#546 How To Create Trust In A Remote Team: Kevin Dias interviewed by Niels Brabandt
How To Create Trust In A Remote Team: Kevin Dias interviewed by Niels Brabandt
By Niels Brabandt, based on the leadership podcast and videocast interview with Kevin Dias
Remote leadership is no longer a logistical question. It is a trust question.
Remote work has matured beyond the emergency improvisation of distributed teams. For decision-makers in business, the central question is no longer whether remote teams can function. The harder question is whether they can build enough trust to move quickly, communicate honestly and make decisions without permanent supervision. In this interview, Niels Brabandt speaks with Kevin Dias about precisely that challenge: how leaders create trust in a remote team when colleagues know one another primarily through screens, messages and asynchronous updates.
Kevin Dias brings a particularly relevant perspective to the conversation. He has worked remotely since 2014, not merely from home, but across major time-zone differences. Based in Japan while working for a United States company, he operates with a time difference of roughly 12 to 13 hours. At Ambiki, where he currently works, the organisation is fully remote, with team members across all US time zones and several additional countries. This is not remote work as a temporary benefit. It is remote work as an operating model.
The interview premise: trust cannot be assumed simply because a team has video calls
Niels Brabandt opens the interview by naming a common leadership blind spot. A team may work remotely and may communicate frequently, but that does not automatically mean its members trust one another. Many organisations had a transition advantage when remote work became common: colleagues already knew one another from years in the same office. The more difficult case is a remote team that has to build trust from the start, often without budget, time or permission to bring everyone together physically.
Kevin Dias responds by moving the discussion away from slogans and towards systems. Trust in remote teams begins with hiring people who are willing and able to work with autonomy. Yet hiring is only the starting point. Trust also requires explicit agreements, communication architecture, leadership consistency and a shared understanding of how work happens when colleagues are not available at the same time.
Hiring for remote work means testing communication, not just asking for preference
One of the most practical parts of the conversation concerns recruitment. Niels Brabandt challenges the common interview practice of simply asking candidates whether they are comfortable with remote work. Many candidates will answer yes, and some may discover months later that they struggle with isolation, autonomy or asynchronous communication. For leaders, that creates a serious risk: the organisation may have done nothing wrong, yet the fit still fails.
Kevin Dias is careful not to claim a magic formula. His answer is more useful precisely because it is operational. In remote work, written communication is not a secondary skill. It is infrastructure. Candidates must be able to express ideas clearly, explain their thinking and show how they approach a problem without relying on constant in-person interpretation.
Dias explains that his organisation uses paid take-home work examples. For development roles, this may involve building a small project. The decisive element is not only the technical output. The more revealing question is whether the candidate can later explain the thinking behind the work, describe the decisions made and communicate clearly in writing. This allows the team to assess whether the person can operate asynchronously and whether their reasoning can be understood without constant real-time clarification.
The team working agreement: trust starts with explicit expectations
A central insight from Kevin Dias is that remote trust does not emerge from vague goodwill. It is strengthened by explicit agreements. He describes the challenge of working from Japan with colleagues in the United States. When he has an idea in the middle of his day, it may be late evening or the middle of the night for a teammate. As a leader, sending a message can create an unintended pressure to respond immediately, especially when career ambition, hierarchy or perceived expectations are involved.
Dias explains that verbal reassurance was not enough. Even if he told team members they did not have to respond outside working hours, the message did not fully land. The solution was a team working agreement. This agreement states clearly that people’s working hours are their working hours, that messages may be sent asynchronously, and that there is no expectation to check or answer messages outside those hours.
For decision-makers, the lesson is significant. Remote culture is not built by telling people to be flexible. It is built by defining what flexibility means, what it does not mean and how the organisation protects people from implicit pressure. A written agreement turns an informal promise into a leadership standard.
Flexibility is not the same as absence of accountability
Kevin Dias also addresses one of the most persistent misunderstandings about remote work: flexibility is not a substitute for accountability. His organisation does not mandate fixed working hours. People may be early birds or night owls, provided the work gets done and the outcomes are visible. In practice, many colleagues still choose regular working patterns because those patterns fit family, school and personal responsibilities. The point is not chaos. The point is adult responsibility.
Niels Brabandt presses this issue in practical terms, asking whether people could work at 4:00 a.m. or 6:00 p.m. if that suited them. Dias’s answer shows a mature leadership position. If colleagues are working across time zones, fixed hours often matter less than clear expectations, reliable delivery and mutual visibility. The managerial task is to define outcomes, not to recreate office surveillance through software or calendar control.
