In August 2020 I wrote a piece for the ACC Docket about leading my team through Melbourne's second lockdown. I re-read it last week. It is a time capsule: Zoom fatigue, sourdough, and the running debate about whether reviewing a contract straight after dinner was ever a good idea (it was not). Most of the advice was about working from home, and working from home is now just working. But buried in it was a point I keep coming back to, and it has aged better than the rest: how you lead people you cannot see.
Back then the people I could not see were a legal and commercial team scattered across kitchen tables and spare rooms in the suburbs. Today it is the same problem at a very different scale. Most of the people who serve our members every day do not work for me at all. They work for our administrator and our insurer, in other buildings and other cities, and I will never bump into them at the coffee machine. Yet their performance is what I am accountable for, and how they feel about the work shows up in our member outcomes within the month.
So the 2020 question turned out to be the permanent question. What does a team need from its leader when the leader is not in the room? The following is what I have road-tested, first in lockdown and since then across teams that are hybrid, multi-functional, or employed by somebody else entirely.
Put effort into positive connection
Formal communication survives distance without much help. The meetings still get booked and the papers still get sent. What quietly dies is the interruption: the two minute question over the partition, the overheard problem, the debate about where to get lunch. Those interruptions are annoying (the introverts among us rejoiced when they stopped) and they are also how a team knows it is a team. Don't underestimate the value of chatter about bagels.
In 2020 the simplest thing we did was also the most effective. We opened a single running team chat and left it open all day. People said good morning in it, asked their quick questions in it and, yes, shared memes and cookie deliveries in it. It cost nothing. One of the team summed it up better than I could at the time: you might not be talking to people all day, but you know you can, and sometimes knowing your team is there is all you need.
That lesson has held. Whatever the tool, the leader has to create a place where the informal happens and then turn up in it. If the only time your team hears from you is a calendar invitation, you have a reporting line, not a team. There is a bonus, too. Corridor conversations include whoever happens to be in the corridor. A shared channel includes everyone, including the person who would never have interrupted you at your desk. Distance, handled well, made my team more inclusive than the office ever did.
Implement new working habits
Everyone has a way of getting into their working rhythm. For some it is headphones in and three hours blocked out to draft the gnarly contract. For others it is talking a problem through with a colleague before they can write a word. Most of these habits were never chosen. They accreted, one workaround at a time, over years in the same office.
A disruption is the one moment when habits are loose enough to change, and a leader should not waste it. Which of our meetings exist because they are useful, and which because they always have? Who needs uninterrupted time, and when? What gets decided in writing and what genuinely needs a conversation? Have those conversations with the team rather than issuing an edict, and then write the answers down, because the old habits will be back within a month if nothing replaces them. (I have watched this happen. Twice.)
Right space for the right kind of work
This may sound trite, but certain kinds of work suit certain kinds of environment. Expense forms and the general admin of corporate life tolerate a reality show in the background and a dog on your feet. Reading a piece of legislation or drafting a board paper does not. When people work across home, office and the airport lounge, the leader's job is to make it legitimate for them to match the task to the setting, rather than defaulting to wherever they happen to be sitting when the task lands. Productivity in a dispersed team comes from that match far more than from hours logged, and far more than from whichever return-to-office policy is fashionable this year.
Setting hard boundaries
Working from home moved the boundary between work and home from architecture to discipline, and discipline is the leader's job to model. If I send a message at nine at night, I have told my team what I expect of them, whatever the message actually says. If I take my breaks, they will take theirs. If I answer emails from the beach, so will they, and then they will resent it.
None of this is soft. Teams that lose their boundaries lose their stamina, and stamina is what a long programme of work runs on. The document you finish after dinner is rarely better than the one you finish first thing tomorrow, and the evening is better spent arguing with your partner about who is going to win Masterchef.
Zoom more, video less
Video calls became the default in 2020 and in volume they are exhausting. Not every conversation needs faces. A voice call is a phone call, which people have managed for a century. A short written update is the note left on a desk. Use the whole range and keep video for the conversations where seeing the person matters: the difficult ones and the ones worth celebrating.
The single best habit to come out of lockdown was the daily stand-up. Ten minutes, first thing, on what matters today. It was quicker than the office had ever been. In the office a problem would wait days for a meeting slot while five diaries were aligned; in the stand-up it was raised, owned and gone before the coffee cooled. That one survived the return to the office and it should survive everything else.
Culture gets tested when nobody is watching
Boards and executives are notoriously trigger-happy with strategy consultants when it comes to values statements. The test of whether the values are real is not the statement on the wall. It is what people do under pressure, with the leader not in the room. A dispersed team is that test running continuously, whether you like it or not.
If people were disengaged before, distance shows it fast. If they believed in the work, distance shows that too. In 2020 the people who held up best were the ones who could draw a line from their own task to what the organisation was doing for the people it served, which for us meant the nurses and carers whose retirement savings we look after. The leader can help draw that line every week by saying plainly why the work matters, and by acknowledging contributions specifically and by name. Recognition does not need a room, just a leader who noticed and said so.
Key take away
The pandemic was the excuse, not the point. The point is the difference between a team that happens to sit together and a team that has been deliberately built: the first kind falls apart at a distance and the second kind barely notices. Almost all of us now lead people we cannot see, whether they are in the next suburb or on someone else's payroll. Build the second kind. And put the contract down after dinner.
A version of this article first appeared as the cover story of the Association of Corporate Counsel's ACC Docket, July/August 2020, and on this site the same month. Revised September 2026. Photograph by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.