Leadership Horizons

Hybrid Working - The Leadership Challenge

• Lois Burton • Episode 39

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Building Connection Across Distance

Feeling like you’re “leading ghosts” on Zoom while trying to keep culture alive across office days, home desks, and time zones? We dig into the real reason hybrid feels hard: it’s not a scheduling problem—it’s a leadership evolution. 

Across this candid, practical conversation, we break down the habits that no longer serve us and share the ones that do, so your team can feel connected, clear, and engaged wherever they work.

We start by challenging the old belief that proximity equals connection. Those hallway cues and desk drive-bys created a comforting illusion; hybrid has stripped that away and revealed the gaps. From there, we lay out three pillars you can apply immediately. 

First, intentional presence: short, sacred connection cadences and “visible thinking” rituals that surface energy, blockers, and learning in real time. 

Second, trust through clarity: over-communicate expectations, make decision-making explicit, and share the why with regular, human updates that reduce anxiety and align action. 

Third, deliberate culture building: move beyond pizza perks to shared experiences—innovation days and learning circles—mapped to values so people feel meaning, not mandates.

We also explore relationship resilience: the capacity to sustain strong ties across distance. When leaders invest in presence, clarity, and values-led rituals, hybrid teams often outperform their old in-office baseline because connection no longer relies on chance. 

You’ll leave with three sharp reflection prompts to guide your next week: have a non-task conversation with each person, test your team’s clarity on expectations and decisions, and design one experience that demonstrates your values in action.

If this resonated, share it with a leader who needs a clearer path through hybrid, subscribe for the next episode, and leave a quick review to help others find the show. 

Got a question for our special Q&A? 

Email Lois at LoisBurtononline.com or DM on LinkedIn—we’d love to include it.

Leadership Horizons - Helping You Lead Beyond Boundaries

SPEAKER_00:

