Chief Change Officer
#352 Wayne Turmel: Leading Without Micromanaging in the Hybrid Mess
Wed, 7 May 2025
Hybrid work was supposed to be the future—but it’s feeling more like a tug-of-war.Wayne Turmel, co-author of The Long-Distance Leader, has spent two decades studying how we lead across distance—and what falls apart when we don’t. In this episode, Wayne explains why most return-to-office plans are more negotiation than strategy, how unexamined proximity bias silently shapes promotions, and why hybrid leadership isn’t about place—it’s about intentionality.Whether you’re managing global teams or trying to avoid burnout-by-Zoom, this conversation will help you rethink what modern leadership actually requires—and how to do it without micromanaging or burning people out.Key Highlights of Our Interview:Leadership Before Location: The First Rule of Remote Work“If you’re a weak leader in person, remote will make it worse. Hybrid just exposes the cracks faster.”Genghis Khan Didn’t Need WebEx—You Don’t Need Chaos“Leading from afar isn’t new. But today, we confuse tech tools with leadership itself.”Proximity Bias: The Promotion No One Talks About“People in the office get more attention—whether we mean to favor them or not. That’s not strategy. That’s inertia.”Why Hybrid Isn’t Really Hybrid“Three-day compromises aren’t hybrid strategies. Most companies are just seeing how far they can push before people quit.”Deep Work, Loud Offices, and Cake in the Break Room“Don’t bring people back just to distract them. Save the office for coaching, collaboration, and trust-building.”Synchronous vs. Asynchronous: It’s About Time (Literally)“If you’re clocking in remotely on someone else’s schedule, you’re not working hybrid—you’re just working differently.”Amazon, Turnover, and the Future of Micromanagement“With 150% annual churn, maybe it’s not a location problem. Maybe it’s a leadership one.”High Finance vs. High Flexibility“Jamie Dimon’s playbook may work for Wall Street. But others are asking: does it have to be that way?”_________________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Wayne Turmel --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.18 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>170,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: What is long-distance leadership and why is it important?
Today, I'm sitting down with Wayne Turmal to dive into a crucial topic, long-distance leadership, in an era where communication technology is rapidly evolving for both workers and leaders. Yes, you heard that right. Long-distance leadership, not long-distance relationships.
For just like with any relationship, maintaining, nurturing, and fixing long-distance leadership is far from straightforward. This conversation couldn't be more timely. When we recorded this episode, Amazon's CEO had just announced that their RTO return to office policy for 2025. And so far, the media narrative surrounding it hasn't been exactly positive.
So how can Wang and his team provide solutions as remote and hybrid work models continue to change shape? Let's find out.
Thank you for having me.
Chapter 2: How did Wayne Turmel become an expert in remote leadership?
This is really exciting, Vince. Wayne, let's start with a bit of your background. How does your past experiences make you the perfect fit to write several books about long-distance leadership and communication for leaders?
Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to intentionally stop myself from going down to Pet Your Rabbit holes because it has been a long winding trip. But the short answer is that I'm originally from Canada while I was in school studying journalism as a stage performer and eventually, like most stage performers, had to get a real job in the real world.
And I started in the presentation skills arena because I learned at the age of eight how powerful it was to be able to communicate. That the number one factor in how you're perceived as an executive, as an employee, is your ability to communicate. I was always fascinated by that. And that's where I started from. And I started in traditional stand at the front of the room presentation skills.
But about 20 years ago, realized that electronic communication at the time, WebEx was the main tool. was going to change how we work and so while i was teaching and studying leadership and other things the electronic communication really became my focus so i've been studying that for over 20 years and then About 10 years ago, Devin Eikenberry and I merged. He bought my company.
We merged his expertise with traditional, what we think of as leadership skills, and my expertise in the remote and electronic world. We now have, three books later, established ourselves really as leaders in the field, if that doesn't sound too arrogant. I was just going to say, the big thing for me is that I learned so early that how you communicate is how you're perceived.
And so many people are subject matter experts. They're incredibly smart, but they struggle taking what's in their head and putting it in the minds of their customers, their employees, and other people. As consultants, you know your business. My job is to help you communicate that to the world.
What exactly does long-distance leadership mean? How would you define it?
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Chapter 3: What does long-distance leadership mean in a historical context?
Yeah, we get awfully hung up on, are my people remote? Are they in the office? Long distance leadership is taking what we know makes good leaders and always has and applying it when you are not always or sometimes ever in the same physical space as the people that you lead. And it's funny because there has always been some version of long distance leadership. Genghis Khan ruled half the world.
and never held a WebEx meeting. Julius Caesar did great out in the field. It's when he went back to the office that things went a little bit pear-shaped. So we've always had to find ways to do this. And as technology has changed over the years, it's becoming both more common and easier, technically easier to do. But technology changes how we as humans communicate.
