Remote work isn’t a new thing. Since the pandemic, especially, remote teams across industries have been enjoying the flexibility and work-life balance that comes from working outside a traditional office.
Teams can be distributed across time zones and continents, and when they’re built right, they can actually outperform in-office teams by miles. We’ve been seeing this happen across a variety of industries since more and more companies have begun adopting remote work structures.
My specialty is building and scaling remote-first teams. This isn’t a flex; I see it as proof that geography doesn’t have to be a barrier to high performance and business growth. One of the biggest things I’ve learned along the way is this: Great teams don’t just run on talent.
They need clarity, culture, and A-player leaders who can run the business without relying on proximity or being micromanaged by senior leadership or you, as the CEO.
And that’s the real unlock. The success of a remote team starts with the leadership.
This blog isn’t going to be a list of generic tips or shallow leadership clichés that every business guru sells on social media. I’m sharing my actual playbook of five unconventional yet tried-and-true methods that I use to identify, build, and elevate top performers into genuine, reliable leaders, no matter where they’re located.
Systems-First Leadership: Letting Process Give Rise to Leaders
When most CEOs talk about “developing leaders,” they start with people. But if you’ve ever scaled a business too fast, you know that’s backwards.
When you hire before you systemize, you create dependency. But when you systemize before you hire, you create ownership.
This is why you should strive to build your systems before you start hiring your remote teams. Otherwise, it’s like trying to put the roof on a house before building the foundation.
Here’s how I think about it:
A-player leaders don’t emerge from micromanagement; they emerge from architecture—and you have to build it.
If your business runs on clean, documented systems—SOPs, project templates, async updates, and so on—then you’ve established clarity and built a stage for leadership to show up naturally.
One of the first things I teach my clients is the R.I.P. Protocol system:
- Record it: Write down the exact steps, one by one.
- Improve it: Look at the bottlenecks. Can this process be done faster, cheaper, or better?
- Pass it: Hand it off. Give your team the tools, training, and trust to own it.
This isn’t just about getting stuff off your plate and keeping your team busy. It’s about giving them something to run with, without your interference.
The moment a system is repeatable, your next leader can optimize it, own it, and scale it without constantly asking what to do next. The whole point of the R.I.P. Protocol is for entrepreneurs to remove themselves from day-to-day operations, making time for bigger goals.
If you want to find out who’s capable of more, don’t ask. Instead, watch what happens when you give them a system. See how they improve and optimize it independently; that’s how you can identify the leadership potential.
The Extra Mile Hiring Filter: Spotting Leadership Before Day One
Most hiring processes are built for efficiency when they should really be built for revelation.
Here’s what I mean by that:
I embed “optional but revealing” tasks into every hiring flow. These are small requests that the average applicant would skip, but top 1% performers won’t even flinch at.
I might ask them to:
- Audit a Loom presentation and suggest improvements.
- Create a simple process doc for something they’ve done before.
- Give feedback on one of our landing pages or email sequences.
- Share a 2-minute Loom explaining how they’d onboard themselves.
This is how you identify the people who naturally go above and beyond before they even join your team.
Because here’s the reality: People who do more than they’re asked before they’re paid to do it have leadership potential in their DNA. They’re already thinking like contributors, looking for leverage, and operating from that founder-adjacent mindset of “how can I make this better?” Those are the people you want overseeing your remote teams.
Keep in mind, though, these tasks that make up the Extra Mile Hiring Filter aren’t about grinding people through unpaid labor. It’s about creating space for the A-players to self-identify.
The Daily Pulse Method: Cultivating Consistency Without Micromanagement
Remote work kills two things: hallway feedback and hover-over-your-shoulder management.
That’s good news if you build the necessary structures to replace them.
One of the most powerful tools I use to develop leaders is something I call the Daily Pulse.
It’s a lightweight, repeatable system that gives me real insight into who’s reliable, accountable, and quietly leveling up.
Every team member submits a quick update each day or throughout a specific project’s milestones, covering:
- What they completed.
- What’s blocked?
- What’s next?
- What they need from leadership.
The goal is for this to be short and sweet. It takes 2–3 minutes to write, and less than a minute to read. When these pulses are completed consistently over time, you’ll get a crystal-clear picture of who is showing up and putting in the work.
This monitoring is essential for identifying A-player leaders, because leadership isn’t just about performance spikes. It’s about trustworthy rhythm, which is especially important in a remote setting.
You don’t want A-players who excel and impress you randomly once a month. To lead remote teams, you need people who are going to be reliable and show up every single day.
In these cases, consistency becomes the currency of promotion. And the team learns to self-regulate without you needing to micromanage everything.
