You may have heard, or heard about the profanity-laced tirade of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, in which he shared his…um, thoughts (?) about remote work. The guy knows a lot about banking and finance. I’ll give him that. But his comments demonstrated that he doesn’t know as much as he should about leading people in 2025. Not if he’s going to be the CEO of a huge corporation.

He made some good points. He said that people have a choice. “You don’t have to work at JP Morgan. [those of you] who don’t want to work here, that’s fine with me. You can walk [sic] with your feet.” (I think he meant you can vote with your feet.) But he said this company is going to set our own standards and do it our own way.

And you know what? He’s absolutely right about that. The company can make its own rules, and if people can’t live with those rules, they can work somewhere else.

To show that I’m not one of these who thinks that remote work is the “only way to go”, I’ve been saying for a long time, “If you can find the people you want under your rules, go for it! If not, you need to change the rules.” It’s becoming clearer that as time goes on, it’s going to get harder and harder to find the people you need without giving them the kind of options that Jamie Dimon opposes so strongly.

But here’s what he’s missing:

First – his pronouncements were motivated by emotion, not sound reliable data. “I’ve had it with this kind of stuff!” he said (the only time he used that particular “s” word to refer to “stuff”).  Any leader worth their huge salary can tell you that making business decisions from an emotional spot is usually a bad idea.

Second – he’s making broad generalizations about the effectiveness and productivity associated with remote work, based solely on his personal observations. That’s a mighty small sample size. I’d want to get more data.

But there’s a third thing he’s missing – and he’s certainly not alone in this. Leading a workforce of humans in 2025 requires managers to develop a new set of leadership skills. And frankly, he, and too many others, are too lazy to do that. Leadership competency based on 2010 standards is leadership incompetency today. These managers, living in the past, want things to work like they always did. Too bad, so sad. They don’t.

Managers have been effectively leading remote and hybrid teams for decades, so don’t tell me it can’t be done. Maybe these folks can’t do it. More likely, they haven’t tried.

If you can’t manage performance without having your beady little eyes on people every minute, that’s a leadership deficiency, and one you need to correct.

If people aren’t collaborating well, you need to fix that – and it probably has little to do with where they’re physically located at the moment.

If you confuse productivity with attendance, try measuring it  based on output instead. Be very clear about your standards, the rewards for meeting them, and the consequences for falling short.

Only time will tell if Jamie Dimon’s Way is the Highway to success for Chase. I wouldn’t bank on it.