I’m sure by now you have heard the term at least once: workforce multiplier; the idea that a person, process or product allows a team to get more done by eliminating some impairment or by enabling more efficient or valuable work. In the workplace, leadership is one of the most critical, and strangely enough, oft overlooked force multipliers.

The idea isn’t new and like many strategic terms originates in military science. Even before its first formal use, the concepts of enabling or driving efficiency and thereby driving increased work date back to the age of the first Roman Republic.

Becoming a force multiplier is hard enough, but nowadays you must be able to do it remotely, because let’s face it: half of us, myself included, never want to step foot in an office again. This way of working offers employees the chance to take their careers into their own hands, while also giving employers access to a wider pool of talent due to the flexible hiring policies.

Remote work means employees can look after their relationships with family and friends better; they can also focus on personal health goals more easily. For employers, remote working saves them money on office space and other overheads associated with full-time workers, like healthcare benefits or pension contributions.

Conventional wisdom might tell you that managing remote teams is challenging because you cannot be with them all the time. This is, to be perfectly clear, micro-manager bullshit. Successful teams don’t need you present, they need you need to make them feel like they are part of the team and that they know what is going on. You could see a direct reports once a year and still accomplish this, although, I strongly recommend against that.

Force multiplication leadership is about servitude, empowerment, and information. As a leader your toil should be unblocking, enabling, and streamlining your team’s work. Whether that means removing blockers, automating grind, or increasing capacity. As a leader your job isn’t to solve all your team’s problems, it to give them the tools and support they need to solve their own problems, and the problems you give them, however they see fit.

Bottom line, if you must tell your team what to do every day, you have failed spectacularly as a leader. Instead leverage collaboration, create clear and actionable goals for them to achieve, and work with them to decompose those actionable goals into achievable steps.

And you can do all of this remotely, no part of this requires you be in the same room as your team, but it does require an extra effort in collaborative communication. Its not about face-to-face zoom meetings, but ensuring that information and goals are properly communicated, and that there is a strong sense of belonging and camaraderie.

Speaking of comrades, the blog post was made with the help of my AI writing assistant. Good Bot.

Distance Leadership: Being a workforce multiplier for remote teams