*Cet article est rédigé en anglais.

Leading at a Distance: The ACTS of Calibrated Virtual Leadership

How leaders can sustain trust, performance and well-being in remote-first teams and influence beyond their direct authority.

Remote work is no longer a temporary arrangement. As distributed teams become a permanent fixture of organizational life, leaders are discovering that the practices that worked in the office don’t always translate to the screen. A subtle shift in tone, a slower response time, a camera that stays off — these are now the cues we have to work with. So the question becomes: how do we lead with empathy, kindness and benevolence when the relational signals we used to rely on have largely disappeared?

This is the central question that drove my final EMBA research paper, which explored how leaders calibrate these three qualities in remote-first work settings. The result is a practical framework, ACTS, designed to help managers sustain both performance and well-being from a distance, and to extend influence well beyond the boundaries of formal authority.

Why this question matters

In remote settings, too little empathy can erode trust and psychological safety. Too much can blur boundaries, lower standards or quietly lead to leader burnout. Kindness without accountability can normalize underperformance, and benevolence applied unevenly can be perceived as favoritism. Although these qualities are often discussed interchangeably, their misapplication carries real consequences for teams that are physically apart but emotionally connected through screens.

As one senior leader I interviewed put it: “We are a five senses people, yet we can only use two in a remote setting — sight and sound. We definitely overcompensate to leverage these.” That overcompensation is exactly what this research set out to understand.

How the research was done

This study used an integrated qualitative methodology combining autoethnography, reflective insights drawn from my own experience leading globally distributed teams, with semi-structured interviews of five leaders and three team members across multiple business functions, geographies and seniority levels. All participants worked in fully remote-first environments. To respect confidentiality, all insights are presented anonymously and aggregated where appropriate. The aim was not statistical generalization, but transferable insights for leaders navigating similar contexts.

What the literature tells us

Research distinguishes empathy (an internal capacity to understand others), kindness (observable acts of care), and benevolence (a consistent ethical orientation toward goodwill). All three contribute to trust, engagement and psychological safety. Yet most existing work studies them separately. Few studies examine how they interact in practice, and even fewer address how leaders calibrate them when in-person cues are absent. That gap  between what theory describes and what leaders actually do remotely is where this study found its purpose.

Three patterns that emerged

Across the eight interviews, three patterns surfaced consistently:

1. Kindness, benevolence and relational awareness are the backbone of remote trust. Without them, teams become transactional and isolated.
2. Empathy risks collapsing into over-functioning when accountability is absent. Leaders who absorb too much, too often, lose effectiveness and their teams begin to test the new boundaries.
3. Remote leadership is not about more communication, but more intentional communication. Quality and consistency outperform quantity.

These patterns gave shape to the framework that emerged from the research.

Introducing the ACTS framework

ACTS stands for Authenticity, Connection, Tension and Synthesis. It is a practical lens for leaders to evaluate how they are showing up in distributed teams and a feedback loop for catching the moments when something is out of balance.

Authenticity

Authenticity is the foundation. In remote work, where a leader’s presence is mediated entirely through a screen, predictability and consistency are what build psychological safety. Authentic leaders share appropriately, listen beyond words and demonstrate the same values whether under pressure or not. Without authenticity, every other relational behavior feels performative. As one team member observed during the interviews, “Empathy has to come from the heart; it cannot be faked.”

Connection

Connection must be engineered, not assumed. Spontaneous office moments — the corridor catch-up, the shared coffee — do not exist remotely unless leaders intentionally create them. Structured one-to-ones, virtual co-working rooms, personal check-ins and visible recognition all become digital substitutes for proximity. Connection is a discipline, not a personality trait. And in a distributed team, it is the only way a sense of belonging gets built.

Tension

Tension is the dual engine of remote leadership. Care without accountability erodes performance; accountability without care erodes trust. Leaders must hold both at once, extending support while reinforcing standards, recognizing personal struggle while protecting team commitments. The research surfaced a powerful insight here: empathy without action can unintentionally feel like abandonment. Tension is not a problem to eliminate; it is a condition to navigate with intention.

Synthesis

Synthesis is what brings the framework together. It is the leader’s ability to integrate authenticity, connection and tension into a coherent identity that teams can read clearly across distance. Synthesis is the “so what” — the moment when intent, behavior and outcome align.

ACTS beyond authority: influencing teams and clients

One of the most useful aspects of the ACTS framework is that it does not depend on formal authority. Leadership in a remote-first world is increasingly exercised through influence across matrixed teams, peer relationships, cross-functional projects and client engagements where you have no direct reporting line. ACTS gives you a way to lead from any seat at the table.

Authenticity earns credibility before a title ever can. A peer or client who experiences consistency, honesty and genuine concern will follow your lead even without an org chart that says they should.

Connection turns transactional working relationships into collaborative ones. The colleague you have taken the time to understand becomes the colleague who answers your message first. The client who feels seen becomes the client who picks up the phone.

Tension, navigated well, signals professional maturity — the ability to push back constructively, hold a standard and still preserve the relationship. This is the territory where trusted advisors are made.

Synthesis, over time, builds a reputation that travels. It is what makes someone the kind of leader people want to work with, recommend and call back.

For client-facing professionals, this matters even more. Clients rarely respond to authority; they respond to trust. A consultant who shows up authentically, builds connection deliberately, navigates difficult conversations honestly and integrates these into a recognizable way of working becomes a trusted advisor, not just a vendor. In this sense, ACTS is as much a client-relationship framework as it is a team-leadership one.

What this means for leaders

A few practical takeaways for managers leading distributed teams or working across organizational boundaries:

• Treat authenticity as an operational practice, not a soft skill. Consistency is what builds the trust that distance erodes.
• Engineer connection on purpose. Schedule the informal. Replace the corridor with a structured ritual.
• Pair every act of compassion with clarity. Kindness without follow-through can feel like abandonment; kindness without accountability can quietly lower the bar.
• Recognize publicly and often. Many leaders default to fixing problems; far fewer intentionally celebrate wins.
• Watch the cues you have, not the ones you wish you had. Tone, response time, engagement patterns and camera habits all carry information.
• Take care of yourself. Remote leadership carries a hidden emotional cost, and a depleted leader cannot sustain anyone else.

A final thought

Remote leadership is not fundamentally different from in-person leadership but the conditions in which we practice it are amplified. Distance magnifies the cost of inauthenticity, weak connections and poorly managed tensions. It also magnifies the impact of intentional, human-centered behavior.

ACTS is a way to make that impact deliberate, whether you are leading a team, partnering with a peer or earning the trust of a client. In a remote-first world, leadership is not a performance. It is a practice — and the practice matters more than ever.

“We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.”

— Mary Catherine Bateson

About the author

Rose-Ann Merulla is an enterprise transformation and IT Asset Management leader with over 25 years of experience across complex, regulated environments. Her work focuses on enterprise governance, operational transformation, and the management of global IT Asset Management portfolios. This includes designing scalable operating models, compliance frameworks, and cross-functional governance practices. Throughout her career, she has partnered with executive leadership teams to align strategy, operational execution, and risk management across large organizations. A recent graduate of the Executive MBA program at McGill University / HEC Montréal, her research explored how leaders calibrate empathy, kindness, and benevolence within remote-first environments. This reflects her longstanding interest in the human dimensions of leadership, organizational trust, and sustainable team performance.

Supervisor

Professor Estelle Morin, PhD, HEC Montréal.