(Mt) – ECOM 201 SEU E Management Digital Solution Providers Project

Introduction to E-Management Project Overview Suppose your group works as a virtual team in a Saudi company that deals with local and global clients. The company main purpose is to provide digital marketing services and solutions. A task has been given to you by the CEO. The task includes building a connection with a South African brand that wants to open an office in AL Khobar, Eastern Province. The task is considered completed when you propose a strategy to the international company representative and receive their feedback. Requirements The group needs to be divided as follows: one team manager, one representative from the international brand, one technical support expert, and one or two general members. Write a reflection on your group work process in creating the team, choosing the tools, working on the tasks and reporting the strategy to the client. The reflection should be written after you establish a successful virtual team. The reflection should describe the process of 4 main components of virtual management: team building, tools, procedures, and task management. Please use these guidelines on how to do so: 1. Virtual Team: In this section, you need to describe the workings of your virtual team. • Name your team. • Who are your team members, and what are their roles? • What are the personal objectives for each member? • What is the collective goal for your team? • Refer to the four different stages of team building? Have you experienced these stages (discuss) 2. Virtual Tool In this section, you describe the process of choosing a tool for your virtual team. • What virtual tool did you use to manage the tasks? (provide pictures) • Describe the features this tool has (provide pictures). • Why did you choose these tools? What are the other options? • Suppose your budget was SAR 10k; how did you use that budget to get the best possible tool? • How frequently does the team meet? How long is each meeting? (provide photos of the team meetings at different times) • What are the meeting minutes? How have they been used effectively? (provide an example of your team meeting minutes). 3. Virtual work dynamics • How did you create a virtual office? • What are the challenges that you faced in your work? (discuss from different roles’ perspectives). • How did you utilize vacation time, holiday times? • How did you divide the workload? • What are the challenges that your team faced in communication? (discuss from different roles’ perspectives). 4. Reports • Provide an example of a proposed strategy that your team worked on to make the marketing campaign successful for the international company. • The report should be 300 words that describe the best practices of doing virtual marketing in Saudi Arabia. o The report should have an introduction, brief strategy, and conclusion. • Include graphs and statistics to support your report. • The international company representative in your team should provide his/her feedback on the report (one or two comments) • The rest of the team should address those comments. • Conclude your reflection. Answer: Presentation • Create 10 slides maximum • The slides should contain the following: o Group members names, IDs, and CRN o A brief description of the virtual team o A brief description of the virtual tool o A brief description of the Virtual work dynamics o A brief description of the proposed reports o Suggestions for future teams Manager’s Guide to Virtual Teams Other titles in the Briefcase Books series include: Customer Relationship Management by Kristin Anderson and Carol Kerr Communicating Effectively by Lani Arredondo Performance Management by Robert Bacal Manager’s Guide to Performance Reviews by Robert Bacal Recognizing and Rewarding Employees by R. Brayton Bowen Sales Techniques by Bill Brooks Motivating Employees by Anne Bruce and James S. Pepitone Building a High Morale Workplace by Anne Bruce Six Sigma for Managers by Greg Brue Design for Six Sigma by Greg Brue and Robert G. Launsby Manager’s Guide to Marketing, Advertising, and Publicity by Barry Callen Manager’s Guide to Planning by Peter J. Capezio Leadership Skills for Managers by Marlene Caroselli Negotiating Skills for Managers by Steven P. Cohen Effective Coaching by Marshall J. Cook Manager’s Guide to Mentoring by Curtis J. Crawford Conflict Resolution by Daniel Dana Manager’s Guide to Strategy by Roger A. Formisano Project Management by Gary R. Heerkens Budgeting for Managers by Sid Kemp and Eric Dunbar Hiring Great People by Kevin C. Klinvex, Matthew S. O’Connell, and Christopher P. Klinvex Manager’s Guide to Social Media by Scott Klososky Time Management by Marc Mancini Manager’s Guide to Fostering Innovation and Creativity in Teams by Charles Prather Presentation Skills for Managers by Jennifer Rotondo and Mike Rotondo, Jr. Finance for Non-Financial Managers by Gene Siciliano The Manager’s Guide to Business Writing by Suzanne D. Sparks Skills for New Managers by Morey Stettner Manager’s Survival Guide by Morey Stettner The Manager’s Guide to Effective Meetings by Barbara J. Streibel Managing Multiple Projects by Michael Tobis and Irene P. Tobis Accounting for Managers by William H. Webster To learn more about titles in the Briefcase Books series go to www.briefcasebooks.com Manager’s Guide to Virtual Teams A Briefcase Book Kimball Fisher and Mareen Fisher Copyright © 2011 by Kimball Fisher and Mareen Fisher. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. 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Under no circumstances shall McGraw-Hill Education and/or its licensors be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, punitive, consequential or similar damages that result from the use of or inability to use the work, even if any of them has been advised of the possibility of such damages. This limitation of liability shall apply to any claim or cause whatsoever whether such claim or cause arises in contract, tort or otherwise. To our clients, who have always been our teachers and, thankfully, often our friends, as well. Contents Preface 1. What Is a Virtual Team? The Challenges of Working with Virtual Teams Why Are Virtual Teams Becoming So Common? Defining Virtual Teams What’s in This Book? Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 1 2. Managing Space, Time, and Culture The Three Key Variables Affecting Virtual Teams What Besides Geography Causes Cultural Distance? Use Whatever Advantages You Have Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 2 3. The Seven Competencies of Effective Virtual Team Leaders The Seven Competencies of Virtual Team Leaders Distance Manager Effectiveness Assessment Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 3 4. What Virtual Team Employees Need from Their Manager How Do You Control Distance Workers? What Do Virtual Team Members Need from Their Leaders? Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 4 5. Bridging Cultural Differences TechWorld Mini-Case Study How Do Cultures Differ? Dealing with Different Country-of-Origin Cultures Cultural Self-Awareness Assessment Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 5 6. Starting Up (or Refocusing) a Virtual Team Selecting Virtual Team Members Orientation for New Virtual Team Members Creating a Team Charter 66 Practical Tips for Chartering Role Clarification Operating Guidelines Technology-Use Protocols Setting Technology Protocols Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 6 7. Building Trust from a Distance The Problematic E-Mail Tips for Developing Trust How Overcoming Isolation in Virutal Teams Builds Trust Celebrating from a Distance Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 7 8. Using Telephonic Collaboration Technologies Mini-Case Study: A Day in the Life of a Virtual Team Leader Using Communication Technologies Effectively Effective Phone Use Telephone Tips Effective Teleconferencing Tips for Effective Teleconferences Instant Messaging Videophones Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 8 9. Using Videoconferencing and Internet-Based Collaboration Tools Videoconferencing Using E-Mail—Without Letting It Take Over Your Life Web Conferencing Using Whiteboards Social Networking Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 9 10. Improving the Business IQ of Team Members Understanding Your Business Basic Economics Understanding Customer Expectations Working with Business Partners Improving the Value Chain Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 10 11. Teaching Finance Fundamentals to Virtual Teams Budgets Calculating a Cost/Benefit Analysis Understanding Profit Reading Income Statements Financial Terms and Concepts Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 11 12. Improving Communication and Feedback Skills The Communication Process Empathic Listening Giving Feedback Receiving Feedback Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 12 