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There is a version of leadership that says you can run anything from anywhere, as long as you are disciplined about how you communicate. I believed it, because the job required me to. When the people you are responsible for are spread across many places and many clocks, you cannot be in all of the rooms, so you make your peace with the screen and you get good at it. You build the cadence. The standing calls, the written updates, the careful habit of saying the important thing twice so that no one can miss it. You tell yourself, correctly, that a leader who overcommunicates is better than one who assumes people already know. And for the ordinary running of a business, that is completely true. Distance is a logistics problem, and logistics problems have solutions.

So you solve them. You learn the rhythm of the clock, whose morning is your night, which conversations can wait for the overlap and which cannot. You become fluent in the medium. You believe, with good evidence, that you are leading well from far away, because the work is getting done and the updates are landing and no one is confused about the plan. Most of the time, you are right.

Then something happens that is not ordinary. The ground under a team shifts. A number comes in wrong, or a decision lands badly, or a piece of news arrives that makes people quietly begin to wonder whether they are safe. And you do exactly what you have trained yourself to do. You get on the calls as fast as you can, you bring everything you have, you say the true and steady thing, and you say it more than once because you know how much it matters right now. And you watch it not do what it would have done if you had been standing in the room.

The words are identical. That is the part that took me a long time to understand. You can say the exact sentence you would have said in person, with the same conviction, and on a screen it carries a fraction of the weight.

In the room, your presence is doing something underneath the words that you never had to think about, because it was free and automatic. It is quietly telling everyone that you are here, that you did not send a delegate or a message, that whatever this is, you are in it with them. That signal is what dissolves the specific fear that shows up when things feel unsteady, which is the fear that you are in this alone. And it is the one signal a screen cannot carry, no matter how good your words are.

This is why overcommunication does not close the gap, and why I spent too long trying to close it that way. I thought that if the words were not landing, I needed more of them, clearer ones, more often. But the gap was never an information problem. People were not unsteady because they lacked facts. They were unsteady because the ground was moving and the person who was supposed to be steady with them was a face on a screen who would blink out in an hour while they stayed in the building carrying it. No volume of words reaches that. Presence is not information. It is gravity, and you cannot transmit gravity through a camera.

Here is the part that connects to everything else. The ground moves more often than it used to, in businesses that are quietly tightening. When someone leaves and the role is not refilled but absorbed into the people who remain, the ones who stay are carrying more than they were, and they are carrying it with a little less certainty that anyone is coming to help. That kind of weight is easy to see when you are in the room, because you can feel it in how people move and in what they stop saying. From eight time zones away, you cannot feel it at all. You see the work still getting done and you conclude that everyone is fine, and the quiet accumulation of too much on too few goes on underneath your updates, invisible, until it surfaces as someone good and tired handing you a resignation you never saw coming.

That is the tax. Not the miles and not the clock, which are only the bill you already know about. The real tax is that the part of leadership that used to be free, the steadying you did simply by being present when it counted, now costs you something you cannot always pay, and its absence compounds in the dark. You are still leading. You are just leading with the one instrument that did half the work taken out of your hands, and nobody writes that line into the plan.

So I stopped trying to overcommunicate my way across the distance, because that was effort spent on the wrong problem. I started spending it instead on being ruthless about which moments were big enough that I had to be in the room in person, whatever the calendar said, because some things cannot be sent. You can only be there, or fail to be, and the failure is quiet every time.

The only distance anyone measures is the one in the travel budget.

See you every other Tuesday.

~ Alicia

P.S. If you're leading from a distance right now, the tax is already adding up, whether or not you can see it. I built a short audit that reads what it's costing you before it surfaces as someone good handing you a resignation you never saw coming. Download it below.