What Happened
Harvard Business School Online recently published a list of twelve tips aimed at helping managers lead distributed teams more effectively. The piece targets professionals navigating the ongoing shift toward remote and hybrid work. It represents the kind of authoritative institutional advice that gets forwarded around corporate Slack channels and filed away under "good intentions" without much follow-through.
The Communication Angle
Here is the real question this piece raises: when you give someone twelve tips, how many do they actually use?
Zero. They use zero.
This is the central failure of most remote team communication advice, including well-credentialed advice from institutions like Harvard. The problem is not the quality of the information. The problem is the delivery format. A list of twelve items signals abundance but produces paralysis. Your brain sees twelve things and immediately starts negotiating with itself about which ones matter. That negotiation ends in inaction. Every time.
Strong communication, whether in writing, leadership, or management advice, does one thing well. It does not do twelve things adequately. The best managers I have worked with do not follow twelve-point frameworks. They pick one or two behaviors and execute them obsessively. The manager who blocks thirty minutes every Friday to send each direct report a personal, specific note about something they did well that week will outperform the manager who half-implements twelve strategies every single time.
Now apply that same logic to how you actually lead your remote team. Your people are not waiting for a new tip. They are waiting for you to be consistent. Consistency in communication is what remote teams run on. When someone cannot see you in the hallway, cannot read your body language in a meeting, cannot catch your tone over coffee, your words carry the entire relationship. Every message you send either builds trust or erodes it. There is no neutral. This is why the format of your communication matters as much as the content. A vague Slack message at 9pm does more damage than most managers realize. A clear, direct morning update with context and priorities does more good than an hour-long weekly call.
The Harvard list likely contains solid individual points. But packaging good advice in an overwhelming format undermines the advice itself. If you want your team to follow through on something, give them one clear directive, explain why it matters, and tell them exactly what success looks like. That is it. That is the whole formula.
This is exactly the kind of scenario I break down in Say It Right Every Time. The chapter on message design gives you a framework for stripping any communication down to its essential load-bearing idea, so that what you say actually lands instead of just adding to the noise your audience is already drowning in.
Never Be Lost
for Words Again
Get word‑for‑word scripts for the conversations that shape your life, from job interviews and negotiations to difficult talks with family and partners, so you always know exactly what to say and how to say it.
Never Be Lost
for Words Again
Get word‑for‑word scripts for the conversations that shape your life, from job interviews and negotiations to difficult talks with family and partners, so you always know exactly what to say and how to say it.
Key Takeaway
Before your next team meeting, write down the single most important communication habit you want your team to see from you this week. Not five habits. One. Then do it visibly and repeatedly until it becomes expected. Predictability in a remote leader is not a weakness. It is the foundation everything else is built on.
