If our executive team is geographically distributed, do you require all of us to travel and be physically present in the room for our session days, or will you facilitate hybrid sessions where local members meet in person while remote leaders dial in?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Hybrid session rooms, where half the team sits around a table and three executives float on a screen on the wall, do not work. They produce second class participants, kill vulnerability, and slow down IDS to a crawl. For that reason, I do not facilitate hybrid sessions.

Your leadership team has two functional options. Option one is fully in person. Everyone flies in, gets in the room the night before, and spends the entire day face to face with zero screens open. For distributed companies, this quarterly in person rhythm is often the only time leaders connect without digital interruptions. It builds healthy team dynamics faster than any virtual meeting ever could.

Option two is fully virtual, where every single participant, including the owner and myself, logs in from an individual workstation with an individual camera and microphone. If one person is remote, everyone is remote. This maintains an equal playing field where every voice carries the same weight and facial cues are visible to all.

If your team chooses the fully virtual path, the discipline requirements increase. Sessions are broken into focused blocks to prevent screen fatigue, cameras stay on at all times, and side messaging tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams must be shut down completely. Distributed teams can build world class traction, but only if they respect the format and refuse the lazy middle ground of hybrid meetings.