And so if we aren't aware of those dynamics, it's very easy to get stressed or even lost in the weeds and not do the things that we know leaders need to do. The role of long distance leader It's not so much what you do, because if you think about the roles of a leader, a manager, an entrepreneur, you need to hire, you need to train, you need to delegate, you need to coach. Yep.
All those things need to happen. But how we do it becomes different when we're mitigated and mediated by technology. So our job is to help leaders understand the nuances and adjust their behavior based on the circumstances in which they find themselves.
How have these changes helped or disrupted the way we lead and manage teams? In other words, how have you seen long-distance leadership evolve? What changes have you noticed in terms of how it works, how fast it's changing, and the direction it's heading?
Our first rule in our book is think leadership first, location second. We believe if you think of what you need to do as a leader, you'll find a way to make it work. If you are not confident in yourself as a leader, if you do not
exhibit great leadership behaviors, remote is going to make it harder because if I struggle to give people feedback on a regular basis, if I'm in the office with them, I'm going to physically see them and my brain goes, aha, that's Vince. I should talk to him about X. If we're working remotely and I don't see you, I may not give you the feedback that you need in a timely manner.
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Chapter 4: How has remote leadership evolved in recent years?
That's going to impact the quality of your work. It's going to impact the quality of our relationship. And ultimately, it's going to impact the quality of the team. So we have to be more mindful of including
all the members of the team no matter where they are and we don't get the benefit of physical proximity so i still need to coach you i still need to include you and delegate you tasks and check on your work and all those things still need to happen But I need to be more mindful and intentional about making that happen.
Or we had a conversation a week ago and our next team meeting is two weeks from now. And I may not communicate with you during all that time. A lot can happen. If I have not developed a relationship with you where you're comfortable coming to me if you have a question, I'm going to assume that everything is fine because you didn't say anything.
As I said, what we have to do, the individual tasks that we have to do as leaders are the same as they've always been. But there is this piece of intentionality and making sure that we have the information flow that we need, but also the relationship that we need. Trust, proactivity, avoiding micromanagement. Those kinds of things are different in degree in a long distance work relationship.
And as we begin to settle into what we're calling hybrid work, which usually isn't hybrid work, but that's a different discussion where you've got some people in the office and some people not, and some are in a couple of days. We develop another layer of challenges, which are things like proximity bias, where the people in the office get our attention.
The people in the office are given perhaps more opportunities and considered more valuable than the people who are not. And that can impact the team negatively as well. One thing that we found before COVID was the rules for how do you get promoted and how do you get your performance evaluation? All those things favored the people who were in the office most often, intentionally or unintentionally.
And in a little bit, I think we're going to talk about some instances where companies make very specific decisions about these things. If you're consciously deciding that the people in the office get the advantage, that's fine. That's a legitimate business decision. The problem is when it's not a conscious decision.
When you think you're being equitable to all your employees, no matter where they are, And yet the people in the office feel very differently than the people who are working remotely. So there's a level of intentionality and mindfulness to remote work that good leaders are probably doing very well anyway.
And poor leaders are the ones where the gap becomes wider and wider between the good leaders and the poor leaders. Everybody listening to this has worked for people who are okay or maybe they're not okay. But we also immediately have those leaders in our lives that we go, that's the guy, right? That's the person that we want to follow.
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Chapter 5: What challenges does hybrid work present to leaders?
That's a great question, because the first edition, of course, came out pre-COVID. It came out in 2018, and it was very well received. It sold very well. We're in seven languages, including Cantonese and Mandarin and Korean and Polish and Lord knows what all else. But the world has changed a little bit. I think there are two, maybe two and a half primary things.
In terms of the book itself, it's about 25% new or updated material. And it falls into two areas. The first, as you say, is the technology. Technology has just changed. When we wrote the book, Zoom was not a thing. Skype for Business was Microsoft's enterprise tool. Now it's Microsoft Teams.
So while we are not a technology book and we don't want to get hung up on the technology, the way that we work is different now than it was six years ago. So the technology is certainly a piece of it. The second piece is,
is that now that we've gone through this change more people in north america for example 50 of the workforce worked from home at least part-time some of the time during covet which means that people have a lot more experience now including senior leaders Pre-COVID, many senior leaders had never worked anywhere other than the office before.
So they had no frame of reference to say, oh, people can be successful, they can be productive. And so I want more people to have experience. So as we started to say, are we going to return to the office? Are we not going to return to the office? We're in this state of flux. As I said, we're in the middle of this seismic change that we're all trying to figure out.
