Why You Can't Develop People From a Distance

Start with the situation

A few years back I sat down and made a list of everyone on my team I felt like I was "developing." Real list, real names. Then I made a second list: everyone I'd actually had a meaningful, unhurried conversation with in the last month.

The two lists barely overlapped.

That was the moment I had to admit something uncomfortable. I was managing people from a distance and calling it leadership development.

Why Does Distance Feel Like Leadership (Even Though It Isn't)?

I get why we default to distance. Distance feels efficient. You can review a dashboard in five minutes. You can't have a real conversation in five minutes.

So we build systems instead. Performance reviews. Check-in templates. One-on-one agendas that turn into status updates. None of that is bad on its own. I still use plenty of it. The problem is when the system becomes a substitute for the relationship instead of a support for it.

I've done this. I've told myself I was "developing" someone because I'd sent them an article, or looped them into a meeting, or given them a stretch project and then mostly left them alone. That's not development. That's delegation with good intentions attached.

Here's the tension underneath all of it: developing people is slow, and we live in a season that rewards speed. Quick content. Quick hacks. Quick strategies promising fast growth for your team, your business, your relationships. Proximity doesn't scale the way a system does. You can't automate it. You can't batch it. And if you're honest, that's exactly why most of us avoid it. It's inconvenient. It's slower than we want it to be. It asks more of us than a template does.

What Does the Research Actually Say About Proximity and Growth?

I'm not just going on a hunch here. Once I started paying attention, the research kept saying the same thing from different angles.

Start with Gallup's research on manager impact. In its landmark "State of the American Manager" report, Gallup found that managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in team engagement. Read that again. It's not company culture. It's not compensation. It's not the mission statement on the wall. Seventy percent of the difference between an engaged team and a disengaged one comes down to the person leading it, day to day, up close.

Then there's the classic Sun Microsystems mentoring study, one of the most cited pieces of research in this space. Employees who participated in a mentoring program, meaning they had someone genuinely close to them, invested in their growth, were retained at a rate of 72 percent for mentees and 69 percent for mentors. Employees who didn't participate in any mentoring relationship were retained at just 49 percent. That's not a small gap. That's the difference between keeping your best people and watching them walk.

And here's the one that surprised me most: proximity bias. Researchers, including Kimberly Elsbach at UC Davis, have studied how physical closeness quietly shapes who gets noticed, coached, and promoted at work. The term itself was coined by psychologists back in the 1970s to describe how we form more positive perceptions of people we're physically near. Organizations are actively trying to correct for this bias right now, especially in hybrid workplaces, because it's so powerful it can unfairly tilt who advances and who gets overlooked.

Think about what that means. Proximity is such a strong force that companies have to build policies to guard against it running the show unintentionally. If closeness is powerful enough to create a bias problem when it's accidental, imagine what it can do when you point it on purpose.

The Reframe: Multiplication Has a Location

Here's where I landed after wrestling with all of this: multiplication has a location, and that location is proximity.

We tend to think of leadership development as something you plan. A curriculum. A framework. A twelve-month program with milestones. And structure has its place. But structure was never the multiplying agent. Closeness is. The plan just creates the excuse to be close.

I'd go a step further. Proximity isn't a soft skill you layer on top of "real" leadership. It is the leadership skill. Everything else, the vision-casting, the strategy, the accountability, it all depends on whether you're close enough to the people doing the work to actually see them.

What Changed When I Started Leading This Way

Once I saw this clearly, I stopped asking "what system do I need?" and started asking "who am I not close to right now, and why?"

For me, that meant something simple and a little embarrassing: I looked at my calendar and realized every recurring meeting I had was either a status update or a strategy session. Not one recurring block on my calendar existed just to be present with someone I was trying to help grow. So I changed that. I built in time that had no agenda other than "how are you actually doing, and what are you stuck on?"

The clients I coach hear this from me constantly now. When a leader tells me their team "just isn't developing," my first question is never about their process. It's "who on your team have you had a real, unhurried conversation with this month?" More often than not, the honest answer explains the whole problem.

This isn't about becoming everyone's best friend or spending every waking hour with your team. It's about being intentional. You can't be equally close to everyone, and you shouldn't try. But you can be close, on purpose, with the people you're actually trying to develop.

How Do You Actually Build Proximity Into Your Leadership?

Here's what this looks like in practice. Not vague advice, actual moves you can make this week.

1. Audit your actual closeness, not your intended closeness. Make the same two lists I made. Who are you supposedly developing, and who have you genuinely talked with, one-on-one, without an agenda, in the last thirty days? The gap between those lists is your starting point.
2. Trade one status update for one real conversation. Pick your next scheduled check-in with someone you want to grow. Instead of running through the usual updates, open with "how are you actually doing with this?" and then stop talking.
3. Build unstructured time into your week on purpose. Block thirty minutes with no agenda, specifically to be present with someone you're developing. If it's not on the calendar, it won't happen. Treat it with the same seriousness you'd treat a client meeting.
4. Notice who you default to and who you overlook. Proximity bias is real, and it doesn't just apply to remote workers. Some people on your team are simply easier to be close to. Name who you're unintentionally distant from, and close that gap first.
5. Coach in the moment, not just in the review. Don't save every piece of feedback for a scheduled sit-down. The closest coaching happens in the flow of the actual work, right after the moment it's needed.
6. Ask better questions instead of giving faster answers. Proximity isn't just showing up. It's staying curious about someone long enough to actually understand what they're carrying. Ask, then let the silence do some work.
7. Follow up like it matters, because it does. A single close conversation can get undone by weeks of silence afterward. Circle back. Ask what happened with the thing they were working through. That follow-up is what turns a moment into a relationship.

Get Closer. That's Where It Starts.

Go back to those two lists for a second. The people you think you're developing, and the people you're actually close to.

If those lists don't match, you already know what to do. Not a new framework. Not a better system. Just get closer to one person this week. Have the conversation you've been putting off because your calendar didn't have room for it.

Nothing multiplies without proximity. Not your team, not your leadership, not you.