Leadership is challenging, however distance leadership is even more challenging and complex. Covid-19, which has caused many changes in the way we work almost overnight, also requires the renewal of classic managerial models and the new leadership’s competencies. According to the Gallup survey, made in 2020, successful distance working depends to a large extent, as much as 70 percent, of the commitment of managers and their support to remote employees. In this paper, we will present the specifics of remote work and distance leadership as well as the understanding and importance of lifelong development of leadership competencies. In the target population of managers, we are discovering what new competencies managers need for distance leadership. In the first part of the research, we identify in the focus groups the most common challenges as well as the embarrassments of distance leadership, and on this basis we propose a list of competencies with which managers can successfully address these challenges. The proposed competencies are then critically evaluated on a wider population of managers using a quantitative method – a questionnaire, which we designed specifically for this purpose. We are interested in which competencies managers consider to be the most important for distance leadership; to what extent they have already developed these competencies and to what extent they want to develop them in a period of 12 months. In the following, we also explore the most often used learning strategies for developing those leadership competencies and make some final recommendation for organisation and HR people how to support managers by distance leadership.