Hybrid working has not just changed where people work… it has changed how leadership works.
For a while, many organisations viewed hybrid working as a temporary adjustment, like having to use your mobile hotspot when your Wi-Fi goes down. A way of navigating unusual circumstances before eventually returning to ‘normal’.
But that shift back never really happened.
Hybrid working has now become a permanent feature of how many organisations operate.
Thankfully, the practical challenges have evolved since the early days of remote work. Tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom now make it incredibly easy to communicate with colleagues across locations, while collaborative platforms such as Miro allow teams to brainstorm, map ideas and solve problems together in real time.
And perhaps it’s just me, but the aforementioned bad Wi-Fi also seems far less common than it once was. People were freezing all the time!
Technology has made working together across distance far easier than it once was. But while technology has solved many of the logistical challenges of hybrid working, it hasn’t solved the leadership challenge.
Because when teams are no longer together every day, leadership relies far less on proximity… and far more on communication, trust and clarity.
This obviously means that if your leadership style is heavily reliant on personal presence, observation and regular interaction, then it is understandable why you may be struggling.
Because the habits that once worked in office environments often struggle to work in hybrid teams.
What Hybrid Working Actually Took Away
If you have worked in or led a hybrid team, very little of what follows will shock you.
You have lived most of it already.
The most obvious challenge is visibility. When your team is no longer in the same room, or even the same time zone, you lose something that office-based leadership quietly relied on. The ability to see who is working, how the team is collaborating, and where the friction is building.
That visibility disappears, and in its place comes a question that many managers find genuinely uncomfortable.
Do I trust the outcome, even when I can't see the process?
For leaders whose instincts were built in offices, this is a significant adjustment.
But visibility is only part of the picture, the informal moments that once held teams together such as, the conversation in the corridor, the quick question across a desk, the spontaneous debrief after a meeting, these disappear too.
And maybe it took this huge change to realise that they did more than we realised. They were where problems got solved informally, where relationships were quietly built, and where team culture was reinforced without anyone having to stick it in the calendar.
In hybrid environments, none of that really happens by accident anymore.
Messages replace conversations, and teams spread across locations and time zones means that a quick question is no longer quick, and misalignment can quietly grow before anyone notices it is there.
The result, when left unaddressed, is disconnection. Team members can begin to feel isolated without ever raising it. Shared identity weakens and culture, which was always more fragile than it appeared, starts to fade, not dramatically as in it disappears entirely, but gradually, in the larger gaps that now exist between interactions.
None of this is inevitable, but none of it resolves itself either.
Old Leadership In A New World
We all know the type. The leader operating from an old textbook, projecting unflappable authority and absolute certainty. A style built for a world that no longer exists.
We are living through another version of that same problem right now… it is just a lot less obvious.
Habits are notoriously hard to kick, and that still applies even when the environment that they were developed in has completely changed… and this is where many hybrid teams quietly start to struggle.
When the shift to hybrid working happened, most managers did not receive a new leadership handbook describing all of the new challenges and tips to work through them. They took the instincts, behaviours and approaches that had served them well in office environments and carried them into a fundamentally different one. In many cases, those habits did not just stop working, but they actively got in the way.
The most common version of this is the attempt to recreate the office remotely.
Calendars fill with meetings that exist largely to maintain a sense of visibility and activity gets monitored rather than outcomes. The underlying message, whether intended or not, is clear.
I need to see you working, because I am not sure I trust that you are.
If you are part of a team that hears this underlying message, it is unlikely to feel great that you are not being fully trusted to complete your work without eyes watching over you.
Then there is the opposite problem, and that’s leaders who overcommunicate without ever really saying anything. An absolute spill of messages, updates and check-ins that create noise without saying anything significant or creating clarity. Teams end up busier and no better informed about what actually matters or where they are heading, they just end up with a big reading list of unread notifications.
Difficult conversations tend to get avoided too. Feedback that would have happened naturally in an office, such as a quiet word after a meeting, a quick check-in at someone's desk, are now a whole lot less convenient and require intention and scheduling.
So, we then add it to a to-do list, and it gets delayed, which means that we could be losing impact of that feedback too as it is now a lot less timely. Therefore, it is not uncommon for performance issues to go unaddressed for longer than they should.
And the longer they wait, the harder they become to resolve.
Perhaps the most damaging habit of all, though, is one that most leaders do not even realise they have.
Proximity bias.
When some of your teams are in the office and others are not, it is natural, and almost instinctive to give more attention, visibility and opportunity to the people you can physically see. It rarely happens deliberately, but the impact on the people working remotely is very real, and it quietly signals that where you work determines how much you matter.
The habits that built strong office-based teams are not automatically wrong, but in a hybrid environment and applied without adjustment, they can do more damage than good.
The good news is that awareness is necessary to begin to make changes, so if you were unaware of any of the above, this is a key moment for you and your team.
What Great Hybrid Leaders Actually Do Differently
I’ve got a paradox for you.
The further apart teams become physically, the more important human skills become. Technology has solved the logistical challenges of working across distance. It has not, and cannot, solve the human ones. Those, funnily enough, still require humans.
Let’s begin by talking about the very human skill of communication.
In an office, ambiguity has a short shelf life. Someone asks a question, gets an answer, and moves on. In hybrid environments, ambiguity lingers for a lot longer. It sits in an unread message, or in the space that now exists between interactions, and quietly becomes misalignment.
This is why intentional communication is not a soft skill for hybrid leaders… it is a core operational one.
