wrong;
• what your relationships look like – more formal or less.

It also covers the work. You should know exactly:

• what you want to achieve as a team – your plans for the project or for the company’s growth,
• how you measure your success,
• what your reality will look like once you get there.

But the vision itself isn’t the most important part. What matters most is that you share it with your people.

Share it, and make it contagious.

Your optimism and your belief that you’ll get there should be strong enough to rub off on everyone else.

The good news is that optimism can be learned. According to Seligman’s research, we develop a pessimistic or optimistic outlook in childhood, and it rests on how we interpret events. It isn’t a fixed part of our character, so it can change. When we train managers, we watch their outlook shift step by step. Working on yourself isn’t easy, but with mindfulness and by listening to yourself, you can swap negative interpretations for ones that serve you and help you build the right team culture.

Don’t be secretive

The curse of many leaders today is the urge to control through information. They believe that holding data no one else has gives them more agency, power and privilege. That it makes them an authority. In reality, keeping people short of reliable information backfires in a dozen ways. Without the right information, people:

• make mistakes in their work,
• make the wrong calls,
• get priorities wrong, which drags down the whole team’s output,
• lose trust in you.

Clarity and reliability are among the basic rules of asynchronous communication in a remote team. Lean on them if you want to grow into a good leader. Make information transparent:

• find a channel that lets you share knowledge,
• agree what information is open to everyone,
• set each person’s access to information individually,
• decide what has to go to the whole team right away and what goes only to selected people,
• decide what you don’t share.

Transparency like this gives everyone equal access to information. It clears bottlenecks and cuts the risk of wrong moves and bad decisions based on stale data. On top of that, it builds priceless mutual trust. Transparency has to be something you actually do, not an empty line in a policy. As the leader, you have to stick to it, no exceptions. You’re setting the example. Which is also why…

Behave the way you expect your people to behave

Want people to take feedback with respect rather than as an attack? Show them how. Listen carefully to criticism, thank people for it, think it over and respond. Over time, the rest of the team will pick up the same attitude from you.

Want your teammates to keep their commitments? Do the same. Keep your promises and hit your deadlines. You’re the one who has to model the right behavior on the team.

If you want people to tell you what they really think, not a version shaped by fear, be honest with them.

You already know how valuable it is to get to know your people. Their private side too: their personalities, family situations, priorities. If you want that, let them get to know you.

A good remote team leader isn’t afraid of their true nature and habits.

During a team-bonding session, show them your workspace, talk about your family, your habits, your hobbies. Open up. Only then will your teammates do the same.

Be there for your team when they need you

You need each other.

They’re there for you, to get the work done.

You’re there for them, to build a high-performing team of engaged people who trust you and each other.

The whole system rests on you.

That’s why your door should be open to them.

How do you do that?

Replies to your team’s emails and messages, and feedback on their tasks in Asana, should be a priority for you. Don’t ignore them, and don’t put them off.

Of course, nobody can be around 24/7. But tell the team when you’re available, when you won’t be, and, where you can, why you’ll be away. That builds your teammates’ trust. They’ll know they can count on you, and remember: the relationship with the boss is the number one motivator at work.

A few tips on being available to your people without giving up your own freedom:

• Set up a channel just for urgent matters and make it your priority. Spell out the rules and the moments when the team can reach you.
• Let people know when you’ll be away, for example in a shared calendar.
• When you can’t give a message your full attention, tell the sender you’ve seen it and will get back to them as soon as you have a moment. If you can, say when that will be.
• Be available when your team is under pressure, for example when a project deadline is close or you know people are working on something important.
• Use meetings to book the next conversation. Ending every conversation with a decision on when you’ll speak next keeps communication steady.

If you want to know how to be a good leader, you have to look inward. Be more than a tough boss focused on results. You have to be an emotional anchor and the glue that holds people together. Your yin resonates with your yang. It’s the two of them working together that make a good leader.

Criticize and praise

Close to 10% of people change jobs because of a bad relationship with their boss. That might not sound like much. It looks very different next to the numbers from a few years ago: in 2016 it was 6%. The upward trend shows that, next to money, the atmosphere at work matters more and more.

Don’t let that happen on your team.