Making work visible without creating micromanagement
The interview becomes especially valuable when Kevin Dias discusses how his team replaces the informal visibility that office environments provide. In a physical workplace, people overhear conversations, notice what colleagues are working on and ask quick questions in hallways. Remote teams lose those ambient signals. If leaders do not replace them deliberately, people can become isolated, duplicate work or miss opportunities to help one another.
Dias describes a channel called “what we worked on today”. Its purpose is not surveillance. It is communication. Team members share key pieces of work so that others understand what is happening across the organisation. The channel is not designed to list every task or prove productivity. It creates enough visibility for colleagues to identify connections, offer help and understand progress.
This distinction is crucial. Poor remote leadership often confuses visibility with control. Strong remote leadership creates visibility so that collaboration becomes easier. The difference is not technical. It is cultural and managerial.
Trust is built through predictability and visible reasoning
Niels Brabandt asks whether leaders can discover the level of trust in a remote team before a crisis reveals its weaknesses. Kevin Dias shifts the answer from diagnosis to construction. Trust is built by doing what one says one will do, making thinking visible and providing context behind decisions. In remote environments, leaders cannot rely on informal hallway explanations. They must deliberately show the reasoning behind decisions so colleagues can understand not only what changed, but why it changed.
Dias also emphasises predictable rhythms. His organisation runs separate Eastern Hemisphere and Western Hemisphere weekly meetings because an all-hands meeting across all time zones would be unrealistic. Recordings are made available transparently. People do not have to watch every meeting, but they can access the information. This combination of rhythm, transparency and realistic time-zone design helps remote teams feel included without demanding impossible attendance.
The leadership mistake: responding to distance with control
When asked for practical dos and don’ts, Kevin Dias identifies micromanagement as a major error. Leaders sometimes react to remote work by becoming more heavy-handed because they cannot see people working. The logic is understandable, but flawed. If leaders cannot trust people to execute against clear goals, more control will not solve the deeper problem.
Dias’s point deserves attention from every executive team. Micromanagement in a remote environment usually signals one of two failures. Either the organisation has not created clear goals, systems and expectations, or it has not hired people who can operate with the required autonomy. In both cases, surveillance is not a strategy. It is a symptom of insufficient leadership architecture.
One-way doors, two-way doors and the speed of trust
A further leadership concept discussed in the interview is the distinction between one-way-door and two-way-door decisions, associated with Amazon and Jeff Bezos. A one-way-door decision is significant and hard to reverse. It deserves careful thought. A two-way-door decision can be changed or corrected. In a start-up or fast-moving organisation, Kevin Dias suggests that the overwhelming majority of daily decisions are two-way doors.
The implication for remote teams is powerful. If every decision requires permission, speed collapses. Dias argues that leaders should give teams the autonomy and psychological safety to make reversible decisions, learn and course-correct. In his formulation, speed is one of a start-up’s greatest assets. Trust enables that speed. Without trust, remote teams become slow, dependent and over-managed.
Leadership as better questions, not permanent answers
Kevin Dias closes the substantive part of the interview with a leadership insight that goes beyond remote work. Many leaders believe their role is to provide decisions whenever team members come to them. Dias offers a more mature view: often, leadership is about helping people ask the right questions so that they can make the decision themselves. Team members may not be asking the leader to solve the problem. They may be seeking a thinking partner who helps them understand the problem more clearly.
For Niels Brabandt’s audience of business decision-makers, this is a decisive point. Remote leadership requires more than tools, meeting rules and channels. It requires leaders who can create clarity without centralising every judgement. The best remote leaders do not turn distance into dependency. They turn distance into disciplined autonomy.
What decision-makers should take from the interview
The interview between Kevin Dias and Niels Brabandt offers a practical, evidence-aligned view of remote leadership. Trust is not produced by a company value statement. It is created through hiring, written communication, explicit agreements, predictable rhythms, transparent reasoning and the disciplined avoidance of micromanagement.
Remote work exposes leadership weaknesses that may remain hidden in the office. If goals are unclear, communication is weak or trust is low, distance makes the problem visible. Yet the reverse is also true. When leaders build the right systems, remote teams can become more intentional, more accountable and faster than many office-based teams.
Kevin Dias’s message is not that remote work is easy. His message is that remote trust can be designed. In conversation with Niels Brabandt, he shows that the future of distributed leadership belongs to organisations that combine autonomy with clarity, flexibility with accountability, and human trust with operational discipline.
Niels Brabandt
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More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.
