What Happened
Harvard Business School Online published a list of 12 tips for managing remote teams. The piece covers common challenges leaders face when their people are scattered across time zones and home offices. It represents a growing body of advice aimed at helping managers adapt their leadership style to a world where face-to-face interaction is no longer guaranteed.
The Communication Angle
Here is the core problem with most remote team advice: it treats communication as a logistics issue. Twelve tips. A checklist. As if the reason your remote team feels disconnected is that you forgot to schedule enough Zoom calls.
The real failure in remote team communication is not frequency. It is clarity. When you lose the physical room, you lose every nonverbal signal that normally fills in the gaps of a sloppy message. The shrug, the nodding face across the table, the tone that says "I'm joking." Gone. What you are left with is your words, raw and unadorned. Most managers are not prepared for that. They speak and write the same way they always have, then wonder why their remote teams feel confused, disengaged, or excluded.
The communication choice that separates good remote leaders from bad ones is specificity. Vague direction kills remote teams. "Let's touch base soon" means nothing when you cannot bump into someone in the hallway. You have to say: Tuesday, 2pm, 20 minutes, we are deciding on the project deadline, come with your top constraint. That is a sentence with a place, a time, a purpose, and a demand. That is how you cut through the noise.
The second layer is written communication. Remote work has forced most professionals into being writers, whether they like it or not. Slack messages, emails, project briefs: this is now where leadership lives. And most leaders are terrible writers. Not because they lack intelligence, but because they have never been trained to write for clarity rather than comprehensiveness. They write to show their thinking. They should be writing to direct someone else's action.
The third layer is acknowledgment. Remote workers cannot feel momentum the way office workers can. They do not see the energy in the room when a project lands well. You have to name it explicitly. "This mattered. Here is why. You did that." If you do not say it out loud (or in writing), it does not exist for them.
This is exactly the kind of scenario I break down in Say It Right Every Time. The chapter on precision language gives you a framework for stripping the filler out of your communication and replacing it with direction. Remote leadership is really just a high-stakes test of whether your words can stand on their own without any help from context, body language, or proximity. Most people fail that test without realizing it. The chapter shows you how to pass 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.
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 written message to a remote team member, read it back and ask: what is the single action I want this person to take, and by when? If you cannot find that sentence in what you wrote, rewrite until you can. One action. One deadline. Every time.
