For the last six of the eleven years I spent running a freight software company, its four hundred employees were scattered across nineteen countries and at least eleven time zones. We had no office, and most of my colleagues never met one another in person. People often assume the hardest part of leading such a company is communication. In my experience it was something subtler: resisting the temptation to recreate, on video, all the rituals of an office we no longer had.
The monthly all-hands was the clearest example. For two years we held one faithfully, a ninety-minute broadcast in which I and the other executives presented results, celebrated wins and answered questions. Attendance was high because it was expected. Engagement, as far as we could measure it, was close to zero. Half the company was watching at dawn or near midnight, cameras off, answering email in another window. We were performing unity rather than creating it.
When we finally cancelled it, the reaction was relief rather than protest. In its place we started a weekly written letter from the leadership team, published every Monday and never longer than a thousand words. It covered what we had decided, what we were unsure about and, crucially, what we had got wrong. Replies were welcome, and I answered every one personally. Within months, the letter had become the most read document in the company.
Writing as a form of respect
The shift to writing changed more than our meetings. It forced us to think before we spoke, and it gave colleagues in every time zone the same access to information, rather than privileging whoever happened to be awake when a decision was made. It also exposed weak reasoning. A plan that sounded persuasive when delivered with energy on a call often looked thin on the page. We learned to value the quiet, careful writers who had previously been invisible.
A meeting rewards whoever speaks first. A document rewards whoever thinks longest. In a company that never meets, you have to choose which one you want to build.
None of this means distributed teams should never gather. We brought small groups together in person twice a year, usually no more than twenty people at a time, in cheap and slightly unglamorous places chosen for their train connections. Those gatherings were for building trust, not for making plans, and we banned slides entirely. The friendships formed over those long dinners carried more weight in difficult months than anything we ever broadcast.
The other lesson was about attention. In an office, a leader's mood leaks into every corridor, whether they like it or not. Remotely, you have to be deliberate about where your attention lands. I blocked two hours every Thursday simply to write short, specific notes of thanks to people whose work I had noticed that week. It was the single most effective thing I did as a manager, and it cost nothing but time.
I sold the company last year, and its new owners have since opened three offices, which is entirely their right. I do not think distributed work is superior to the alternative. But it taught me that leadership is less about presence than about clarity, and that clarity is best achieved slowly, in writing, by people who are allowed to think. The all-hands, it turned out, had mostly been for me.