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Contact: Niels Brabandt on LinkedIn
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Podcast and Videocast Transcript
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Having a remote team is one thing, and of course you work together. The question is: do you trust each other? And the question is: how do you actually create trust in remote teams when you do not have the privilege that remote work only entered your world when you were already working together for 20 years, so you know each other already from the office for a decade or two?
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And we have an expert on the matter with us here today. Hello and welcome, Kevin Diaz.
Kevin Dias
Hi Nils, great to be here. Thanks for having me again.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Thank you very much for being here again. Back by popular demand, I can say. So people ask you back, so well done you here. Can you tell us a bit more on your background? How do you work in the remote setting so people know what you actually do every single day?
Kevin Dias
Sure. Well, personally, I've been working remotely since 2014. And not just remotely, but like complete opposite time zone remotely. So I am based in Japan, and I work for a US company, so there's quite a big, you know, tends to be 12 or 13 hours difference there. And currently I'm at Ambiki, where we are a 100% remote team. We have all the time zones in the US, plus four other countries, so people all over the world.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Excellent. So when you want to work together with people and you don't know each other, and let's face it, you do not have the opportunity to just fly over and meet, because usually you either don't have the time or the resources, or people simply say, "You won't get money for this." How do you create trust amongst people who only know each other from computer screens?
Kevin Dias
Yeah, so I think it starts with making sure you hire the right people, people who are willing to work in a remote environment, who are, you know, willing to have that level of autonomy.
Kevin Dias
But there's also some different systems that we've put in place. So one, we have a team working agreement. So one of the first things I struggled with personally was, since I'm in Japan, if I'm in the middle of my day and I have a great idea that I want to message a teammate on, it's, you know, 10:00 p.m. or 2:00 a.m. their time. And, you know, being their boss, I don't want them to feel like they have to respond or they have to be up in the middle of the night waiting, "Is Kevin going to message me?"
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Which they probably will when they want to have a career. They probably will try to react to actually impress you in one way or the other.
Kevin Dias
And, you know, even if I just said that, it was clear that, like, they were still not getting it. So we really had to have this explicit team working agreement where we said, you know, your working hours are your working hours. You don't have to check messages outside of that. But people will be sending messages and receiving messages asynchronously because we're across all various time zones. And just the act of having that very explicit agreement that people would sign when they started really, you know, put it out there and showed, like, "Hey, we mean it when we say this."
Kevin Dias
And yeah, in addition to that, like, we don't mandate work hours. So, you know, everyone's already in different time zones. So if you're an early bird and you want to work early in the mornings and get off, you know, early in the afternoon, great. If you're a night owl and you want to start late and work late, you know, whatever works for you. It's more about the accountability of getting the work done, you know, seeing the outcomes, things like that.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Excellent. So people are fully flexible. They could work 4:00 a.m. in the morning or 6:00 p.m. in the evening and then do their hours. Fully flexible around the clock?
Kevin Dias
Because for me, it doesn't really matter because I'm in a completely different time zone anyways, right? But I think, you know, people tend to, you know, work regular hours, especially like our US team, just because that is most convenient for them and that tends to fit the schedules around kids and schools and things like that.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Excellent. Yeah. So one question, of course, I have. You said you need to hire the right people. So what I usually see in an interview is someone is sitting there with a checklist and say, "Are you okay with remote work?" Someone says, "Yes." Okay, tick the box, and that's the end of the topic. So people say, "Are you okay with it?" They say, "Yes."
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And sometimes you hire people who suddenly after three or four months quit out of the blue because they say, "Look, I just realized this is not really for me." Not even about the time. It's just me sitting on my own just doesn't work. And of course, companies now want to prevent that you invest into someone and then they say, "Sorry, it's all great. It's just not for me." So you didn't even do anything wrong that you could change. How do you know how to hire the right people?
Kevin Dias
Yeah, I don't have the magic formula, but I would say the things that we really care about are written communication is just so important in a work environment. So being able to express your ideas.
Kevin Dias
You know, one thing that we like to do when we're hiring is a take-home paid work example. Like for the development team, it might be creating, you know, some small project. And it's not about the actual creation itself, but it more often is like after you've built it, being able to get on, explain your thinking, explain your ideas, walk through, you know, were you able to write clearly about why you built what you built and what your thinking process was. So I think in those steps, you're able to see a little bit like, will this person be able to work asynchronously? Are they able to express their ideas clearly? Can they do it in writing? Those are some of the things that are top of the list that I tend to look for.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Excellent. And when you now say, "Okay, some people might be at the situation where they say, 'I think we trust each other, but we didn't have any big moment of crisis, and we don't want to find out during crisis that actually trust is pretty low here.'" Is there any kind of way that leaders or people in the team can find out is trust either high or rather low? Is there any kind of way to find out?
