For years, leadership in IT – especially in the sales channels – was based on visibility. A good manager was ‘on the spot’, knew the rhythm of the team, was in meetings with customers, and his or her presence gave the signal: ‘I am in control of the situation’. Today, this approach is losing its raison d’être.
In the hybrid model, physical presence has lost its importance as a measure of engagement. As one sales channel director at a major vendor points out, “the fact that someone is logged on from 8am to 5pm means absolutely nothing anymore – except that they know where to click”. In the new paradigm, it’s not so much ‘being’ that counts, but the impact – the tangible effect that is left behind by a leader on the team, even when that leader is not constantly visible.
This represents a shift towards what is known as outcome-based leadership – a management style based on results, not on time spent online. The leader is no longer the gatekeeper of presence, but the designer of an environment where people know what they need to achieve and why it is important. A conscious withdrawal from micromanagement is today not a sign of lack of control, but of leadership competence.
A change can also be seen in the approach to metrics. IT companies are increasingly moving away from measuring activity (e.g. number of meetings or logins) to measuring impact: how a person contributes to a common goal, regardless of where they work. This requires not only trust from leaders, but also a new discipline – because managing impact without understanding the context can lead as much to burnout as to success.
In a nutshell: the leader used to be the first to arrive at the office. Today, he is the one who refreshes the dashboard last.
New tools, new rituals
In a world where office coffee has been replaced by status on Teams, leaders need to reinvent leadership – not from the ground up, but from the interface. The tools that were meant to be a support have now become the space in which all team dynamics take place. Only that mere presence on Slack is not enough to build a culture of collaboration.
The companies that do best in a hybrid environment have stopped treating tools as ‘communicators’ and started treating them as behavioural architectures, for example by abandoning regular online meetings in favour of video reporting. Such micro-innovations are not just about convenience – they also signal to the team: “I trust you, but I expect clear communication and measurable results”. Instead of incessant check-ins, asynchronous rituals are emerging – e.g. Monday updates in Notion, Friday summaries in the company’s Slack channel, or fixed KPI dashboards in Power BI that each team member updates independently.
Interestingly, it is the tools that today force a new kind of transparency. In the office model, some things could be ‘done on occasion’. In the hybrid, there is no opportunity – there is either intention or silence. This means that the leader must not only set the tone of communication, but also design the moments of interaction. In some companies, for example, he uses ‘Office Hours’ – the leader’s open hours on Teams, where anyone can ‘drop in’ without arranging a meeting.
The new rituals are less spectacular but often more effective. Instead of one big presentation once a month, the team lives a steady rhythm: mini-feedbacks, quick iterations, clear goals. A leader who understands this rhythm no longer needs to supervise the work on a daily basis – all he or she has to do is build a system that regulates itself.
Leader as mood curator
Until recently, the tone in a team was set informally: a joke in the kitchen, a sigh after a difficult client, a supervisor’s reaction after a demo with a partner. In a hybrid environment, these soft signals have either disappeared or become distorted. As a result, leaders who once ‘felt the team’ now often lead blindly – unless they learn a new role: mood curator.
In channel companies, where the work cycle tends to be highly task-based, it is easy to overlook the fact that the team functions not only because of the tools, but also because of the energy – that hard-to-capture mix of commitment, sense of purpose and simple affection for colleagues. In a hybrid world, it is the leader who is responsible for maintaining this atmosphere. Not by organising online quizzes or sending emoticons, but by being attentive to micro-interactions.
A good hybrid leader doesn’t wait for the quarterly summary to find out that something is ‘off’. Instead, he or she uses every channel – status in Teams, activity in comments, how goals are formulated – as a source of sentiment information. At one MSP, the leader of the technical department started every 1:1 conversation by asking “how do you feel about what we’re doing today?”. It doesn’t sound like a revolution, but after a few weeks it changed the way the team shared feedback.
Good IT leaders know that sentiment is not just a soft background to the ‘real work’. They determine whether people stay for the long term, whether they initiate or just execute. A team that does not feel a sense of purpose will not look for solutions – only tasks.
Being a mood curator is also about being able to read the context and respond accordingly. When the team is working at high speed for weeks on end, a good leader doesn’t motivate, he slows down. When frustration arises – he doesn’t keep quiet, but shows that he sees and understands. This is a subtle but increasingly crucial leadership competency.
In an era of boards, dashboards and statuses, empathy is becoming the new source of competitive advantage. And the leader who can nurture the climate before addressing the results – often achieves both.
Remote charisma – is it even possible?
In the traditional leadership model, a leader’s charisma often ‘got the job done’. All it took was confidence in the room, a quick briefing in the corridor, a strong voice in a meeting with partners. Today, when the voice from Teams interrupts and the camera shows only the head in the home LED light, the natural question is: does charisma even remotely work?
The answer is not intuitive, but surprisingly unequivocal: yes – as long as the leader can switch from the ‘wow’ effect to the consistency effect. In a hybrid world, it is not who speaks the loudest that wins, but who speaks the clearest. Instead of one strong presentation once a quarter, what matters is whether the leader’s message remains consistent through dozens of small interactions: emails, comments, chat responses.
As the practice of technology companies shows, remote charisma is based not on expression but on intentionality. A leader who runs the camera with meaning, speaks succinctly and does not waste the team’s time – becomes more ‘present’ than one who tries to mimic the old office energy.
Remote charisma is not about “performing”. – is about being legible. The team needs to know what the leader believes in, what is important to them and what decision they will make when things get unclear. In a distributed environment, this predictability is the new version of confidence.
If charisma was loud and showy in the office era, it is quiet and precise in the hybrid era. And that is why, increasingly, what is required of a leader is not stage magnetism, but the ability to build a clear message that stays with the team long after the call is over.
