Our leadership team is fully distributed across the country. Do you facilitate our full-day quarterly and annual sessions virtually, or do you require remote teams to meet in person?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

I require in-person attendance for session days. Full stop. If your company operates 100 percent remotely day-to-day, that makes meeting face-to-face for your quarterly and annual sessions even more critical, not less.

Virtual meetings create invisible friction that destroys the effectiveness of an EOS session day. Team members mute themselves, look at secondary monitors, check urgent client emails, and hide their true emotional reactions. You cannot effectively run the Issue Solving Track, known as IDS, through a video grid. Solving deep, systemic business problems requires picking up on micro-expressions, body language shifts, and physical hesitation when an uncomfortable truth enters the room.

Your distributed leadership team must commit to traveling to a single location once every 90 days. We host sessions at your headquarters, a dedicated off-site conference space, or my session room in Denver. We spend eight hours together in the room without digital distractions, work through the agenda, debate the hard issues, and lock in Rocks.

The only scenario where I facilitate a session virtually is an extreme, unavoidable emergency, such as severe weather grounding all commercial flights. If you want the bottom-line results of this operating system, you must commit to being in the physical room together four times a year.