People often ask me how I get my teams to keep friction to a minimum, and how metrics like performance and collaboration end up naturally higher than in other teams.
Hitting those numbers is a real success worth celebrating, and it comes from the day-to-day work. But there’s something I think is essential to call out, based on my own experience, and it’s exactly what led me to reflect on, and confirm in practice, how trust actually gets built on a team.
A new kind of comfort settled in after the pandemic: solving everything over video calls, avoiding travel when possible, staying home. It makes sense, it’s cheaper and more comfortable in the short run. A few weeks ago I came back from a series of important in-person meetings with a firmer conviction than I expected: that comfort has a cost that doesn’t show up right away.
No video call replaces sharing an office. Sharing the same lunch, reading someone’s body language, noticing their reaction when something doesn’t add up, even how they hold themselves or move around a room, build a bond that survives perfectly well over remote work afterward, but is very hard to build starting out remote.
And that’s not an automatic guarantee that everything’s going to work out better. Sometimes it’s the opposite: being there is what lets you realize a collaboration isn’t flowing for a deeper reason. Sometimes two or more people, no matter how much goodwill they have, just don’t make a good team, no matter how hard you push it. Those things are also worth catching up close, not only when everything’s going well.
This isn’t the first time I’ve done this. More than once I paid for my own flight to go meet my team in person, without anyone asking me to. I tell the people I coach this often: technology lets you sustain a working relationship at a distance, but it doesn’t hand you one from scratch. Once you’ve met someone in person, a request for help stops being a message in a channel. It’s a request from someone you shared a meal with.
I push this internally too: it’s an intangible investment most organizations underrate, precisely because it never shows up in a short-term KPI.
Right now I’m applying the same logic with a client building a digital payments business. A foreign business partner we’ll need heavy technical collaboration with for a key integration is coming to visit, and I’m traveling on my own dime to spend a day with him before the hard work starts. Not because the technical part requires it. Because the trust built that day is what holds up the whole integration later, when the first hard problem shows up.
None of this is an argument against remote work. It’s a reminder that there’s an investment comfort can’t replace, and it’s worth making, literally, when the relationship calls for it.