13. Creative Problem Solving for Virtual Teams Six-Step Problem-Solving Process Problem-Solving Tools Creativity Tools Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 13 14. Managing Performance from a Distance Performance Management Basics Goal Setting and Accountability Systems Mini-Case: Lars and the Disconnected Team Members Six-Step Goal-Setting Process Individual Development Plans Socratic Coaching Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 14 15. Effective Decision Making over Distance Decision-Making Challenges Common Decision-Making Methods Why Virtual Teams Usually Use Consensus Reaching Consensus as a Virtual Team Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 15 16. Virtual Team Building Two Types of Team Building Assessing Virtual Team Effectiveness Road-Tested Team-Building Examples Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 16 17. Maintaining a Balanced Personal and Work Life The Work and Home Life Balance Problem A Brief History of Organizational Design The Technology Tether The Personal System Tips for Working at Home Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 17 Index Preface We were thrilled to be invited by CWL Pubishing and McGraw-Hill to create Manager’s Guide to Virtual Teams for the Briefcase Books series. This was an opportunity to revisit the material we published several years ago in The Distance Manager, also published by McGraw-Hill. We believe that the issues we discussed then are still important, perhaps even more important than they were at that time. Virtual teams have become common, and the challenges faced by virtual team managers are even more complex. However, much has changed since the original book was published. At that time we lamented, for example, that no one had yet invented a combination of the PDA and the telephone so that we could manage e-mail, shared calendars, voice mail, and phone calls with one device. Now, smart phones are so common that it is hard to remember how we worked without them. Companies are using social networking techniques, blogging, and instant messaging that were unheard of when we originally published. But today’s smart phones, Blackberries, and iPads will be replaced by technology we can’t imagine, and in this book, we wanted to do something more than just respond to the latest wave of communication technology. Many of the topics in Manager’s Guide to Virtual Teams echo those we covered in our previous work, especially in the areas of trust building, the role of the virtual leader, employee expectations of leadership, focusing teams, and basic communication technologyuse techniques. We cover new ground in chapters on managing performance from a distance, training virtual team members about their businesses and finance, engaging in team building, giving and receiving feedback, supporting group decision making, fostering problem solving, and what we believe has become an issue of extreme importance for managers of virtual teams, maintaining personal and work life balance in the age of intrusive technology. Even when revisiting topics we have covered earlier, however, we’ve added more specific advice based on several more years of practical experience. Since we wrote The Distance Manager, we have had a busy consulting practice helping our clients apply these concepts; and although there is some common content, many of our current insights are different enough that we believed this new work was much needed. The unique approach of this series emphasizes pragmatism over theory, and promotes helpful tips over general observations. We like this practical approach, and we hope you find it helpful. We want you to know that we are not just reporting the best practices of our wonderful Fortune 100 clients. We’ve used most of what we suggest at The Fisher Group, Inc. (www.thefishergroup.com), ourselves, because much of our work must be done virtually. As former managers, we’ve always been hesitant to recommend anything to a client that we wouldn’t be willing to do in our own practice. Special Features The idea behind the books in the Briefcase series is to give you practical information written in a friendly person-to-person style. The chapters are short, deal with tactical issues, and include lots of examples. They also feature numerous sidebars designed to give you different types of specific information. Here’s an overview of the types of sidebars and what they cover. Every subject has some special jargon, including this one, dealing with virtual teams. These sidebars provide definitions of terms and concepts as they are introduced. These sidebars do just what their name suggests: give you tips and tactics for using the ideas in this book to intelligently manage and encourage effective operations management practices in your organization. Tricks of the Trade sidebars give you how-to hints on techniques astute managers use to execute the strategies and tactics described in this book. It’s always useful to have examples that show how the principles in the book are applied. These sidebars provide descriptions of how managers and organizations implement the techniques in this book. Caution sidebars provide warnings for where things could go wrong in managing your virtual team and things you should be aware of to help prevent problems. How can you make sure you won’t make a mistake when you’re trying to implement the techniques the book describes? You can’t, but these sidebars will give you practial advice on how to minimize the possibility of an error. This icon identifies sidebars where you’ll find specific procedures, techniques, or technology you can use to successfully implement the book’s principles and practices. Acknowledgments We wish to express our appreciation for the keen editorial insight of John Woods, who brought this project to us on behalf of Briefcase Books and our long time publishing partner, McGraw-Hill. Thanks also to our literary agent Mike Snell for his vigilant efforts on our behalf, and to our own company, The Fisher Group, Inc., for allowing us to use excerpts from The Distance Manager Training Program workbooks and assessments. We give our most special thanks to our clients from whom we have learned much and to whom we dedicate this book. Without the virtual team leaders and team members at organizations like AXA Equitable, Apple Computers, CDW, Cummins Power Generation, DynoNobel, GE Capital, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Nike Hong Kong, Ralston, State Farm Insurance, the U.S. Department of Treasury, the Staff Office of the U.S. Senate, and Weyerhaeuser, we wouldn’t have much of practical value to share with our readers. Kimball Fisher Mareen Fisher Portland, Oregon, USA Chapter 1 What Is a Virtual Team? Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision and the ability to direct individual accomplishment toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results. —Andrew Carnegie Let’s consider three common situations involving virtual team management. Meeting challenges like those described here are part of what we discuss in this book. Case One: The Global Team Management Challenge Not too long ago we worked with a manager at Cummins Engine, Inc. He was located in the U.K., but the small teams reporting to him were scattered across more than twenty countries. An especially bright and capable leader, the manager found that he would seldom see a more significant challenge than coordinating the work of people sharing a common office. Leading global teams, for example, sometimes seemed like tiptoeing through an unmarked minefield. People had diverse cultural backgrounds and often interpreted the same e-mail in different (and sometimes contradictory) ways. Offense was taken when none was intended. Confusion and duplication of effort occurred with alarming regularity. Finding time for meetings that didn’t conflict with someone’s sleep schedule or national holiday was almost impossible. He was also concerned about the communication challenges associated with running an operation that required almost immediate access to him 24/7. How could he lead a balanced work and personal life when he was constantly tethered to work by his smartphone and computer? Case Two: Can a Group of Remote Employees Really Function Like a Team? A manager from IBM went through a significant downsizing in his organization, leaving him with 65 direct reports spread across the continental United States. Turnover was high enough that even with a grueling travel schedule, he could never meet all his direct reports in person before they transferred away. Unfortunately, temporary travel restrictions for nonmanagers made it impossible to get his team together in one place at the same time. All their meetings had to be Web meetings or teleconferences. But how could he help the team members get to know each other well enough to trust each other? Would they ever reach the comfort level that would allow