Kevin Dias
I'm not sure about ways to find out, but I think, like, you know, ways of building trust are very important. So I think, you know, it's about doing what you'll say you'll do, making your thinking visible. So being able to, especially in a remote environment, because you don't get to talk to people in the hallways, you know, putting the context behind different decisions of the why you made that decision.
Kevin Dias
I think creating predictable rhythms. So we do both an Eastern Hemisphere weekly meeting and a Western Hemisphere weekly meeting because there was just really no way to have an all-hands type meeting with all the different time zones and recording all of those. So having everything being very transparent that, like, you don't have to watch it, but if you wanted to watch it, like, it's on the shared drive and you can see it. Being consistent in your actions, I think, you know, the same leadership principles that apply in person apply in a remote environment as well.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Yeah, absolutely. And one question when I prepared for this interview, of course, I asked because many people asked you back. That's why I got in touch with you. And of course, I asked them, "What are your main questions?" And there's one question that really sort of that basically almost anyone said. And I'm going to put this forward to you. They said, "With his experience, they really want to know one thing. What are your top three don'ts?"
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
So things you did where you realized, "Okay, that didn't work too well." So your top three don'ts and your top three dos to actually make people prevent these mistakes and do this, which is way better. What are your top three don'ts and dos as the final question of this interview regarding how to create and not only trust, but also a great remote team? Start with the don'ts.
Kevin Dias
Yeah, let me start with the dos. I got to think a little bit on the don'ts. So the dos I would say we have a what we worked on today channel. And the point of this is not at all about micromanagement. It's about communication. Because you're missing those hallway conversations, just having a place that teammates can understand, like what other people are working on, that, you know, it's not every day that you're going to have a connection, but sometimes you're going to see like, "Oh, like, I can help out that teammate. I didn't know they were working on that thing."
Kevin Dias
So, and it's not like you have to list. We make it very clear. It's not about listing every single thing you did that day, but just the key pieces that other teammates, you know, might want to know to show clarity. What else? The team working agreement that I mentioned, I feel like that is a very key do that has really helped us in the remote environment.
Kevin Dias
As far as don'ts, like a big one, micromanagement. I think the first thing that I've seen a lot of the big mistake I see people make is like, "All right, it's a remote environment. Like, I can't see them. I can't watch them. I need to get more heavy-handed." And, you know, that never works, right? And I think it becomes a both, like you have to look inward at yourself, like, do we have the right systems? Have I set clear goals and expectations for these teammates? And then if that is true, then maybe it's like looking at, well, who are we hiring? Because if I can't trust these people to execute on those goals, then we have a bigger problem that micromanagement is not going to solve.
Kevin Dias
I think the other thing I would say would be, you know, I really like Amazon and Jeff Bezos' concept of one-way doors and two-way doors. So, you know, a one-way door being a decision that's really big and you probably can't reverse it and you should put more thought into it, and a two-way door being, you know, decisions that you can, you know, come back on.
Kevin Dias
And I think in a startup world, on a daily basis, maybe 98 to 99 percent of these decisions are going to be two-way doors. And as a startup, time is your most valuable resource. And giving your team the autonomy and the green light and the trust that, like, hey, the psychological safety to say, like, it's okay to fail, but like, I want you to, I would rather that you ask for forgiveness than ask for permission. Like, I need you to make these two-way door decisions every day to move us forward because there's going to be a lot of them. And, you know, speed is our greatest asset. So I trust you. Like, let's make the decision, move on. If it's.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Make it happen.
Kevin Dias
Not right, we can course correct from there. So I think, you know, that also takes time to build that trust with your team. That's part of it. But I think being able to give them that leeway to make those decisions. And maybe the other thing I would say as a do as a leader is a lot of leaders feel like people are waiting on them to make the decision for them. But I think a lot of times leadership is more about just helping them ask the right questions so that then they can make the decision. You know, sometimes they're not looking for you to make the answer. They're just kind of coming to you to explore the ideas or to get you to ask questions. So not feeling that you have to make the decision for them, but prompting them with the right questions so that they understand the problem that needs to be solved.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Yeah, I think these are the perfect final words. We see someone has a lot of experience and you now can put everything into practice in your team. And of course, Kevin is available on LinkedIn as well, so he's happy to answer any question. We've always been in touch, so I can say absolutely great person to be in touch with any time.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
At the end of this podcast, as well as at the end of the video cast, there's only one thing left for me to say, Kevin, thank you very much for your time.
Kevin Dias
Thank you, Nils.