In this post: Tony Greco has led remote teams for 20 years, starting in a makeshift office under his basement stairs. He explains how predictable communication, shared goals, and honest conversation keep distributed teams aligned and accountable when no one shares a hallway.
Tony Greco's first remote job came with a desk under a staircase. He worked from a makeshift office in his basement, making phone calls because video meetings did not exist yet. There was no little light to show whether someone was online, so he learned to lead people he could not see.
Twenty years later, Greco has managed teams spread across continents and time zones, including at the USGA and Wyndham Hotels. His central lesson for building alignment and accountability across remote teams is that distance punishes quiet leaders.
"Silence creates gaps, so if they're not hearing from me or hearing from the organization, they're going to fill that silence with assumptions," Greco said on Activating Greatness, the leadership podcast from Velocity Advisory Group. If those assumptions are wrong, the team goes down a rabbit hole, and the leader has to climb out of it.
What remote teams lose, Greco said, is "leadership or team building by osmosis": the walk to the water cooler, the shared lunch, the casual conversation that happens because people sit near each other. Without proximity, those moments have to be built on purpose.
His structure is predictable and repeatable. He holds a one-on-one with every team member each week. The full team meets once a month with a real agenda, which anyone can add to, and anything that could be handled by email stays out of the meeting. Two or three times a year, the group gathers in person around a work activity.
One of those gatherings is for goals. Each person's goals go up on a spreadsheet that everyone can see, and the team discusses whether each one supports the strategy of the organization and the department. Everyone weighs in on everyone else's goals. Twice or three times a year, the goals go back on the wall for a check on who is struggling and who can help.
"There's no surprises, there's no secrets, there's no little side projects going on," he said.
At Wyndham, Greco was asked to pull revenue managers from Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and North America into a single global team. They knew of each other but had never worked together.
He started with a behavioral profile assessment so each person understood their own style and their colleagues'. Then he brought everyone to Orlando for a scavenger hunt, with teams intentionally mixed across continents. Revenue managers are competitive, he noted, so they played to win.
The real work came next. Greco grouped people by strength to build a department-wide strategy. Those who were good at conceptualizing drafted the framework, and those who were good at structuring data took the next stage. The strategy belonged to everyone, and the relationships outlasted the exercise. When someone hit a business problem, they called a counterpart in Australia instead of calling Greco.
"My job is to remove roadblocks, not tell them how to solve problems," he said. His team members generally know far more about their jobs than he does.
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Use it to set a predictable rhythm of one-on-ones, team meetings, and in-person gatherings, and to keep shared goals visible all year.
Greco's most important weekly task is the one-on-one. "I never deprioritize that no matter where I am in the world," he said. He moves the time to fit different time zones, but the meeting happens.
His team did not believe that at first. When people said they were too busy to meet, he told them to find a time. "As a leader you can put a priority out there, but then if you don't ever ask about it and follow up on it, it's not really a priority," he said. Over time, they came to trust that he cared about what they had to say.
The meetings belong to the team member. Some want to talk about their kids and their weekend. Others dive straight into business. Some weeks it is 15 minutes. Others it runs past half an hour.
"Silence creates gaps, so if they're not hearing from me or hearing from the organization, they're going to fill that silence with assumptions."
Tony Greco, Senior Leader of Global and Remote Teams
Greco admits he micromanaged when he was younger, asking what people had done each week. He learned to hand over a project, ask to hear when it was done, and check in once or twice along the way. With time zones spanning 12 hours or more, he stopped caring what hours people worked.
When someone struggled, he coached that person instead of changing the process and punishing everybody. Some people need help building the self-discipline remote work demands. He has told team members to block time on their calendar for focused work and to turn off email from 9:30 to 11:30.
At a recent in-person meeting, his team sat around an Airbnb kitchen table after cooking breakfast together. He asked each person when they are at their best at work and when they struggle most. "I intuitively knew that, but I never actually asked the question out loud," he said. Hearing the answers, teammates rescheduled their conversations around school bus pickups and peak hours. Brooke Page-Thompson has argued that every manager should ask that question, as part of the culture shift organizations need.
Strategy stays alive because Greco keeps putting it on the agenda, about every third month, with a midyear check on whether the goals still make sense. He works to filter new priorities from above. When one does come down, he brings it to the team and asks where it fits. If something goes on the list, something else comes off.
"My team knows I'm sometimes brutally honest with them," he said. "They also know we have a circle of trust." They can push back, and sometimes they tell him he is wrong. He takes the input and makes the call. "At the end of the day I need to make the decision," he said, but the team always knows why. Ryan Payne made a similar case for the conversation advantage.
Tony Greco builds alignment through predictable, repeatable communication: weekly one-on-ones with every team member, a monthly team meeting with a set agenda, and two or three in-person gatherings each year. During one of those gatherings, the team posts everyone's goals on a shared spreadsheet and checks each one against the organization's strategy. Revisiting those goals throughout the year means there are no surprises, no secrets, and no side projects pulling people in different directions.
Greco meets with each direct report every week and calls those meetings the most important thing he does. He moves them across time zones but never deprioritizes them. He lets each person decide how to use the time, whether that means personal conversation or business. He learned that if a leader does not protect and follow up on a priority, the team will not treat it as one.
Greco gives people a project or goal, asks them to report when it is done, and checks in once or twice along the way. He does not track the hours people work. When someone struggles, he coaches that individual instead of adding rules for the whole team. That can mean helping the person block focused time on a calendar or turn off email for part of the morning.
Greco brings new priorities to his team openly and asks how each one fits the existing strategy. If a new priority is added, he asks what should come off the list and who will lead it. He shares his own view, even when he doubts the idea, and invites the team to push back. He makes the final decision, but the team always knows the reasoning behind it.
HOW VELOCITY HELPS
Greco warns that silence on a distributed team fills with assumptions, and he learned the most about his people by asking a simple question out loud. Velocity's Culture & Engagement work asks those questions at scale through culture assessments, engagement surveys, and stakeholder interviews, then builds on the findings in the High Performance Culture Workshop. Leaders of remote and regional teams gain a clear view of what their people experience before those gaps turn into misalignment.
The best advice Greco received came from one of his first bosses: treat people the way you want to be treated. He followed it for years before revising it. "Treat people how they want to be treated, not how I want to be treated," he said. A direct leader, he realized, cannot assume everyone wants directness.
He admits the revision costs effort. With eight direct reports, a leader has to understand eight personalities. But the relationships and the work, he said, are "so much more productive that way." Remote leadership rewards the leader who does that work on purpose.
Hear Tony Greco's full conversation with host Alec McChesney on Activating Greatness. Watch on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Follow Tony on LinkedIn.
FREE GUIDE
Greco's daily habit is preparation: every meeting gets 24 hours' notice so he can arrive ready. This short framework shows how preparation, transparency, and honest conflict build trust across regional and remote teams.