them to openly admit mistakes, offer constructive criticism, share their best ideas, or ask each other for assistance? How could he help them—especially those who worked alone from their homes—overcome their inevitable feelings of isolation? A team that shares a common office could get to know each other by taking breaks or having lunch together. Informal interaction in the hallways, at the water cooler, or in the parking lot builds relationships and a sense of common team identity. Celebrating birthdays and childbirths, sharing pictures of children and weddings, informally telling work stories about organizational disasters and victories and any of the thousand other tiny social interactions that connect people and create a social lubricant that facilitates working together would likely never happen. Was it even possible to create a highly functioning team in this situation? Case Three: Can a Team That Shares a Common Office Be Virtual? A manager of a sales team at the high-tech distribution giant CDW told us that she struggled with the challenges of managing people who were never in the office. Her sales team was almost always in the field working with customers. She was a good manager and had a track record of positive accomplishments, but many of her leadership practices were based on the traditional management model that assumed regular face-to-face interactions. She knew how to pop over a cubicle and help someone she could see was struggling with an assignment, how to gather an obviously confused group together for an emergency meeting, how to correct a misconception she overheard in the lunchroom, how to take full advantage of those fortunate moments when you run into someone in the hallway you need to speak with, or how to watch people and tell from their expressions and body language whether they understood or agreed with her. When she observed gossiping, whining, blaming, or other behaviors she knew would erode the effectiveness of the team, she intervened immediately. If she saw cliques forming, behaviors that indicated disunity or silo thinking, or indications of the early stages of conflict brewing, she resolved them. She knew how to rally the troops when the tone of their comments indicated that they were discouraged. To continue the military analogy, she liked being on the frontlines, helping the wounded, and personally leading charges far into enemy territory. “But,” she asked in an interview, “how do you lead a team over the Internet?” It felt to her like calling in orders to the battlefield when she was located in a tent, blinded and deafened by separation from her army, a million miles away. The Challenges of Working with Virtual Teams We have hundreds of these stories about the challenges of working with what are widely known as “virtual teams.” They come from operations as diverse as large multinational insurance companies to the staff office of the U.S. Senate, and from jobs that range from Microsoft executives to Swedish R&D scientists in a mining explosives company. Even though these are very different organizations—both private and public, blue collar and white collar, large corporations and small home-based businesses—they share a common problem: How do you manage people you seldom see in person—especially when that group of people is supposed to be a cohesive and productive work team? Why Are Virtual Teams Becoming So Common? The bad news is that these types of operations are difficult to manage and they are increasingly common. Since the industrial revolution started more than a century ago, organizations have had employees who didn’t work in the same location as their manager. But in the last several years, the number of these operations has exploded. Why? True global marketplaces have required that even smaller organizations have people closer to their customers, vendors, and key stakeholders. Skilled workers now live everywhere instead of in clumps surrounding key corporations or schools. Employees who were once willing to relocate to wherever the employer needed them now have to manage multiple careers and are reluctant to move their kids. Businesses don’t want to pay for relocation expenses. Cost pressures have also forced large organizations to reduce expensive brick-andmortar office buildings and place key components of their businesses in other countries. The nature of work itself has changed from mostly physical labor to mostly knowledge work, allowing people to work away from farms, factories, and mines. (For more about this, see our book The Distributed Mind, Amacom, 1998.) Perhaps most importantly, technology that allows people to do knowledge work jobs from anywhere is cheap, effective, and plentiful. The ubiquity of the Internet, in particular, allows people to coordinate their work regardless of location. What was once rare—a virtual team including employees who are remote from their manager and each other —is now commonplace. And it is unlikely that any professional manager will go through his or her entire career without having to manage at least one. Surprisingly, this is also the good news. These types of operations are increasingly common. That means that even though there are challenges, lots of people have already faced these challenges successfully. There was a time when some experts wondered if an effective work team was even possible if its members weren’t physically located together. They argued that communication technologies could never substitute for face-to-face interaction. We now know that is not true. Yes, it’s more difficult to lead a group of people located all over the place. But it is possible. Lots of managers are doing it. In all three cases that open this chapter, for example, the leaders ended up not only solving their difficult problems, but excelling as virtual team managers. Defining Virtual Teams To begin our discussion, let’s define virtual teams. Please note that there are many organizations that are not teams. If your operation doesn’t require people to collaborate to achieve common goals, for instance, then a team structure isn’t necessary. People can do independent work effectively even if they are isolated from each other. For example, we once worked with a utility that wanted to create teams, but when we helped management discover that individual gas meter readers didn’t have to work with each other to accomplish their jobs, they quickly (and appropriately) abandoned the project. (Ironically, technology that now allows for the remote reading of meters makes the former nonteam of employees new candidates for teaming because they now have to collaborate to make the best use of the technology. Before, they could work in the field without sharing anything other than an occasional tip on how to deal with aggressive dogs.) This book deals with virtual teams composed of people whose work depends on one another. We do not write about virtual groups of people. Unlike virtual groups, virtual team members have to collaborate to do their work, but unlike teams who are collocated, their mission is more difficult because they don’t share a common office and/or work schedule. Team A group of people who share a common purpose and who must collaborate to get their work done. Virtual team People who must work together, but who can’t frequently meet face-to-face because they: Work in different locations Work different time schedules Virtual teams are more prevalent than many people believe. Our experience suggests you have a virtual team if any of the team members: Are located in different workplaces Work in shifts Travel frequently Often work from their homes, cars, or in the field Are assigned to multiple project teams Work part-time Report to more than one manager If you’re a student of virtual teams, you’ll probably notice that our definition of virtual teams varies from that of some other experts in the field. Some, for example, consider virtual teams to be only those teams that are geographically dispersed. To them, a global team is obviously virtual, but a collocated 24-hour call center, 24/7 manufacturing plant or a multiple-shift IT help desk is not. But to us, the management dynamics of leading across a distance are similar whether the distance is geographic or is caused by working different hours. (For more on this, see our book The Distance Manager, McGraw-Hill, 2001). One of the authors, for example, was a manager in a multiple-shift manufacturing plant operated by Procter & Gamble in Lima, Ohio. The plant continues to be one of the most advanced team-based operations in the world (described in detail in Leading Self-Directed Work Teams, McGraw-Hill, 2000). Because team members were scattered across three shifts, however, some people were always unavailable because they were home asleep. They might just as well have been living in a different state. And although it is not part of our definition, we believe that culture is a third important