The Cultural Intelligence Framework: Global Sensitivity for Global Leaders
If you’re leading remote workers, you’re leading across cultures—whether you realize it or not. Your team members might be in the Philippines, Poland, or Peru, and their cultural wiring dictates how they interpret feedback, take initiative, communicate, and generally work.
For example, what works for your US-based team might totally miss the mark with your team in Latin America. This is why understanding cross-cultural motivators and communication styles is so important.
To address this, I use what I call the Cultural Intelligence Framework to guide how I develop leaders across regions.
It’s built on questions like:
- Are they from a high-context or low-context communication culture?
- Are they motivated more by recognition, responsibility, or routine?
- Do they value direct feedback, or is that a threat signal?
I know several CEOs who have made the mistake of applying a one-size-fits-all leadership approach to a global team. It doesn’t work.
But when they started learning how different cultures interpret authority, everything changed.
You may have a rockstar team member from Indonesia who rarely speaks up on calls. Depending on your cultural lens, you might read this as them being disengaged. But in reality, it may be that their cultural background taught them that interrupting or disagreeing with leadership was disrespectful, so they chose to stay quiet in meetings.
But if these leaders try a different, more culturally inclusive approach, like shifting to async voice notes and private chats, you may notice their ideas start flowing. You never know. Leveraging their cultural understanding of the workplace may help them tap into their leadership potential, and they could be leading their own remote teams in a few months.
Remote leadership isn’t about charisma; it’s about calibration.
It’s essential to know your people and adjust your style accordingly. You’re there to support them. Remember that.
The Fast-Track Onboarding System: Intensity First, Then Autonomy
One of the biggest missteps I see CEOs make is treating the onboarding process like a slow, casual chat over coffee. They ease people in, give them time to adjust, and cautiously avoid being “too intense.”
I think this is a mistake. You’re not doing anyone favors by letting them wander in ambiguity for two weeks as they meander through your business processes and systems.
My onboarding philosophy is simple, and I teach this to the CEOs I help coach:
Start fast, then give them freedom. I call this the Fast-Track Onboarding System. You start with intensity, then give them autonomy.
Here’s how it works:
- Phase 1: High-Touch Intensity
- Give them clear deliverables on Day 1.
- Show them “what great looks like” with real examples they can reference and replicate.
- Check in daily and create feedback loops.
- Teach the pace and standards of your culture as soon as possible.
- Phase 2: Pull Back Quickly
- Shift to async updates.
- Give them more responsibility and let them lead a small initiative or project.
- Encourage proactive problem-solving. You can be around to put out any major fires, but the bulk of the responsibility is on them.
- Offer guardrails, not handholding. You need to see how they do on their own. It’s their time to sink or swim.
Most people want clarity. They want to know where the finish line is and then be left to freely run toward it on their own. Remote teams are no different.
If you onboard slowly and ambiguously, you don’t build leaders. You build uncertain employees who don’t feel confident enough in themselves or the systems, so they constantly come to you for questions, which means you, as the CEO, can’t take yourself out of the daily workflows.
But if you set the tone early, then step back, you create confident operators who can lead without waiting for permission.
Conclusion
So, to summarize, these are my five go-to systems for building leaders to guide remote teams effectively:
- Systems-First Leadership: Build clarity first, then hire remote teams. Systems allow leaders to emerge naturally and lay the foundation for the team’s long-term success.
- The Extra Mile Hiring Filter: Use optional hiring tasks to spot future leaders who self-select. Those who are willing to go above and beyond are the ones you should keep your eye on.
- The Daily Pulse Method: Lightweight, frequent reporting to track reliability without micromanagement. Frequent check-ins keep everyone accountable and on-task, no matter what time zone you’re all in.
- The Cultural Intelligence Framework: Lead your team with cultural nuance, not one-size-fits-all tactics. Take the time and make the effort to understand where your remote teams are coming from so you can make them feel comfortable enough to tap into their full potential, not fade into the background.
- The Fast-Track Onboarding System: Set the tone fast, then step back and watch autonomy flourish. Hit the ground running with your new hires and see who can handle your processes early on. They might be your new leadership team.
Here’s what all five of these methods have in common:
They don’t rely on you being an “inspirational business leader” or being available to coach the entire team 1:1 forever.
They rely on architecture.
Your team’s leadership capacity doesn’t come from charisma. It comes from:
- Clean systems.
- Clear feedback loops.
- Thoughtful hiring filters.
- Cultural sensitivity.
- And onboarding that builds muscle.
You don’t “find” A-players. Instead, you design the environments that make them stand out.
This is how you stop being the operator in your business and transition to being the orchestrator.
When you finally achieve that, you’ll find real freedom for both you and your team.
