This blog is part of our Remote Leadership Series. It was written anonymously by a leader currently participating in the Lead From Anywhere programme. The reflections below are shared with permission.
I went into the first Lead From Anywhere session with mixed feelings.
The programme was fully funded for me, which removed the financial barrier, but the time commitment was a bit stressful, to be honest. I am a senior leader in a small SME operating fully remotely. An 8-week commitment can seem like a bit of crazy thing to sign up to when you’re faced with daily fires that have to be put out. In my role, recruitment pressures are ongoing and team engagement is fragile during a period of change. My calendar is already dense. I wasn’t convinced that adding another programme would materially change how I lead.
What convinced me to give it a go in the end the clout Grow Remote brings to this niche space. Their leadership programmes have consistently sold out since 2020, and they’ve trained 1,000 Irish business leaders across remote and hybrid organisations. This particular course – Lead From Anywhere – was developed after listening to over 50 Irish companies last year discuss the real-life challenges they’re experiencing.
The first session itself was more reflective than I expected. A brief exchange with another participant – a DM popped into my Zoom chatbox – was unexpected. What we realised is that we have almost identical challenges at work and it felt strangely refreshing to have that kind of solidarity. It reminded me that remote leadership is often isolating, and that shared learning has value.
Here are five things that stood out from Day 1 of the programme.
1. In offices, feedback is incidental. In virtual teams, feedback must be intentional.
In an office environment, feedback happens organically. You overhear conversations, you notice behaviour, you adjust and correct mistakes in passing. It is incidental.
In distributed teams, that indirect feedback disappears. The feedback that counts is intentional.
My takeaway: If feedback isn’t intentional designed into your systems, it will simply not happen.
2. Visibility must be projected, not assumed.
In offices, visibility is a by-product of presence. In distributed teams, it is an active process.
Participants spoke about achievements being sucked into tools and channels, unseen beyond immediate stakeholders who have eyes on. Leaders also noted how easy it is to lose sight of colleagues and direct reports when interactions are purely task-driven.
Presence, in this context, is not physical proximity – it is about attention, recognition, and communication.
My takeaway: Leaders must actively create visibility – for themselves and for their teams – rather than assuming good work will be noticed. In a virtual setting, it rarely is.
3. Without social osmosis, people lack context – and context creates influence.
In physical workplaces, people absorb norms, power dynamics, behaviours, and decision logic in an indirect manner. Things are picked up or inferred by context a lot of the time. This osmosis by proximity is how influence happens when people work in the same space.
In remote teams, that kind of interaction disappears. New hires or people changing roles can struggle to understand how things have been done before (because they were not aware and never observed the work being done), which limits both their confidence and their influence.
My takeaway: Context must be explicitly shared, or power and influence become concentrated among those who already have it.
4. Remote culture must be maintained with care – culture doesn’t hold organically.
Culture is often sustained through shared experiences, informal rituals, and learned behaviour through observation. In distributed environments, those mechanisms weaken when there are fewer shared experiences.
Leaders on the session spoke about company values becoming abstract, rituals becoming optional, and social cohesion growing fragile. Culture in remote teams does not drift because people don’t care – it drifts because it is no longer tangible.
My takeaway: Remote culture requires deliberate maintenance; if it is not actively nurtured, it erodes.
5. Distributed teams don’t automatically flatten hierarchy – in fact, virtual settings can intensify it.
There is a common narrative that remote work flattens hierarchy. Day 1 of this course challenged that assumption.
Virtual meetings can create new barriers: people hesitate to speak, loud voices dominate more easily, and many leadership conversations happen invisibly. In an office, you might see leaders enter a meeting room; remotely, that activity is invisible.
Without intentional communication of expectations, norms, and vision, teams are at risk of drifting.
My takeaway: Leaders must strategically over-communicate in distributed environments, or hierarchy and ambiguity grow. Learning how to be strategic is vital.
Final reflection
I started the programme unsure whether it would be worth the time. The first session didn’t offer a single transformative framework, but it clarified something more important: remote leadership is less intuitive than we often assume, and more systemic than we typically design for.
Hearing peers articulate these challenges was as valuable as the formal content. It reframed several of my own issues and I look forward to session number 2.
