The Leadership Lesson Hybrid Work Is Forcing Everyone to Learn

There’s a line you hear in a lot of leadership talks: “People don’t leave companies, they leave managers.”

In a hybrid company, however, this can play out a little differently. People leave managers who stop being able to read them. The instincts that work in an office don’t always translate well across a dozen screens and different time zones, and plenty of good managers might not even notice until it’s too late.

When I started building BriteCo, I assumed the hard part of leading a distributed team would be the logistics. However, the actual challenge was relearning how to connect with people. It’s emotional work, and the screen backgrounds and mute-button etiquette we tend to fixate on barely scratch the surface. Most of us were never trained for the kind of leadership that hybrid work actually demands.

The hallway moved, so I had to move with it

One of the most underrated things about an office is its hallway. Someone walks past your door with a half-formed question, you talk for 20 minutes and a problem you’d both been circling for a week is suddenly solved. We’ve experienced that at BriteCo more times than I can count.

However, this type of spontaneous interaction just doesn’t happen on its own when half the team is remote. So, we stopped waiting for it to happen naturally and started manufacturing it. We keep a few Slack channels dedicated solely to unfinished ideas with no set agenda. We also schedule virtual coffee breaks on the calendar with no connection to any project. Our in-office days are now reserved for messy, collaborative work, with focused work taking place wherever a person actually concentrates best.

These practices give creative energy somewhere to land, even if they never fully recreate the hallway.

Most of my cues don’t survive a screen

It’s genuinely hard to read a room over video. The signals I used to rely on — a shift in posture or the atmosphere going flat when an idea lands wrong — are often muted or absent on a call.

To tackle this issue, I’ve become more direct. I ask people how they’re actually doing, then I stay quiet and wait for the real answer instead of the default “good, busy” response. I also ask what frustrated them this week. I used to treat these questions as optional, but they serve a valuable purpose. For a leader who can’t rely on physical presence, they help you collect the information that the hallway used to hand you for free.

I run a jewelry insurance company, so I spend my days thinking about objects that carry enormous emotional weight for the people who own them. An engagement ring is never just a ring. That sensitivity to what something means to a person has to extend inward to the team; otherwise, it’s just a talking point in a brand presentation.

Trust does the work the office used to do

For a long time, many managers relied on a lazy shortcut: if I can see you at your desk, you must be working. The reality is that some people do coast when no one is watching. However, plenty of others do their best work at home with no commute, fewer distractions and a closed door. Desk visibility never told you which employee was which, so you never found out.

Trust-based leadership replaces that shortcut, but it demands more from you on both a psychological and professional level. You have to know each person on your team well enough to understand what conditions allow them to do their best work. The warning signs also need to be caught earlier, because the casual observations that once revealed them are gone. That also means having difficult conversations sooner, before problems have time to grow.

At BriteCo, culture is created deliberately rather than inherited. We run off-site and all-hands gatherings, and we stay rooted in Evanston, where our relationship with Northwestern University has helped build a strong talent pipeline that keeps us tied to the place we’re from. We prioritize clear and frequent communication across our online channels, too, so that our remote workers never feel disconnected or isolated from their colleagues who do come into our offices. Our local roots and hybrid model work in tandem, enabling us to offer flexible working to our team. 

The managers who succeed in this new hybrid work environment are the ones who can sense how someone is doing through a screen and build trust without needing to see them in person. Better software and stricter return-to-office policies won’t get you there; it’s a skill that needs practice and a framework we’re always working to improve. Over time, I’ve found that getting better at reading people I can’t see has made me more attuned to those sitting right across the table from me.

There’s a line you hear in a lot of leadership talks: “People don’t leave companies, they leave managers.”

In a hybrid company, however, this can play out a little differently. People leave managers who stop being able to read them. The instincts that work in an office don’t always translate well across a dozen screens and different time zones, and plenty of good managers might not even notice until it’s too late.

When I started building BriteCo, I assumed the hard part of leading a distributed team would be the logistics. However, the actual challenge was relearning how to connect with people. It’s emotional work, and the screen backgrounds and mute-button etiquette we tend to fixate on barely scratch the surface. Most of us were never trained for the kind of leadership that hybrid work actually demands.