variable affecting virtual teams. If team members are separated by significantly different cultures, they can be as behaviorally distanced from each other as if they were in a different country, regardless of whether they occupy the same space or time. This is especially obvious in those teams whose members may share a location but do not all speak the same language and therefore cannot collaborate effectively with each other. But it is also true when other cultural differences separate people and make it difficult for them to work together. What’s in This Book? Now that we have defined virtual teams, we’d like to dedicate the rest of the book to helping you lead them more effectively. Common questions about managing virtual teams that we intend to answer in this book include: What are the major challenges of managing a virtual team? What is the leader’s role? How do we help employees feel connected? How do we build trust from a distance? How do we communicate effectively? How should we use e-mail, teleconferences, instant messaging, and Web conferencing? How do we maintain relationships? What type of people should we hire to be on virtual teams? How do we orient new virtual team members? How do we manage across cultures? How do we manage the performance of people we can’t see? How often should we get together in person? How do we maintain an effective team environment? How do we set up a virtual team? What are the practical tools needed to keep a virtual team focused and effective? How can we maintain a balanced work and personal life? How can we do virtual team building? If you are interested in these questions, read on. In the next chapter we discuss why the three variables of space, time, and culture are so important to virtual teams, and we introduce the basic techniques for managing them. Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 1 The three key variables that affect virtual teams are space, time, and culture. Each variable can create a sort of distance that effective virtual leaders need to bridge. A virtual team (1) is any group of people that has to collaborate to get work done and (2) has members who work in different locations or during different hours. Virtual teams are increasingly common because global markets requi them and cost-effective technologies now make them practical. Any serious manager needs to know how to manage them effectively. In this book we help you address the common challenges of virtual teams, and we share the best practices of excellent virtual leaders across the globe. Chapter 2 Managing Space, Time, and Culture Remember upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all. —Alexander the Great In the last chapter we introduced the three key variables affecting virtual teams: space, time, and culture. In this chapter we explain why these variables are so important and suggest some steps you can take to address the challenges that come from a lack of shared offices and common working hours. The Three Key Variables Affecting Virtual Teams Why are these variables of space, time, and culture important? Team members located together (shared space) who work the same schedule (shared time) and know how to work together (shared culture) have a significant advantage over virtual teams. In this setting, for example, there are few obstacles to the formal and informal communication that are important for collaboration. Team members can quickly and directly share project status, ideas, concerns, and questions, help each other learn their jobs, solve problems, and make joint decisions. Informally, they can run into each other in the hallways, see each other during breaks, or meet at lunch or in the parking lot. Not only does this interaction help with the socialization needs of team members (people will work and communicate more effectively with people they know than with strangers), but it also provides a serendipitous opportunity to coordinate and collaborate (“Hey Jane, I just heard that you’re working on the X project. Can I ask you a couple of questions?”). Their shared culture helps them know what to do when they run into problems, have conflicts, or need to coordinate difficult assignments. Virtual teams seldom have these advantages of shared time, space, and culture, even though they must be able to compete with teams that do. SPACE, TIME, AND CULTURE Managing the three key variables affecting virtual teams is critical. If you don’t have shared physical space (collocation), create virtual space. If you don’t have shared work hours (synchronous time), create virtual time. If you don’t have a strong shared culture to guide team member behavior (homogeneity), then create a virtual culture. This book shows you how to do all three. Space-Time Obviously these three variables are strongly related and most virtual teams are affected by all three. Physicists tell us, for example, that space and time are actually part of the same continuum. This is easy to see if you imagine a widely dispersed team. If people are located in several places, then they will also be in different time zones. Thus, you could argue that as far as virtual teams are concerned, space-time is one variable rather than two. Culture Culture is also affected by space-time. The more distributed the team is in time and space, the more likely members are to have a fragmented (or what experts call a “heterogeneous”) culture. Obviously, teams dispersed in several countries face challenges caused by geographic cultural differences. For example (and at the risk of perpetuating stereotypes), consider what some people have reported to us about working on global teams. South Americans on a project may see timelines as approximate, while Germans may view them as precise, even though both sit through the same discussion in the same language at the same time. Asians may smile and nod their heads when asked to agree to something that they know they cannot later support because the rudeness of overt disagreement is culturally intolerable. This behavior confuses their U.S. colleagues, who assume that nods and smiles mean agreement. North Americans may run roughshod over what they see as the unnecessary time-consuming practices of other cultures. This short-term efficiency focus may backfire in the long term as it erodes trust and employee commitment. TROUBLE IN SCANDANAVIA A virtual new product development team of scientists at a Scandinavian company we worked with was having problems. Although they were some of the best and brightest technical minds in their field, coordination between the groups in Sweden and Norway and the group in the U.S. wasn’t so effective, and the business suffered as a result. When the team got together to discuss delays in new product introductions, they discovered that one of the key problems was cultural. Most of the Scandinavians took off the whole month of August for vacation, and the Americans resented it. The Swedes and Norwegians resented what they considered the unhealthy practice of American workaholism and the lack of respect for an important family and cultural tradition. Once each side showed appropriate cultural sensitivity and understood the concerns of the other, however, they were able to compromise, and they put together a plan for vacation rotation and improved communication that allowed each group to meet most of its needs while making the required improvements to the business process. To add more complexity to this culture problem, Ed Schein, an M.I.T. professor whose research focused on organizational culture, has defined culture as anything that falls into the category of a “learned behavior about how to work together” (Edgar Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership, 2nd Ed., Jossey-Bass, 1997). This definition appropriately allows for many things besides geography to influence the culture of a team, including organizational practices, educational backgrounds, and present and former leadership styles. Gaps in these areas can create a great deal of distance. What Besides Geography Causes Cultural Distance? In one company where we worked, the biggest and most divisive cultural difference wasn’t based on location, but on organizational practices. Some recently acquired organizations had fragmented into warring fiefdoms. Arguments were heated and common. Resources and information weren’t shared. Cooperation and collaboration were rare. The company was concerned that unless the language (e.g., acronyms, business terminology), practices, processes, and attitudes of the acquired organizations became better aligned with the culture of the organization that had acquired them, the entire operation could fail. CULTURE PROBLEMS The most problematic cultural distance between team members is often caused by something other than nationality. Differences in education, organizational affiliation, or any personal life experiences can give rise to cultural misunderstandings