Hello and welcome back to Leadership Horizon. I'm Lois Burton and today we're tackling one of the most persistent challenges facing leaders right now, the hybrid leadership challenge. This feels very timely as the UK House of Lords published its report on hybrid working just last week, and it's a debate that's taking place across the world to maximise the benefits of hybrid working while mitigating some of the challenges, many of which I find I'm covering with many of the leaders I coach. Before we dive in, I just wanted to remind you about next week. So next week's podcast, which is our 40th episode, which is brilliant, is a special QA session when I'm inviting you all to send me questions on all things leadership, which I will be answering in the live podcast next week. We've had a fantastic response, however, it's not too late. If you have a question you would like me to include, please email me on Lois at LoisBurtononline.com or DM me on LinkedIn. The episode will be a longer one also next week. It will be half an hour to enable me to get to as many questions as possible. So do drop me a line if you've got a burning question. I'd love to hear from you. So let's get to hybrid working. It's fascinating. We're now several years past the forced experiment of remote work that the pandemic thrust upon us. And yet many leaders tell me they're still struggling. They're still trying to figure out how to build real connection, maintain culture, and develop their people when everyone's scattered across home offices, co-working spaces, and the occasional trip into HQ or the office. So here's what I've learned, and here's what's really important. This isn't just a logistics problem, it's a leadership evolution problem. And it's really important that we don't just treat it as a logistics problem. Let me share a story. Just last month I was coaching a CEO, let's call him Matt, and he was utterly frustrated. He told me, Lois, I feel like I'm leading ghosts. I see names on Zoom screens, I read their messages in Slack, but I don't really know my people anymore. I don't know who's struggling, who's thriving, somebody might be about to quit. I've no idea. I just feel I don't know them at all, and we're not really taking account of how we connect in a real and purposeful way. And that's not alone. This is what I'm hearing from leaders across every sector I work in. The hybrid model has given us flexibility, yes. It's opened up talent pools, reduced commute stress, and in many cases improved work-life balance. But it's also created what I call leadership blind spots. Those crucial signals we used to pick up in person that are now invisible to us. Many organizations are trying to tackle this with mandatory attendance for part of the week or part of the month, but that's not always working out well or in a consistent way. Some people resent it, don't see the benefit in it, feel that it's just a question of showing up rather than there being a real reason for being in the office. So it's not always driving high performance and real connection. So what have we lost and what haven't we lost? Here's a truth that might feel a bit uncomfortable. Hybrid leadership has exposed something that was always there, but not always acknowledged. Our reliance on proximity as a proxy for connection. I'll say that again. We used to rely on proximity as a proxy for connection. And I I still hear people say this. I still hear people say it's because we're not together very much. Um, and and some organizations they say are trying to recreate that. And in-person connection does matter, it really does matter. But we can't just rely on proximity because actually that never works. Think about it. In the old model, we could walk past someone's desk and notice they look stressed, we could grab coffee together and talk. We could read the room in a meeting and pick up on unspoken tensions, we could do all of those things. However, often we didn't, because we were busy and everyone was busy. And so we were still head down into the task, not really noticing or making connections with even the people that we were in the offices with. We thought we were being present, but often we were just being there. As I said before, of course, in-person connection matters, but we need to make that more meaningful as well, so that if people are in the physical office, they can see a tangible benefit. So let's look at this differently. Drop of water. Um, hybrid work has stripped away that false sense of connection through proximity. And that actually gives us an opportunity because it forces us to be more intentional about how we lead. Over the last couple of years, I've identified three essential elements for leading effectively in a hybrid environment. And I want to share these with you today because they can be absolutely transformational when you apply them consistently. Number one, intentional presence. The first pillar is what I call intentional presence. In a hybrid world, you can't rely on osmosis. You need to deliberately create moments of genuine connection. And I'm not just talking about another Zoom happy hour. I'm talking about real, purposeful engagement. Here's a practical strategy. Implement what I call connection cadences. These are regular, predictable touch points with your team members that go beyond task updates. For example, one leader I coach now does 15-minute monthly live check-ins with each direct report. No agenda about projects or deadlines, just how are you really doing, what's going on for you, what's energizing you right now, what's draining you. Another leader starts every meeting with what she calls visible thinking, asking one person to share something they're wrestling with professionally, not something they've already solved. I've got a template for this as well, and which is called Ask and Offer, which is about people then sharing something they're wrestling with, but also asking for help and other team members being able to offer tangible help. This creates vulnerability and connection and normalizes asking for help, and that can transcend the screen. The key is consistency and authenticity. Your team needs to know these touch points are sacred, that they will happen and they matter. And it is that consistency is so important because it's often this type of thing, the one-to-ones that get pushed aside. If there's a deadline looming, if there's, you know, if if a week becomes really packed with meetings, these are the things that get lost. And it is the consistency that matters if you're serious about creating intentional connection. Number two is trust through clarity. Here's what I've observed. In hybrid environment, ambiguity breeds anxiety. It always did, even in person. But that gets intensified in hybrid environments. When people can't see you or their colleagues working, when they don't know what's happening in those office days they're not part of, their brains fill in the gaps, usually with worst-case scenarios. So as a hybrid leader, you need to over-communicate with crystal clarity about three things. Firstly, expectations. What does success actually look like? Not just the what, but the how. Nothing erodes trust erodes trust faster than people feeling decisions are being made in mysterious in-office conversations that they're excluded from. That might not be happening. There may be no mysterious in-office conversations happening. But again, if people are not privy to the decision-making process, then they'll imagine what's happening and the trust will go. So make sure you are really explicit. And again, repeat this. Keep repeating and be clearer and be clear every time. And allow people to ask questions about all of these things. Ask questions about the expectations, ask questions about the decisions. And an important thing is that um don't just say to people, does that make sense? Or does everybody understand? Because the chances are people will nod their heads whether they do or not. Think about some questions that you can ask of them to make sure that they have taken in the clarity. So you might say things like, summarize back to me what you think is expected here. What do you understand about who's making this decision and how it's being made? So if you ask them those types of questions, you will get a sense of how clear they actually are. The third one is context. Share the why behind any changes, your strategies and your priorities. And again, share these relentlessly. Keep repeating them. When people work remotely, they miss the informal conversations and the clues that can help everything to make sense. So you do need to be sharing the why. When we get the big why, there is a reason it's called the big why, then people feel more relaxed and less stressed, and they will work to a higher standard. One CEO I work with now records a five-minute video message every Monday morning, just sharing what's on his mind, what he's focused on, and why. It's informal, it's authentic, and it creates transparency that builds trust across his distributed team. So trust through clarity. Number three, deliberate culture building. Culture doesn't happen by accident. It never happens by accident in in-person environments, but it certainly doesn't happen by accident in hybrid environments. It won't emerge from coffee breaks or casual conversations. Those days are gone for most of your team. Instead, culture in a hybrid world is built through shared experiences and reinforced values. Let me give you some examples from teams I've coached. One leadership team I work with does quarterly in-person innovation days, where they tackle a real business challenge together. Not in a conference room, but through activities that require collaboration and creative thinking. And they've tried this in a variety of environments, both outdoor and out indoor, to make it meaningful. Another team has created what they call virtual learning circles, small groups that meet monthly to explore a topic that none of them are experts in. It's voluntary, it's vulnerable, and it's created connections that have transformed their working relationships. But here's the critical piece: these experiences must be tied back to your organizational values. As you know, I've talked about organizational values and leadership values many, many times. Culture isn't pizza parties, it's the lived experience of your values in action. So if you're creating experiences, make sure you're referencing the values and make sure you're talking about how this demonstrates our values in action. Finally, I want to connect to something that I talk about frequently on this podcast, which is resilience. Hybrid leadership requires a different kind of resilience, both from you as a leader and from your team. It requires what I call relationship resilience, the ability to maintain strong connections even when they're stretched across distance and time zones. Teams with a strong relationship resilience perform better in high in hybrid environments than they did fully in person because they've learned to be more intentional, more clear, and more purposeful in how they connect. The fifth pillar of resilience, which I cover in my Leading with Resilience programme, is all about strong relationships, and these can be built just as effectively in a hybrid environment as in person. However, that does require you to invest in the three elements I've shared today. So, let me leave you with three questions to reflect on this week. First, when was the last time you had a genuine, non-task-focused conversation with each member of your team? If you can't remember, that's your signal. Secondly, could your team members clearly articulate your expectations, your decision-making process, and the why behind your current priorities? If you're not sure, there's a clarity gap you need to close. And third, what shared experiences are you creating that reinforce your culture and values? If the answer is none, it's time to get deliberate. Here's what we all know: the hybrid model isn't going away. Some organizations will mandate returns to office, others will stay fully remote, but most will remain somewhere in between. And that means hybrid leadership isn't a temporary challenge, it's the new leadership landscape. The leaders who will thrive are those who stop trying to recreate what was and start building something better, more intentional, more clear, more human. The way we led yesterday is not going to lead us into tomorrow. But the future of leadership, it's being written right now by leaders like you who are willing to evolve. Thank you again for joining me today on Leadership Horizons. If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear how you're tackling the hybrid leadership challenge. Connect with me on LinkedIn or at Lois at LoisBurtononline.com. Don't forget next week the special QA session. It's going to be good. We've got some great questions to answer. So until next time, keep pushing your leadership horizons forward. Thank you.