Remember when leading remote teams was exotic? It meant that your organization had unusual reach, scale or operations. Maybe you oversaw a team of security managers for worldwide distribution centers at Amazon or globally dispersed cybersecurity architects at Microsoft.

In the hybrid work era, it’s just another day (not) at the office.

We used to lead from the front: on the floor of the GSOC, at the perimeter, or in the corner office with a whiteboard full of emergency protocols. According to Mike Brzozowski, who has led global teams at a past security role in Canada and a current one in Germany, the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything.

“Before the pandemic,” he says, “having a dispersed team was exceptional. Then, quarantines, social distancing, and software like Teams and Zoom made remote work the norm, and with it introduced widespread responsibility for leading remote teams.”

Then companies started preferring remote teams in many cases.

“Employers discovered that untethering staff from a physical workplace expanded the talent pool, reduced overhead costs, and enabled companies to tailor salaries to specific locations,” among other efficiencies it generated, adds Brzozowski.

It’s true. It’s almost surprising today to not have geographically distant employees. I live in Washington, D.C., and my team members are in New Jersey, New York, Dallas, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, and London. We see each other in person at client sites and conferences.

Pre-COVID, presence mattered. It still does — but in different ways. As remote and hybrid work reshape how organizations function, security leaders face a new reality: managing decentralized teams across time zones, functions, and cultures without daily, face-to-face engagement.

In physical security, where decision-making can’t always wait for a quorum, remote leadership poses unique challenges. You can’t inspire with charisma in a chat thread. You can’t read fatigue through a phone line. And you can’t reinforce culture with a hallway chat when your team operates in five languages across three continents.

And yet, security leadership in a dispersed world isn’t just possible — it’s necessary. It requires moving beyond security’s beloved command-and-control model and embracing leadership built on trust, transparency, and shared mission.

Culture is easy to talk about and hard to build, especially when your team lacks a shared physical space. But culture doesn’t require a campus. It requires clarity. Security leaders should codify the values that matter — integrity, discretion, vigilance—and articulate how those show up in different roles. How does “resilience” look for a part-time security officer in Manila versus an executive protection analyst in London?

In a collocated environment, leadership can thrive on proximity. You overhear a conversation, course-correct in real time, or brainstorm over coffee. In distributed teams, that ambient awareness vanishes. Danielle Weddepohl, Director of Public Safety and Emergency Management at George Brown College in Toronto, laments the lost art of shooting the breeze around the water cooler, where you could both check in on your colleagues and learn valuable information. You need systems to replace those lost opportunities.

Visibility tools can help. Dashboards and communication platforms are useful when they align teams around common priorities.

But the remote environment strips away context. A terse Slack message can be read as curt. A camera-off Zoom call feels impersonal and perhaps unprofessional. Silence, in remote teams, often breeds ambiguity, and ambiguity corrodes trust.

Leaders must therefore overcommunicate — thoughtfully. Asynchronous channels (email, shared docs, project management apps, texts, etc.) offer clarity. Synchronous ones (calls, video chats) offer connection. Use both.

Mind your tone. Feedback that feels constructive in person can land harshly in writing. I recently emailed a colleague, telling him that a change he was pushing for would be delayed a week while I socialized it with our team. His response was unusually terse: “OK, fine.” That read “angry” to me. I happened to see him a couple of days later and he wasn’t upset at all.

If your role requires critique, accompany it with curiosity: “How did you arrive at this decision?” goes further than “Why did this happen?”

Remote leadership shouldn’t translate into absentee management. But neither should it imply micromanagement.

We must empower regional and functional leads to own their decisions. Give them the context they need — risk appetite and exposure, threat posture, executive expectations, critical asset inventories, so they can make real-time calls without second-guessing. This is not a delegation of tasks but a delegation of trust.

Still, autonomy is not abandonment. Leaders must remain accessible, especially during incidents or escalations.

The most dangerous myth in remote leadership is that professionalism should eclipse personal connection. Security is a relational business. Whether you’re managing a residential patrol team or an intelligence desk, your people need to know they’re seen. That starts with asking about their families, their career goals, even their frustrations.

Remote environments often create isolation, especially for frontline staff. The antidote isn’t technology, at least not at first. It’s empathy. If you’re only checking in when something goes wrong, you’re not leading, you’re auditing.

“You should be connecting with, leading, guiding, inspiring and learning from your people at all times. That’s leadership,” says Matt Dumpert, who heads Kroll’s ESRM practice and routinely deals with staff, partners, and issues worldwide. “You should be studying their work environment and always looking for improvements, efficiencies, tools, training and opportunities for growth. Lead from the front and demonstrate the type of behavior your team needs to be successful.”

Despite President Trump’s muster of the federal workforce back to the office, remote and hybrid work seem to be here to stay. Leadership is still local; local to the relationships you build, the values you model, and the consistency with which you show up.

Remote leadership is exotic no more. It’s not a shift in tactics. It’s a shift in mindset. For security leaders, remote is the new perimeter.