and undermine effective teamwork. Managers need to keep this in mind when dealing with a team whose members have different cultural backgrounds (even if they all reside in the same geographic region). We’ve heard similar concerns expressed about how the “culture” of a function such as engineering versus marketing or manufacturing can cause confusion and conflict in a team. For example, if a virtual project team composed of engineers, salespeople, and manufacturing people can’t get their job done because they don’t understand or respect each other, is that any less problematic than if the root of their conflict comes from geographic cultural differences? We’ve been in many teams where the engineers have complained about the lack of technical savvy of the manufacturing people and wondered why the salespeople don’t sell the products they have instead of pestering engineering for changes. The manufacturing people have complained that the engineers are too theoretical and don’t design for the real world. They think salespeople are naive and have no idea about how unrealistic schedules affect a factory. The salespeople lament the realities of the market and can’t comprehend the unwillingness of engineering and manufacturing to address customer needs. Ironically, we have watched people transfer from one function to the other, soon forgetting their previous concerns and taking on the speech patterns and sympathies of the new functional culture they had joined. It’s like watching someone move to another country, learn its language and habits, and eventually abandon all traces of the former life. In a team with many geographic cultures, there can be difficult problems around questions like “What do certain words or gestures mean?” or “How do we make sure we understand each other?” or “How can people with significantly differently viewpoints collaborate?” If they go unresolved, the team cannot perform at the highest level. But smart virtual team leaders realize that these questions can be just as problematic when the cultural difference stems from personal life experiences related to education, organizational affiliation, religion, gender, sexual orientation, race, socioeconomic circumstances, disability, military experience, or a whole host of other factors. SHARED CULTURES CAN BE DYSFUNCTIONAL Just because you have a homogeneous (shared) culture doesn’t mean the team can’t improve. Some strong, shared cultures can create “groupthink,” a consistency in approach and thinking that limits creativity and innovation. More importantly, a common culture may actually have to be modified if it becomes dysfunctional. In this case it becomes more dangerous than a fragmented culture because it is more likely to cause behavioral problems across the entire team. DEALING WITH CULTURAL DIFFERENCES Determine what kind of cultural issues are affecting your team. Are they rooted in organizational differences, country-of-origin differences, technical discipline differences, a combination of several of these, or something else? Treat the situation appropriately. For example, technical training may be required to bridge the chasm caused by technical discipline differences in approaching problems or making decisions. On the other hand, if the differences spring from organizational cultures, discussion and compromise may be the key. Serious culture differences of any type may require special training in cross-cultural sensitivity. In some cases professional consultation or mediation may be required. This help is especially important when it concerns issues that may have legal consequences. Use Whatever Advantages You Have We devote most of the rest of this book to a discussion of how to create virtual time, space, and culture for those teams that do not have the benefit of sharing either a common office or common work hours. But if your virtual team has the advantage of sharing space or time, we’d first like to discuss ways to use these opportunities. Using Shared Space Some virtual teams, such as a single-location 24-hour call center or factory, have multiple shifts of employees on the same team. They can’t normally get everybody together at the same time, but they do have everybody work in the same location at different times. If you have the advantage of sharing a common space, use it. Create a physical place that provides a sense of identity and a means for collaboration. Carve out a place for a team room where people can cluster and talk when they have overlapping schedules. Some organizations, for example, designate certain areas as gathering and meeting places. These rooms normally have a whiteboard and comfortable chairs surrounding a table. They are spaces that encourage people to share ideas with each other, solve problems, and collaborate. Decorate the team space with identity-enhancing graphics. For example, these teams often benefit from posters, charts, and graphs located on the walls. Post your goals, project timelines, or other key measures in places where they are visible to everyone. These types of community report cards can be updated each shift to obtain high-quality data, but more important, they are a visible reminder that each shift is part of a team that transcends its time period. Some teams—like the original Macintosh team at Apple Computers who flew a Skull and Crossbones flag over their building—create a symbol they use to reinforce their shared identity with people who work at other times. Most operations of this type find that they have to create shift overlap in the schedule to accommodate and encourage team communication. This is easier in operations using eight-hour shifts than in organizations using twelve-hour shifts, but it is always preferable to create the opportunity for face-to-face interchange whenever possible. During the overlap, most organizations have some sort of shift download meeting where incoming team members find out what happened on the last shift. This time is always scarce and should be used efficiently for the activities that are best done face-to-face. If a team decision is to be made, for example, some of the suggestions might be gathered asynchronously on the team Web site at the convenience of the team members throughout the shifts. The meeting time may then be reserved to discuss the pros and cons of each suggestion. Using Shared Time Some virtual teams have people in several locations, but they still have some regular overlap in daily work schedules. Use what you have. Most of these teams find it useful to have regularly scheduled conference meetings during the time overlap in the same way that collocated teams have staff meetings. The most common frequency for these virtual conferences is weekly, although many of these types of teams find that a brief daily meeting is helpful to coordinate assignments. Some virtual teams are located in a sufficiently small geography that face-to-face meetings can be held without incurring significant travel expenses. It is good practice to have these with sufficient frequency that team members can have most of the advantages of a collocated team. For this type of team, a quarterly meeting at a central location should not be difficult. Increased frequency is recommended if team members can benefit from sharing ideas, coordinating with others, or participating in joint problem solving or decision making. Remember to save the face-to-face meetings for things that aren’t easily accomplished through virtual interactions. You might keep a running agenda for the meetings that anyone can contribute to (perhaps a space on your Web site titled “Topics for upcoming face-to-face meetings”). This way, you can schedule a meeting as soon as you have a sufficient agenda to justify one. What If You Share Neither Time nor Space? Teams with no (or severely limited) shared time or space need a way to coordinate the day-to-day work through a variety of collaboration technologies. Coordinating the timing of synchronous meetings can be a headache in these teams because some members are almost always required to participate at a bad time for them (middle of their night, holidays, weekends, etc.). We have a business contact in Moscow, for example, who has an 11-hour time difference from our location in Portland, Oregon. Every virtual meeting requires someone to work outside of the “normal” 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. workday. In these cases, do your best to minimize this problem by choosing the least disruptive times. Rotate meeting times so that the same people aren’t always inconvenienced. In many cases virtual interaction still isn’t enough for people who share neither time nor space. Do something that allows people to get together in person, as well. The frequency of these interactions depends on your situation. These types of virtual teams range from never having a face-to-face meeting to having one every other week. In our experience, the most