For decades, much of leadership happened through proximity. Managers could observe how teams were doing, employees could pick up behavioural cues from senior leaders, and culture was reinforced through countless small interactions that rarely needed design. But distributed work has disrupted that model.
At a recent roundtable, in association with TransforMe Learning on the theme “Leading People You Can’t See: Trust, Accountability and Culture in Distributed Teams”, HR and business leaders came together to discuss what it takes to lead people who may rarely, or sometimes never, share the same physical workplace. Setting the tone for the discussion, Gatik Chaujer, Co-founder of TransforMe Learning, positioned the conversation as an exercise in listening. The conversation centred on a question: if flexibility is now part of the operating model, have leadership behaviours evolved with it?
When performance is visible, but belonging is not
A participant from an organisation operating across multiple locations described a workforce where employees were delivering against project expectations, and customers were satisfied, yet some employees rarely came into the office, even for team meetings or larger organisational gatherings.
If an employee is delivering on their targets, what else creates the feeling of being part of an organisation? And if colleagues rarely experience the organisation beyond their own team or project, how is culture transmitted at all?
This is where distributed work exposes a limitation in traditional leadership models. In the office, culture can spread partly through observation. Employees see how decisions are made, how leaders respond under pressure and how colleagues interact. When those signals disappear, culture cannot simply be assumed to travel with the employee. It has to be made visible in other ways.
Designing for accountability, not surveillance
That challenge quickly brought the conversation to accountability. In distributed teams, the absence of physical visibility can tempt organisations to compensate with more meetings, more reporting and more monitoring. But participants repeatedly pointed to the risk of confusing oversight with accountability.
One leader argued that the behaviour of managers matters disproportionately because employees watch what leaders actually do and use that to interpret what the organisation truly values. Cultural expectations therefore cannot remain words in a values framework; they have to appear in everyday leadership behaviour and, where appropriate, in the way performance itself is evaluated.
Another participant framed the relationship differently from how organisations often approach it: rather than imposing accountability first and hoping culture follows, strong culture itself can reinforce accountability.
Accountability in a distributed environment is less about proving that someone is working and more about creating clarity around outcomes, expectations and responsibility. For leaders, that demands a move away from managing activity towards creating the conditions in which people understand what they own and feel trusted to deliver it.
Communication vs. connection?
The conversation also challenged another common response to distributed work: communicate more. More communication is useful, but frequency alone does not create trust.
Participants shared examples of leadership AMAs, open forums, structured employee interactions and mechanisms through which employees could ask senior leaders questions on policies, salaries or organisational decisions.
One practice stood out because of the expectation attached to it: when a question could not be answered during the session, leaders were expected to return with an answer subsequently. The intent was not simply to create access to leadership, but to show employees that their questions had been heard.
Yet the discussion also raised a harder question. Do employees leave such interactions genuinely feeling heard, or has the organisation simply completed another communication process?
That distinction is critical in distributed teams. A calendar full of town halls, check-ins and leadership calls can create the appearance of connection while still leaving relationships highly transactional. Trust requires not just opportunities to speak, but evidence that leaders listen, respond and act consistently.
Culture needs intentional rituals
Participants spoke about structured leadership interactions, storytelling, recognition, coaching, leadership shadowing and recurring forums that create predictable opportunities for connection. One participant argued that intentionality and ritualisation could help organisations create leaders capable of leading people they cannot physically see.
That is a useful shift in how organisations think about culture. A ritual is not simply another meeting. It is a repeated behaviour that signals what matters.
Recognition rituals tell employees what the organisation values. Leadership forums can signal openness. Storytelling can help employees understand the behaviours behind otherwise abstract values. Regular check-ins can build connection when designed as genuine conversations rather than status updates. For distributed teams, these rituals can do some of the work proximity once did automatically.
That need for intentional human judgment sharpened when the conversation turned to AI. Nupur Joshi of Aditya Birla Group said that ”As AI becomes part of everyday work and outputs become a lot more templatised, leaders have a new responsibility: to ask not just for the output, but for the thinking behind it. That's how we make sure people's thinking and judgement keep growing, even as the tools get better.”
Navigating consistency and meaning
Sandra Colhando, Co-founder of TransforMe Learning, brought another useful lens to the discussion: compliance and purpose.
The compliance side included the structures, processes and technology organisations use to create consistency and accountability. Purpose showed up differently: through leadership vulnerability, storytelling, mindful communication and the ability to make organisational values personally meaningful.
One example shared during the discussion illustrated the difference. A leader used a personal story involving his daughter to demonstrate how an apparently casual workplace comment could make another person uncomfortable. Instead of communicating the lesson through another policy statement, the story made its human consequences tangible.
Colhando also highlighted something distributed leaders lose when interactions become predominantly virtual: the information available through physical presence. Body language and informal encounters often tell leaders how people are feeling before anyone explicitly says it.
The challenge, therefore, is not simply how organisations communicate virtually. It is how leaders create new ways of picking up the signals of proximity, once provided almost automatically.
The real leadership gap is in the 'how'
This ultimately reframes the challenge for HR and L&D. Most organisations already know the what of leadership. Set clear goals. Communicate. Recognise performance. Build trust. Create accountability.
The harder question is how leaders demonstrate those behaviours when their teams are dispersed. In summarising the discussion, Gatik Chaujer argued that the opportunity for HR and L&D was to enable leaders to become more authentic, more humane and less transactional. Organisations may already have many of the structures and processes they need; the more difficult capability lies in the “how” of inspiring through change, influencing people and creating accountability when conventional role-modelling is less visible.
That means leadership development itself may need to change. Rather than focusing primarily on frameworks, organisations may need to build repeatable behaviours: how leaders listen, how they recognise contribution, how they tell stories, how they communicate difficult decisions and how they create moments of connection when teams are separated by geography.
Vandana Chaturvedi of NTPC noted, “My takeaways are to enable our leaders to shine with authenticity and connect with each and every person wherever they are, and to make them feel valuable and have the same experience and culture that everybody else is feeling.”
The future of distributed leadership, then, may not depend on recreating the office virtually. It may depend on becoming far more deliberate about the things the office once allowed organisations to take for granted. When proximity disappears, culture cannot be accidental. Leadership has to make it intentional.
