In a world caught between Zoom calls and office mandates, Darren Menabney says global leadership is built on trust, autonomy and cultural intelligence.
In June 2010, Darren Menabney was working for the Canadian government when he escorted the Prime Minister of Japan at the G20 Summit in Toronto. A brief encounter with U.S. President Barack Obama marked the high point of his 20 years in government. Back at his desk, the routine of meetings, emails and reports felt flat. “I didn’t want another 20 years of spreadsheets and meetings,” he says in a 2015 TEDx talk. Within a year, he had left for Tokyo and a new career.
Since then, Menabney has crossed sectors and continents: diplomacy, business development, corporate HR, and now academia. At Ricoh he led initiatives to strengthen collaboration among 85,000 employees in more than 65 countries. At GLOBIS University he teaches business presentation, critical thinking, design thinking, cross-cultural management, and leading global virtual teams. He has written for Forbes and Fast Company, spoken at a TEDx event, and trains executives worldwide.
Throughout this, his focus has been consistent: helping people connect and create value across borders.
Menabney saw the strain on multinational teams well before remote work went mainstream. At Ricoh he watched how time zones, language gaps, and cultural assumptions slowed collaboration. In 2019 he used these insights to launch a GLOBIS course on Leading Global Virtual Teams.
A year later, the pandemic turned it into essential training. But he warns against drawing the wrong lessons. “Isolation from work was mostly due to isolation during COVID. Social lockdowns, for example. Virtual work during COVID was kind of atypical or abnormal,” he says.
The bigger change has been the hybrid debate. “What’s really changed is this infatuation with time spent in the office versus time not spent in the office,” he says. “If you trust your team to be professionals, you don’t worry about how many days they spend in the office. You trust them to do their tasks with autonomy and accountability”.
Remote leadership reveals who can trust and who can’t. Many managers default to control, watching screens instead of outcomes. Menabney calls that self-defeating. “Micromanaging is one of the worst things you can do as a remote team leader. You can’t always be overseeing what people are doing,” he says.
He sees trust as a balance. “You give people autonomy to do the work. You don’t manage them too much. You give them goals, you give them milestones. You trust them to get the work done. At the same time, they have accountability for getting the work done through the milestones and agreed-upon goals”.
Trust also needs reinforcement. He calls it “over communication” — not flooding inboxes but using varied channels and adding social check-ins. “How are they doing? What support can you give them? That reinforces your trust in them,” he says.
Emotional intelligence helps leaders read the room. Cultural intelligence reminds them the room isn’t the same everywhere. “Common sense is not so common,” Menabney says.
“Emotional intelligence doesn’t always work when the context changes, when the culture changes. How to build trust will differ from one culture to another,” he explains. Leaders also need to confront their own blind spots. “Fish don’t know they’re swimming in water,” he quotes from The Culture Map.
His practice is to map the team: high context or low context communicators, collectivist or individualist, structured or autonomous. “If people recognize their individual styles are being accommodated, you’re going to have a much more effective team. This is what equity really is about, the E in DEI,” he says.
Global teams rarely collapse outright. They drift into subgroups — by office, culture or language — and their communication and collaboration does the same. “That is a real risk that you have to watch out for, because that means the team is fragmenting,” Menabney says.
He argues for reintegration, not policing. GitLab, a fully remote company, brings staff together twice a year to renew bonds with face-to-face interactions. More broadly, he believes leaders must reconnect teams around mission and purpose, not just process.
Training managers to lead remotely is critical, but Menabney warns against HR setting rigid rules. “HR tends to do what works best for HR, which is not always the same as what’s best operationally for the team,” he says.
Mandating office days, he argues, is nostalgia disguised as policy. “There’s a great phrase called ‘nostalgic leadership.’ That’s the kind of leadership that worked in the ‘good old days’. But the good old days are gone,” he says. With 83% of employees globally wanting hybrid work, ignoring that reality risks disengagement.
Despite talk of deglobalization, Menabney believes the fundamentals point the other way. “Globalization [has] supposedly died many times. I think it is not going to go away,” he says.
One key difference now is infrastructure. Cloud tools, video platforms, and collaborative software make distance less relevant. “Any company can be a global company, because all the technologies are in place after COVID. We all know how to use Zoom and companies are familiar with it,” he says.
That access cuts both ways. Companies can recruit globally and sell globally, but only if they move beyond rigid structures. “The org map should not be the default for how every project is done,” he says.
For leaders, the choice is stark. Tap into worldwide talent and markets or compete locally while rivals go global. Menabney sees the direction as clear: “With a bit of homework, companies can access the global talent pool. Technology has enabled all of us to be global organizations”.
Read Darren’s latest article in Fast Company, How to Unlock Creativity in the Hybrid Workplace.
Darren Menabney
Professor, GLOBIS University
Every organization's needs are different. With our global learning options, we're ready to help you find the right program to achieve your talent development goals.
