Remote teams and the 2/3 pattern

At the end of my series on the 2/3 pattern, I asked whether it holds in remote-first teams. I've been thinking about that question a lot since then.

Short answer: yes, the pattern holds. But the feedback loops work differently. And that changes everything about how you manage the weak pillar.

What changes when you're not in the same room

In an office, information flows informally. You overhear a conversation and realize a project is struggling. You see someone's face during a meeting and know they're not convinced. You bump into the CEO in the kitchen and get thirty seconds of context that changes how you think about a decision.

Remote work kills all of that.

I don't mean this as criticism. I've been working remotely for years and I prefer it. But the informal feedback loops that offices provide for free have to be deliberately built in remote environments. If you don't build them, you don't get them.

Weak pillars get weaker faster when feedback loops are broken. In an office, you might notice team health declining through body language, side conversations, the general vibe. Remotely, you don't see any of that. By the time the problem surfaces in metrics or explicit feedback, it's often much worse than it would have been with earlier detection.

How each pillar behaves remotely

Leadership is actually easier to observe remotely in some ways. Decisions happen in written form. You can literally see how a leader communicates, what they prioritize, how they respond to problems. The written record makes leadership visible in ways that office presence doesn't.

But leadership's informal influence disappears. A leader who builds trust through presence, through being available, through walking around and checking in, loses those tools completely. Remote leadership has to be more explicit. You can't lead by vibes.

Team health is where remote work hits hardest. The small moments that build team cohesion don't happen naturally. No lunch conversations, no coffee chats, no shared commiseration after a hard meeting. Team building has to be intentional, which means it feels artificial, which means people often skip it.

I've watched remote teams that seemed fine suddenly implode. The warning signs were there, but nobody saw them because nobody was in the same room. A team member was frustrated for months, mentioned it in a one-on-one that got rescheduled three times, and finally just quit. In an office, someone probably would have noticed earlier.

Strategy can actually thrive remotely. Deep work is easier. Async communication forces clarity. You can't rely on hallway conversations to align people, so you write things down, and written strategy is often better strategy.

But the connection between strategy and reality gets tenuous. When the strategy team isn't sitting near the people doing the work, it's easier for strategy to drift into abstraction. The feedback loop that says "this isn't working on the ground" gets longer and weaker.

The common enemy trap is harder to spot

I wrote before about teams that seem strong because they're united against a common enemy. Us versus them. Leadership, another team, a competitor. The cohesion is real, but it's hollow. It disappears when the enemy goes away.

In an office, you can sometimes spot this. You hear the grumbling. You notice who eats lunch together and who doesn't. You pick up on the us-versus-them language.

Remotely? It's invisible. The team performs well in metrics. Standups are productive. Retrospectives don't surface anything unusual. Meanwhile, a Slack back-channel is building resentment that you'll never see until it explodes.

I worked with a remote team that seemed great for over a year. High velocity, good morale in surveys, no visible problems. Then the manager who'd been seen as the "common enemy" left. Within three months, half the team followed. The cohesion had been real, but it wasn't about the team. It was about shared opposition. And nobody saw it coming because all the signals were in private messages and off-the-record Zooms.

Building feedback loops deliberately

Remote teams need to overinvest in making feedback loops explicit.

Regular one-on-ones are the bare minimum. And they can't just be status updates. You have to actually ask how people are doing, and you have to create space for honest answers. That's hard in a 30-minute Zoom where everyone's calendar is packed.

Skip-levels help. Talking to people two levels down gives you signal that might be filtered by their direct manager. But you have to do it regularly enough that it's not weird when it happens.

Written communication creates artifacts you can review. If strategy is drifting, you can see it in the documents. If leadership is unclear, you can see it in the messages. The paper trail that remote work generates is actually useful for diagnosis, if you're willing to look.

And I've started asking directly: "What's not working that we're not talking about?" It's awkward. People often don't answer honestly the first time. But asking repeatedly, and actually responding when someone does raise something, eventually builds the trust to get real feedback.

The rotation happens faster

One thing I've noticed: the 2/3 rotation seems to happen faster in remote teams. Weak pillars decay more quickly when feedback loops are broken. By the time you notice the problem, you're often already deep in crisis mode.

Remote leaders need to be more proactive about rotation. You can't wait for the weak pillar to force attention. You have to anticipate it. Check in on team health even when everything seems fine. Validate strategy against reality even when metrics look good. Keep leadership visible even when there's no crisis requiring it.

It's exhausting. But the alternative is being constantly surprised by problems that grew in the dark.

Does this match your experience with remote teams? What feedback loops have you built that work? What signals do you watch for?