ThemeTrust & culture
CardCard 26 of 65
Questions5 to explore

Leadership

Who leads the team & how

Leading a hybrid team means making your presence felt somewhere other than a room.

A team leader's job is partly about creating conditions: clarity, safety, pace, belonging. In an office, a lot of that happens through presence and proximity. A leader who is in the building is visible, approachable, and able to read the room. In a hybrid setting, that ambient presence disappears for whoever is not in the same location.

The result is that hybrid leadership requires more deliberate choices. Who gets pulled into decisions? Who gets checked in on? Whose contributions are acknowledged in shared spaces? These things happen by accident in an office and have to be engineered when the team is split.

Leadership style also matters more. A leader who primarily relies on informal influence and reading body language will struggle more in hybrid than one who defaults to clear, written communication and structured check-ins.

Make it explicitWrite down how the team lead will keep remote and office members equally informed and heard: specific channels, cadence for one-on-ones, and how decisions get communicated.

How strong hybrid teams handle it

The same building block, handled well. These are patterns from teams that work well across locations, offered as illustrations to react to, not rules to copy.

Visible decision-making

Strong hybrid leaders write down how decisions get made and who was in the room. This prevents the common pattern where office proximity quietly determines who has influence.

Structured one-on-ones

Regular one-on-one calls with each team member, remote and local, are the primary way a hybrid leader stays connected to the individual. Ad hoc catch-ups in the corridor are not a substitute for people who are not in the corridor.

Modelling async norms

Leaders who write clear async updates, use shared channels for decisions, and do not expect instant replies set the culture of the whole team. If the leader only communicates in real-time on video, the team will follow.

Equal access to opportunity

Hybrid leaders track whether development opportunities, visible projects, and interesting work are distributed across the team or quietly gravitating toward people who are physically nearby.

Questions for your team

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

Does everyone on this team feel equally seen and heard by the team lead, regardless of where they work?
How does the team lead find out what is going well or badly for a remote team member?
Are decisions made in a way that everyone can follow, even people who were not in the room?
What does the team lead do to make sure remote and office members have equal access to interesting work and visibility?
What would make leadership in this team feel more present and fair across locations?

Watch for

Leaders who are physically in the office most of the time often have better relationships with office-based teammates without realising it, which affects trust, opportunity, and who gets heard.
A leader who relies on reading the room is working at a disadvantage in hybrid: most of the room is a small video tile.
The team tends to mirror the leader's communication style. If the leader does not write decisions down, the team will not either.