common frequency is a quarterly meeting that focuses on the things best done in person, including some social activities (dinner, golf, etc.) that facilitate team building. Avoid concerts, movies, or other activities that won’t allow people to interact with one other. Finally, find a way to create some team space. Some virtual teams at Hewlett-Packard, for example, actually set up desks for the offsite team members in the office where most team members are located. This isn’t practical or cost effective in most situations, but where teaming is critical, HP finds that this makes the offsite employees feel more like full partners than periodic associates. At a minimum, set up a team wiki or Web site to be a virtual space for your team. This will help create a shared identity for team members and help them feel less isolated. Include a “virtual water cooler” section on the site—a place where people can hang around and share the tacit information that keeps an organization going. For example, many teams have a chat room space on their intranet or team Wiki that allows more informal virtual interaction asynchronously. Team members from one shift can also leave notes to the next shift on the space, maintaining a type of ongoing operational log to capture important information and concerns. A certain portion of the site should be designed by the team members themselves to allow them to get to know each other better. Many teams include their photos, videos, or links to personal social networking pages from sites like Facebook or LinkedIn. Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 2 There are different types of virtual teams depending on how the three key variables of space, time, and culture affect them. Use what ever advantages you can on your team. If you share a common space, use it to help overcome challenges with communication and team identification. If you have some common time (even if it’s only a brief overlap in the morning or evening), use it to discuss the highest-priority issues of the team synchronously. If you have a common culture (and it’s functional), use it to align and motivate the team. If you don’t have common space, time, or culture on your team, you need to create virtual space, time, and culture. The rest of this book tells you how. A lot of things that can cause cultural difficulties on a virtual team. Conflicting cultures can be created by differences in country of origin, education, organization, or life experience. And even if you have a common culture on your team, it might not be a good thing. A common but dysfunctional culture, for example, can be more counterproductive than a fragmented one. Note Much of the discussion about the three variables affecting virtual teams comes from our book The Distance Manager (McGraw-Hill, 2001) and our Assessment Tool, Assessing Virtual Teams (The Fisher Group, Inc., 2010). Used by permission of authors and copyright holders. Some of the information about culture first appeared in a chapter Kimball wrote for The Handbook of High-Performance Virtual Teams (edited by Nemiro et al., Jossey-Bass, 2008) entitled “Tools for Effective Virtual Team Start-Ups.” Used by permission of the author. Chapter 3 The Seven Competencies of Effective Virtual Team Leaders If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader. —John Quincy Adams We have spent almost three decades trying to understand how to make leaders more effective, first in our own management jobs at Procter & Gamble, Tektronix, and Weyerhaeuser, and later as consultants to about one-quarter of the Fortune 100 companies (such as Apple Computers, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Capital One, Chevron, Intel, McDonald’s, Microsoft, NBC [General Electric], Toyota, and Tropicana [PepsiCo]). What is obvious to us (and, we suspect, every other serious manager in the world) is that there are certain fundamental practices necessary for all leaders regardless of title, level, or responsibility. These practices include things like being appropriately proactive, being an excellent communicator, and developing people effectively. Thankfully—especially given the sad and very public recent history of large business failures across the globe—there is also emerging agreement on a new, higher standard of ethics and transparency in leadership. One of our friends, for example, who recently attended his son’s graduation from the Harvard Business School, remarked that he was pleased to see that MBAs are now “strongly encouraged to stay out of jail.” But we have come to believe there are certain practices and perspectives especially important for leaders of virtual teams. To that end, in this chapter we describe the seven competencies we think are essential. This information comes from hundreds of interviews we have conducted with managers over the years as we have asked them the question, “What do effective virtual team leaders do?” The Seven Competencies of Virtual Team Leaders To share what we have learned from recent interviews, we have revised a model of virtual team leadership we wrote about in our first book on the topic (The Distance Manager, McGraw-Hill, 2001). As shown in Figure 3-1, these seven key competencies are leader, results catalyst, facilitator, barrier buster, business analyzer, coach, and living example. In this chapter, we describe each of these competencies and explain each one’s importance to virtual team managers. We start with the core competency (leader) and then go to results catalyst and work our way around the model counterclockwise, ending with living example. Figure 3-1. The seven competencies of effective virtual team leaders Leader Not surprisingly, being a leader is the core competency for effective virtual team leadership. What does that mean? Of course it includes some of the things you would expect in a discussion about leadership. Being a leader, for example, is different from being a manager (see Figure 3-2). Figure 3-2. Leadership versus management Although the various administrative skills like planning, organizing, directing, and follow-up (normally associated with effective management competencies) are essential on a virtual team, the managers we interviewed strongly suggested that most of that work has to be done by the team itself. If these teams aren’t effectively “self-organizing,” they argued, then virtual team leaders are dead in the water. When a virtual team leader emphasizes management over leadership, he or she will normally create dependence instead of independence, compliance instead of creativity and innovation, and rigidity instead of flexibility and responsiveness. Virtual team members chafe under what they view as efforts to micromanage their work, and they wonder why someone who doesn’t see them often could possibly be more competent at doing it than they can. See the next chapter about employee expectations for more on this topic. Self-organizing teams This term is synonymous with self-directed work teams. Both terms refer to teams with a high degree of worker empowerment and minimal supervision. While it is often optional for collocated teams to be self-organizing, virtual teams normally need to be self-organizing because increased supervision is not an option. That doesn’t mean, of course, that all virtual teams are good at being self-organizing, nor that all virtual team leaders are good at empowering their teams. An enormous amount of work is required by managers to help teams learn how to effectively manage themselves during the frequent absences of the formal leader. For more about how to deal with this difficult dilemma, see our book Leading Self-Directed Work Teams. Most of our clients prefer to use the term high-performance work teams to refer to these types of operations. We also like this term because it emphasizes the result of the team (ends) over the method used to obtain the result (means). Helping virtual team members understand this distinction is an important part of the leadership role. There is little value to empowered autonomy unless it results in improved organizational returns. A virtual team leader can’t see what team members are doing and has to rely on them to be self-starters. If team members wait to be directed by a distant leader, productivity will die, and the team (along with the manager) will not succeed. These managers have to be able to trust their people, to count on them meeting commitments, and to know that they will ask for help if it’s needed. Thus, although management skills are necessary, the manager normally teaches these management techniques to team members, rather than employing them herself or himself. DO IT WITH THEM, NOT FOR THEM Virtual team managers often manage people instead of leading them because it’s easier. When a frustrated virtual team member comes to you with a problem or complaint, it’s often easier to solve the problem yourself than to help the person learn how to solve