Developing leaders at a distance: three remote teams, six promotions

Over three years at Amazon I built and led three distributed teams in sequence across Global Robotics and Amazon Web Services, each of eight to ten people, plus a 21 person quality team I led for about six months, all spread across geographies with no conference room to pull anyone into. The assignment was to deliver programs the business depended on. The harder assignment, the one nobody writes down, was to develop people in an environment where the coffee chats, hallway escalations, and in-office mentorship that managers had always relied on no longer existed.

The situation

I also inherited a few structural challenges: some people whose roles no longer fit their strengths, and development that had taken a back seat to the pace of delivery. Remote work makes both easy to defer, and growth conversations quietly become something for next quarter.

What I did

I led with a deliberate operating model rather than good intentions. Every team member had an individual development plan with leading and lagging indicators, a weekly one-on-one, an assigned mentor, and daily stand-ups to keep cross-pollination alive despite the distance. I committed to seeing every person face to face at least quarterly, because remote could not become the excuse for not knowing the people I led. And my posture on talent decisions was explicit: promote the people ready to be promoted, redirect people whose roles no longer fit into places they could succeed, and protect the team’s standards when a role was not working.

The clearest example is a Level 5 program manager I hired in early 2022. He came in with a strong technical background but into a non-technical role, and his ambition was a technical leadership track. I believed he could get there with the right scaffolding, so I built it deliberately: a stretch assignment early, building a department-wide operational excellence mechanism that required buy-in from department heads down to frontline associates, a structured 30-60-90 day plan, weekly one-on-ones focused on judgment rather than status, and support in drafting a white paper that earned senior leader alignment. When I was promoted into another organization, I sponsored his transfer and kept mentoring him there. Within eighteen months of his hire he was promoted twice, into technical program management and then to the next level.

What happened

Across the three teams, six people were promoted during my time as their leader. Three others were moved into roles better suited to their strengths, where they could succeed. My teams’ manager satisfaction scores landed in the top quartile of the organization, and inclusion was rated in the 90th percentile. Delivery did not suffer for the development investment. In my experience it never does; the causation runs the other way.