Recognition doesn’t have to be financial, though it’s good to set some budget aside for it. Public praise for the people who did something special for your success is enough.

You probably know this already, but it’s worth saying again: criticize in private, praise in public.

Swap micromanagement for macromanagement

Think long term and trust your team. Delegating tasks and spreading responsibility across everyone is one of a remote team leader’s key duties. It:

• raises their engagement in every project,
• gives them a sense of agency and ownership,
• creates a kind of gratitude for the trust you’ve shown them,
• lets people learn on their own: you leave room for mistakes and you forgive them, because the only people who never get anything wrong are the ones who do nothing.

Look after relationships within the team

A good atmosphere is one of the top motivators at work. In a hybrid or remote team, you as the leader become the link between team members.

You set the tone of your relationships.

You decide which way team bonding goes.

You shape what kind of relationships you have.

You create the atmosphere on the team.

Use every tool you’ve got to get people involved in bonding. The payoff is relationships on a completely different level. Create places to relax and ways to switch off from work. They help people get to know each other, and that goes a long way. It helps them:

• understand each other more easily at work,
• read both verbal and nonverbal signals correctly,
• learn about each other’s personal situation, which builds empathy,
• tap into the emotional intelligence you need to build lasting relationships.

In a remote or hybrid team you have fewer tools and chances than in an office, but that doesn’t mean you have none. Here they are:

The watercooler channel

Use your communication tools, a platform like Slack for example, as a place to share things that have nothing to do with work. Set up a dedicated channel where anyone can post photos, GIFs, jokes and whatever’s on their mind. It’s a place for opinions on serious and less serious things, from private life to social issues and even politics.

Let Slack or another messenger become your office “hallway”, where you bump into each other to chat and take a breather from company and work problems.

The team-bonding standup

These quick, focused meetings don’t have to be about logistics and work alone.

Turn them into a fun way of bonding that helps you get to know each other better.

What can you talk about?

Exactly what you’d talk about with friends:

• where you see your life in 5 years;
• the biggest dreams you want to make happen in the next year;
• New Year’s resolutions;
• hobbies;
• a review of the last book you read;
• filling in and discussing personality tests.

With every meeting, as you get closer and less self-conscious, this list will get longer.

Rituals

Why not grab a virtual coffee together? It’s a great way to bond over lunch and a chance to get to know each other better.

Or maybe regular online quizzes and games you all get into would work better for you?

Or a half-hour joke session?

What matters is that these things become a permanent part of your routine. In a remote team, bonds loosen easily, even the ones you’ve already built.

You’re responsible for keeping them alive. So:

Come up with ideas.

Kick them off.

Bring people together.

Check that they land with your team.

As you can see, there are three areas where your leadership traits can show:

• You and each team member
• You and the team
• You as the main social hub between team members.

Your success depends on how good you are in all three. Get one right and it won’t do much. Get two right and your success will be incomplete and probably short-lived. Only all three will get you there. It’s one of the challenges we tackle in Stages 6-12 of the Reliability Protocol, building the foundations of how a team works together and turning them into everyday practice. And if you want to see where your team stands today, take the short Reliability Diagnostic.

Frequently asked questions

What are the most important traits of a good remote team leader?

A balance between matter-of-fact management and empathy, transparent information, being available to the team, the ability to delegate, and looking after relationships and team bonding.

What is the leader’s role in a remote team?

A remote team leader is the link between team members: they set the tone of relationships, share the vision, make sure everyone has equal access to information, and start the team bonding that doesn’t happen on its own in remote work.

What does a remote team leader actually do?

The key responsibilities are regular 1:1s, two-way feedback, delegating, sharing information openly and keeping team rituals going.

How often should you hold 1:1s with your team?

1:1s should be regular and non-negotiable, like a doctor’s appointment. Agree how often and how long with each person by asking them straight out what they expect.

How is leading a remote team different from leading an office team?

A remote leader gets fewer natural chances to build relationships, so they have to deliberately start the bonding, communication and rituals that happen on their own in an office.

How can you be an available leader without working 24/7?

Set clear availability rules: a dedicated channel for urgent matters, a shared absence calendar, and the habit of ending each conversation with a decision on when you’ll talk next.