it. But as the famous Taoist saying goes, ”If you give a man a fish you feed him for a day. If you teach him how to fish you feed him for a lifetime.” If you keep doling out fish, you create dependence. You can’t afford to have team members calling you with every difficulty. So when team members call with a customer problem, a technical breakdown, or a disagreement with a fellow team member they want you to fix, consider doing it with them, not for them. It takes more effort, but it will show them how to do it without you next time. “OK,” we said, “so what do you mean by leadership?” The leaders we talked to answered with many of the things you would expect, such as inspiring people to do their best and using vision as a tool of alignment. But they also confirmed that there are certain areas where these efforts are crucial on virtual teams, especially skills for dealing with people across the distance of space, time, and culture. Giving a presentation virtually, for example, is a different experience from doing it face-to-face. Even more critical are the skills associated with delivering performance feedback to someone you can’t see, or intervening to change a dysfunctional team culture during a Web meeting or teleconference. And almost to a person, these managers insisted that a virtual team leader has to be especially sensitive to cultural issues. An inappropriate joke, unintended violation of important norms, or unskillful treatment of an individual’s cultural concern about another team member can destroy a virtual team. Vision A verbal picture of the possible future direction of an organization. Consider some examples from the public sector. A simple but wellcrafted vision such as John F. Kennedy’s “We will place a man on the moon” or Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down that wall” or Mahatma Gandhi’s “non-violent change” or Mikhail Gorbachev’s “perestroika” can inspire incredible motivation and action. Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech is an excellent example of a vision stated in a way that provides clarity of direction and provokes institutional change. VISION BLOGGING One of the powerful tools for a leader is a personal vision of greatness for his or her team. How does the leader communicate this vision? Some leaders we’ve worked with keep a blog on their team Web page to share elements of their vision and reinforce it with current examples. If your vision includes something like reducing your team’s carbon footprint, for example, periodically note in your blog how Maya in the Alberta office found a way to reduce the need to travel through better use of Web conferencing or Giles in Manchester figured out how to conserve power in his home office. Or if your vision includes cost containment, share that story about how Lacey in the San Jose office negotiated a lower cost for expensive office supplies. You’ll be rewarding good performance publicly, sharing best practices, and reinforcing your vision all at the same time. Results Catalyst The second competency is results catalyst. Virtual team managers know that inspiring and motivating from a distance is important, but unless it produces bottom-line results, it is insufficient. The managers we interviewed also reported that it was not just getting results that was critical, but getting them in a certain way. For example, instead of getting results from dictates and controls or other authoritarian methods, they preferred to use more facilitative and developmental approaches such as a technique we call boundary conditions (see Figure 3-3). These methods, they reported, generate a feeling of personal empowerment and are more likely to produce sustainable results. Moreover, they don’t create an overreliance on the remote manager who may not be available at critical times when employees have to make quick decisions to save money, be responsive to customers, or avoid work delays. Figure 3-3. Directives vs. boundary conditions It is far easier to focus on the tasks at hand than the results that must be achieved, but a results catalyst knows this is a dangerous mistake. Many an organization has suffered when a function, for example, completed an assignment, but did it in a way that created more harm than good. There is a good reason that physicians subscribe to the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm,” because it is possible to cure a disease but kill a patient in the process. Many organizations find themselves unwittingly doing the same thing. A seemingly innocuous decision to shortcut an environmental process, save money on preventive maintenance activities, or save time and effort by ignoring small warning signs of potential people, political, or equipment problems could have disastrous results. One organization we worked with got so caught up in completing an interesting management information project that although they produced an award-winning, state-of-the-art management reporting system, they spent so much money on it that they had to increase the prices of their services, losing customers as a result. Boundary conditions These reveal restrictions and constraints (such as budgets, deadlines, or laws) that must be considered when making decisions. When a leader shares the boundaries within which a decision must be made, he or she is empowering the employee to make the decision in a way that is more likely for the process to be successful. For example, an effective virtual team manager would normally say,” Juan, why don’t you decide what to do for the next step of this project. Just remember that we can’t spend more than $2K and that it has to be cleared with engineering,” rather than “Please do such and such.” Why? Because if Juan makes the decision himself (appropriately considering the boundary conditions), he’ll “own” it. That means he’ll make sure it is implemented properly, he’ll fix it if it doesn’t work, and the results will be better than if he feels he is simply executing someone else’s orders. Facilitator The third competency is facilitator, the role of providing appropriate resources for the team to do its work. These resources include things like budgets, personnel, tools, training, and information. One of the most important things facilitators do for virtual teams is ensure that team meetings are effective. This is a key resource for effective team coordination, decision making, and problem solving. In a virtual team, much of this has to be done via technology. Managers must be highly skilled, for example, at facilitating Web meetings—a skill set that requires more than face-to-face facilitation techniques. This also requires that virtual team leaders be proficient in communicating via tools like e-mail, instant messaging, and teleconferencing. Experienced managers know that this isn’t as easy as it sounds. How do you convey appropriate emotion (excitement, sadness, etc.) over e-mail? How do you make sure that a communication is written in a way that doesn’t unintentionally convey the wrong message or leave things too open to interpretation? At the time of this writing, communication vehicles with a video component are still not always available, and managers must therefore also be proficient in communicating with someone, or with a collection of several people, whom they cannot see. COMMUNICATING WITH PEOPLE YOU CAN’T SEE Why is it a problem to communicate with someone you can’t see? Because humans are hardwired to use visual cues like body language, facial expressions, and gestures to facilitate communication. So what do you do if you can’t see these visual cues? Some teams at Hewlett Packard use visual imagery in teleconferences. They might say, “Martha, are you frowning right now?” or “Alex, I bet you’re shaking your head” to draw people into fuller and more effective conversations. Managers also have to remember to ask if people have questions because they can’t see a confused expression over the telephone or e-mail. And it’s always a good idea to confirm any decision by having the people responsible for implementing that decision repeat back what they are going to do. This is a good double-check of the effectiveness of the communication. Don’t ask them if they understand what you said. In some cultures it’s rude to say no, even if they didn’t understand a single thing. Barrier Buster The fourth competency is barrier buster. This is the ability to remove those obstacles that get in the way of the highest possible performance from employees individually and collectively. In a collocated facility, these barriers—things like conflict, organizational structures and policies, or even low self-esteem—are often glaringly visible. But in a virtual team, these barriers are more likely to be kicked under the rug and ignored. This isn’t good! Assume that barriers always exist and actively ferret them out. Regularly ask, “What prevents you from reaching your highest level of performance?” to