How to lead people you can't see

A lot of leadership training tends to assume everyone is in the same building. But it rarely covers what to do when the person you are trying to lead is on the other end of a screen. In fact, if I think about most of the material I share in this newsletter, there is probably an inherent assumption that face to face communication is the norm.

But the reality is very different these days. We are more likely to work at a distance from our team members some or even all of the time. And as a result, unless we have established a high trust relationship with them, it is so much harder to know whether they are engaged, overwhelmed, or quietly struggling.

In this situation, inexperienced or untrained leaders will often take one of two approaches. Some will increase control: more check-ins, more frequent updates, a need to be copied on everything. Others go the other way. They give their team lots of space, check in rarely, and proceed on the basis that no news is good news.

Neither approach is great.

The most-cited study on virtual team leadership was published over two decades ago, which tells you something about how slowly this area has moved in management thinking. Kayworth and Leidner (2002), writing in the Journal of Management Information Systems, observed thirteen globally distributed teams and found that the most effective virtual leaders shared two consistent characteristics. They communicated regularly, specifically, and promptly, with clarity about who was responsible for what. And they operated as mentors rather than monitors, showing genuine empathy towards their team members whilst being willing to give direct guidance when it was needed.

A more recent study by Marstand and colleagues (2024) followed over 500 remote and hybrid workers across two separate longitudinal studies. It found that two specific leader behaviours reduced employees' sense of psychological distance from their manager: showing genuine consideration for them as people, and communicating a clear direction. When that psychological distance decreased, task performance improved, and people were more likely to contribute beyond what was strictly required of them. The authors described it as being "distant but close."

So, while physical separation is a constraint, how much your team feels that distance is something you can influence.

As I mentioned, leaders need to establish high trust relationships with their remote team members, and these ideas of mentorship, consideration and empathy are what builds that trust. But it is far harder to do this at a distance than face to face.

A 2025 study by Aziz and colleagues, drawing on data from 79 teams in the telecoms sector, found that leaders can more easily maintain their operational effectiveness through virtual communication than their relational effectiveness. While face-to-face interaction builds trust through repeated small moments of contact and shared experience, virtual communication does not replicate this. In a remote context, trust has to be built deliberately, because it will not accumulate on its own.

And building this trust and the associated levels of engagement is crucial, not just for effectiveness reasons, but for the well-being of your team. Research shows that high work-related loneliness in remote workers was significantly associated with emotional exhaustion, poor work-life balance, counterproductive behaviour, and depression (Becker and colleagues (2022)).

Qin (2024), in a study of 527 remote workers, found that transparent communication was the single strongest predictor of trust in remote leaders. This needs to be deeper than simple status updates. Talk about direction, context, and your own thinking about where things are going and why.

Regular conversations that focus on how someone is doing, not just what they are delivering, are where you pick up the clues a task report will not give you. In a remote context, these conversations are not optional. They are how you manage psychological distance, because true connectedness helps drive engagement and motivation in a team.

Becker and colleagues found that high job control, with genuine ownership over how and when work gets done, protects against emotional exhaustion in remote workers. This is consistent with what self-determination theory has found about human motivation: autonomy is vital and is one of the three core conditions under which people do their best work.

Malhotra and colleagues (2007), in research published in Academy of Management Perspectives, identified this as one of the core practices of effective virtual leaders: actively ensuring remote team members are seen and recognised beyond the immediate team. When people work remotely, they can quietly disappear from organisational life. Your job as the leader of that team is to make sure they don’t.

A 2020 study by Spagnoli and colleagues found that high-control leadership significantly amplified technostress* and burnout in fully remote workers. The effect was strongest for those working entirely from home. Tightening your grip does not compensate for physical absence. It makes things measurably worse. If you recognise this pattern in yourself, I have written before about why the impulse to over-control tends to get stronger when you are anxious, and the signs to watch for.

Makowski and colleagues (2025) found that a hands-off approach, whilst tolerable for highly experienced team members, consistently left less confident or less experienced people feeling unsupported. They did not flag problems or ask for help. They just disengaged quietly, and the manager was often unaware. It is therefore important to think carefully about your team members as individuals and work out the level of support that each of them needs.

None of this fully replaces being in the same place as your team, at least occasionally. Aziz and colleagues are explicit: in-person contact does a level of trust-building work that virtual contact struggles to match. If your team is fully remote and in-person gatherings are possible, they are worth prioritising, even infrequently.

But the key takeaway is probably this: distance may be a constraint, but invisible leadership is a choice.

*Technostress is defined as: “the stress that users experience as a result of application multitasking, constant connectivity, information overload, frequent system upgrades and consequent uncertainty, continual relearning and consequent job-related insecurities, and technical problems associated with the organisational use of ICT”

References are on the website version of this piece.

All of my posts for new leaders are here.

Best wishes

Martin