And the answer for many people has been, we're going to get people to come back to the office some of the time. The word that they use is hybrid. It's not really hybrid. What most organizations have done is not so much a strategy as it is a hostage negotiation. The company says, how much can we make them come back to the office before they quit? And there's too much turnover and too much chaos.
And the employees are saying, how much can we resist going back to the office before we get fired? And I guess we've settled on three days a week. And there you are. That's a compromise. It might be working for you. But it's not really a strategy. Hybrid work in its most effective form, and we're seeing this in organizations, is more than just what work gets done where.
It includes the concept of time. What work gets done where and when. For example, do you really have a hybrid strategy if I'm working from home, but I have to log on at the same time as all of my peers in the office get there and log off at the same time? Does it matter if I'm doing deep thought analytical work that I do that between the hours of nine and five New York time?
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Chapter 6: What updates are included in the second edition of Wayne's book?
We are a hybrid organization with Kevin Eikenberry Group. I'm three hours time difference from Kevin in Indiana. There are a number of hours a day that we overlap, that we're synchronous. But he doesn't manage my time.
If I want to start very early in the morning and knock off in the afternoon, as long as my work gets done, as long as the clients are getting service, as long as my teammates can reach me in a effective manner, that works for us. And that's where what we call hybrid work really becomes something different, the balance of synchronous and asynchronous work.
What we're hearing from our clients, for example, is we want people to come in three days a week so that they have time to collaborate and get to know each other and brainstorm. That sounds great in theory. What we're hearing though is people are complaining when they go into the office
Oh, I can't get any work done because people are talking to me and there's noise in the office and people are stopping by my desk constantly. And there's cake in the break room because it's Alice's birthday and I have to go deal with that. And then when I work from home, I can't really get any work done because I'm on Zoom calls from morning till night.
That's the result of not being intentional about what work gets done where, when. You're right. If your job is to check things off your task list, going into the office may not be the best way to get those tasks completed. It doesn't mean there isn't important work that has to happen there. So how about...
you decide all the meetings that I have, or as many as possible, are going to take place when we're all together, right? As a leader, I'm gonna do my coaching sessions when people are in the office and we can be face-to-face. And on the days when they're not in the office,
I'm not going to have them on meetings from morning till night because that's when they're going to do that task completion, getting stuff done, deep focused thought that is best done uninterrupted. And if they want to do that at eight o'clock at night when the kids go to bed because they can think better, I don't care. As long as that report is in on time,
It's up to the quality and standard that we expect. And you are available to your teammates and adding to the value of the team. Now that's a hybrid solution as opposed to merely a compromise.
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Chapter 7: Why are current hybrid work strategies often flawed?
This interview feels super timely, especially with Amazon CEO announcing that starting in 2025, Corporate staff will return to a five-day work week. There's been a lot of fuss around this. So far, the reaction has been mostly negative. Some people say it's the end of remote work. Others say they will quit over it. What's your personal take on this?
Or let's imagine if Amazon invited you to help with this transition, how would you apply your leadership models to this situation? Maybe you can give us a quick overview of your models and how they could fit into Amazon's latest development?
Okay, so the first thing is to say we can help them because even though I'm here talking about long distance leadership, the Kevin Eikenberry group as a whole focuses on leadership. And so there's all of Kevin's remarkable leadership, which is in the DNA of our remote content.
and our remote content is totally consistent with the remarkable leadership so we can address anything the second thing is that we often get lumped in with the remote work zealots the people death to the office and the four-day work week and all of that and while we certainly embrace that as an option We believe that every organization is different and needs to do what it does.
Amazon intentionally has a very 20th century factory model. The nature of what they do, it's 90% warehouses and deliveries. Those are in-person, pick it up, stock the shelves, in-person functions. They also, by the way, have 150% turnover every year. They churn and burn people and have throughout their entire history. That is their business model.
And so if they decide this is what we're going to do, it's easy to say we're coming back to the office and so we have no remote employees, but that's not true. If I am a regional manager, I might have employees in 12 different warehouses. We are not physically together. We might be working the same hours, but I can't see what you're doing in each of those locations.
So it's really important that you get back to, that you don't get hung up on the fact that we're not all in the same place. If we are in the same place, great. We need to think like leaders, right? We need to coach and present the vision and give feedback and...
all of that stuff and if i have people who are in different locations i need to exhibit those exact same behaviors adjusting for the difference the distance and so we would go back to why do you have 150 turnover every year we know that people don't quit jobs they quit bosses
We know that when leaders exhibit good coaching, good feedback, fairness, all the things that good leaders do, those teams tend to have less turnover and less chaos. So let's improve the leadership mindset of everybody from the new supervisor to The skills of moving from a employee to a leader need to be trained and coached and carefully defined.
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