The most effective hybrid leaders are super clear… clear on expectations, clear on priorities, clear on the reasoning behind decisions, not just the decisions themselves. When people understand the why, they can act with confidence independently, which is precisely what hybrid working demands of them.
This leads very nicely into how trust is built through consistency.
Trust in hybrid teams is not built in a single impressive interaction, such as one that clarifies expectations. It is built gradually, through repeated small moments of consistency, such as showing up prepared for meetings.
Critically too, speaking of meetings, it is crucial to your success that you create an environment where people feel safe enough to speak honestly. Psychological safety is difficult to build in-person, so in hybrid environments, where people have fewer chances to read the room and more opportunity to go quiet, it becomes even more important and even more of a conundrum to establish.
Micromanagement is like trust’s big wrecking ball. When people feel watched rather than supported, they stop taking initiative as they are just expecting you to step in and direct them.
The shift from directing to coaching is one of the most significant adjustments hybrid leadership requires, and it feels as though it is one of the least discussed.
When you cannot observe your team daily, you cannot manage through instruction alone. You need people who can think independently, solve problems without escalating everything, and develop without constant supervision. That only happens when leaders invest in asking better questions rather than always providing the answers.
Mindset wise, there is a hugely important shift required when leading a hybrid team… stop measuring presence, and start measuring progress.
You might think that is obvious, because why would you not be interested in progress? But it directly challenges that part of your mind that quietly wonders how productive people really are when you are not there to see it.
This means setting goals that are clear enough to be understood without a conversation, defining what success actually looks like, and having performance discussions rooted in results rather than activity. It also means being honest when expectations are not being met, and doing so remotely, where the temptation to delay is always higher.
As you may already know, culture does not maintain itself. In office environments, it was sustained by a hundred of small and sometimes unintentional moments. In hybrid environments, those moments have to be created deliberately.
The most effective hybrid leaders find ways to build connection that do not feel performative. We all hate FORCED FUN!
“Come on everyone! Enjoy yourself!”
They recognise contributions publicly and specifically, they create genuine opportunities for collaboration not just meetings for the sake of meetings, but moments where people think and solve problems together. They also remind their teams, regularly and consistently, of the purpose that connects the work they are each doing from their separate locations.
Because when people feel connected to a purpose and to each other, distance becomes far less of an obstacle than it first appears.
Why Organisations Are Finally Taking This Seriously
There is a growing recognition inside organisations that hybrid working did not just change where people work, it exposed something that was already there.
A leadership skills gap.
Many managers were promoted because they were brilliant at their jobs. They understood the work, delivered results, and demonstrated potential, basically leading by example.
What they were rarely given was any meaningful preparation for the human side of leading people. In office environments, that gap could be papered over by a strong presence, regular visibility, and the natural rhythm and hustle of office life.
Hybrid working removed the paper.
Suddenly, the behaviours that built engagement, trust and collaboration had to be conscious and intentional rather than incidental. And for many managers, particularly those leading teams for the first time, that transition has been genuinely sticky and difficult.
The organisations responding most effectively are not simply acknowledging the challenge… they are investing in it.
Leadership development programmes, manager capability initiatives, hybrid communication training, and coaching skills development are all seeing increased demand, because the scary stack of overwhelming evidence that it is necessary is becoming even more difficult to ignore.
Leadership behaviour directly influences engagement, it shapes retention, it determines whether collaboration actually happens or whether it just appears on a calendar. And in hybrid environments, where the margin for error is smaller and the consequences of poor leadership are felt more quickly, the quality of a manager can make or break a team's performance.
Emotional intelligence, communication skills, coaching ability, and the capacity to influence without relying on presence, these are no longer aspirational leadership qualities or ones that we think only the best leaders possess… they are the baseline. And right now, many managers are still developing them.
So, What Are You Actually Going to Do About It?
Knowing what skills hybrid leaders need is one thing. Developing them though… that is another conversation entirely.
The problem has never really been awareness. Ask any manager to describe what great leadership looks like and most of them will give you a pretty decent answer. They have seen it, experienced it, and can likely tell you why it was a great example of brilliant hybrid leadership.
The gap is not in the knowing, it is the conversion of knowing into doing. Translating good intentions into behaviour change that actually holds under the pressure of your actual workload.
That means putting managers in those realistic scenarios that recreate the specific awkwardness of hybrid communication, those feedback conversations that feel harder on a screen, and those one-to-ones where someone seems fine, but something is clearly off.
You practice those moments before they happen. You reflect on what worked, what didn't, and why. Then you go back to your team having already made the mistakes in a room where the stakes were low.
The format matters too. Busy managers do not learn in a single room on a single day. The best programmes combine live workshops with digital learning, microlearning, and structured practice back on the job, so the development keeps happening in the real environment where the skills actually need to show up. Because in reality, you would not learn to properly ride a bike by only using your static exercise bike.
Ultimately, the only measure of any leadership programme that actually matters is not what someone knows when they leave the room.
It is what they do differently weeks and months later.
So Where Does This Leave You?
Hybrid working is not a logistical challenge that organisations have broadly figured out. It is a leadership challenge that many are still in the middle of.
The tools are there, the technology works. What determines whether hybrid teams actually thrive is far less visible and far more human… the quality of communication, the consistency of trust-building behaviours, and the ability of leaders to create connection and clarity across distance.
The managers who will lead most effectively in this environment are not necessarily the most experienced or the most technically skilled. They are the ones who recognise that leadership has always been about people, and that in hybrid environments, when humans are further from one another, that has never been more true or more tested.
Organisations that invest in developing those skills now will not just build better managers, they will build better teams and a stronger culture.
Thanks
Alex & The Excel Team