individuals in one-onone teleconferences and to the team as a whole in Web conferences. Always be working to eliminate the policies, structures, conflicts, or other problems that get in the way of producing the best organizational results. Business Analyzer Think of the next competency, business analyzer, as the ability to manage businesses instead of functions or sites (the skills associated with managing the whole instead of just its parts). It’s important that a virtual team leader, for example, be sensitive to whether team members feel isolated or disconnected from the team or business, and that he or she intervenes appropriately to do virtual team-building activities when the need arises. These interventions may even require the leader to work with other teams across the organization to ensure that the business, not just his or her part of it, is successful. It may require working with customers, government compliance agencies, or other stakeholder groups in the business environment. One special emphasis here is the area of culture development. “Often,” one manager said, “the culture that gets established in a virtual team has to be improved. It is easy for the team to fall into habits of being noncommunicative, being disrespectful of others, or not being accountable. If the leader doesn’t intervene, the team results will eventually suffer.” We recommend early intervention. As we frequently suggest, all problems are magnified by distance. If you think something might be a problem, it usually is. If you think it’s a small problem, it’s probably huge. And if you think it’s a big problem, it might already be too late to fix. This topic is important enough that we dedicate an entire chapter to it later in the book. MAKE IT GOOD FOR ALL A good business analyzer understands that what is best for his or her operation may not be best for the organization as a whole. We worked in one operation, for example, where the procurement team was proud of the fact that it had saved tens of thousands of dollars on contracts through tough negotiations with vendors. Unfortunately, vendors consequently decreased their quality to a point that more than a million dollars of final product had to be recalled from customers because the substandard components of the vendors failed in the field. It was a classic tale of suboptimization (optimizing a part of the organization to the detriment of the whole). Coach In terms of time, the sixth competency, coach, probably consumes more of the virtual team leader’s workday than any other. Virtual teams need a lot of coaching to be successful. This includes coaching and training in technical, interpersonal, and business skills both for individuals and for the team as a whole. And it takes a lot of time just to determine the areas where the coaching is needed. In later chapters we discuss how to improve performance from a distance and cover this issue in detail. Coaching A series of interventions a manager makes to improve team performance. Like the sports metaphor suggests, coaches recruit, help team members acquire and apply skills, help them work effectively as both individuals and teams, and help them learn from mistakes and get better and better results (win games). Whenever a manager is giving feedback on performance, helping a team member put together a plan to acquire new skills (through schooling, training, new project assignments, mentoring, etc.), doing a performance appraisal, providing team or individual training, or conducting a postmortem on a project to see what improvements could be made next time, he or she is coaching. Living Example The final competency is living example. Virtual team managers must set an example for how they expect others on the team to behave. In today’s business environment, employees are skeptical about management. They believe in actions, not words; personal examples, not policies; and they believe in budgets, not in stated intentions about where resources will eventually be applied. They expect that their leaders will set an example about things like effective communication, personal responsibility, and good meeting management. We read not too long ago, for example, about a high school principal in the Portland, Oregon, area who retired and then volunteered her services for free for the next school year in order to avoid laying off two other teachers. It’s one thing to say you’ll fight for more teachers, but another thing altogether to volunteer a year of your own personal life. One of our favorite stories about a virtual team leader being a living example comes from a then-subsidiary of Tektronix. A manager in the Grass Valley Group had a number of people on his team who traveled extensively. One day he had to assign a team member who had just returned from a trip to get on an airplane over the weekend to deal with yet another customer emergency. The team member complained that he hadn’t even had time to mow his lawn due to his grueling schedule. The manager knew that the concern was well justified. But he didn’t just express empathy and encouragement as many team leaders might have, he took his son over to the employee’s house that Saturday to mow the lawn. Did that require a personal sacrifice? Yes. But it left a lasting impression on the employee (who is the coworker of a friend who told us this story). A lecture about how sometimes we have to sacrifice for the good of the company can be useful, but a demonstration by a living example carries a lot more impact. And it said more about how that leader cared about his team than an expression of appreciation in a meeting ever could. How Do I Determine My Effectiveness as a Virtual Team Leader? Ultimately, the answer to the question “Am I a good virtual team leader?” is determined by the results of the team(s) you lead. Good managers get good results. But to determine whether you are applying the best practices of effective virtual team leaders, consider completing an assessment like the one below. Distance Manager Effectiveness Assessment Instructions: Assess your effectiveness as a virtual team manager by considering how often the following questions are true in your management practice (Always, Frequently, Sometimes, or Never). Statements that receive lower than a “Frequently” rating may indicate an opportunity for improvement. Leader 1. Helps the virtual team understand exactly what it is responsible for. 2. Responds to communication (e-mails, voice mails, etc.) from team members within 24 hours. 3. Empowers the team by ensuring they have the authority, resources, information, and accountability to be successful. 4. Provides effective “start-up” or “refocusing” interventions for virtual teams, including a face-to-face meeting of all members on a regular basis. 5. Ensures that effective information-sharing, problem-solving, and decision-making processes are in place. 6. Manages by sharing information/data, not by asking people to conform to unnecessary rules and regulations. Results Catalyst 7. Focuses on results. 8. Clearly states the limits (boundary conditions) within which the team c make decisions. 9. Actively supports team decisions that are within stated boundary conditions. 10. Strives to manage by a set of guiding principles (i.e., core guiding beliefs) rather than by policy only. 11. Makes sure the team establishes and uses a set of operating guidelines. 12. Establishes clear performance goals and metrics set jointly with the team and discussed regularly. Facilitator 13. Models good team meeting preparation and facilitation. 14. Helps the team understand and use effective decision-making processes. 15. Is sensitive to group dynamics and deals effectively with dysfunctiona behaviors. 16. Helps the team solve technical problems; ensures the understanding and use of appropriate problem-solving tools. 17. Helps the team solve people problems; ensures the understanding a use of appropriate problem-solving tools. 18. Helps the team solve business problems; ensures the understanding and use of appropriate problem-solving tools. Barrier Buster 19. Works actively to remove unnecessary policies, procedures, or work practices that hinder team performance. 20. Corrects differences between what the company says it wants to hav people do and what it actually rewards people for doing. 21. Actively works with individual team members to help them overcome feelings of isolation. 22. Helps the team understand, recognize, and manage different kinds o conflict. 23. Recognizes when he or she is a barrier to the team and takes necessary improvement action. Business Analyzer 24. Communicates information about what is happening in other parts of the organization. 25. Discusses specific data about product/service performance with the team on a frequent basis. 26. Frequently discusses specific data about competitors with the team. 27. Discusses specific data about financial performance with the team on frequent basis. 28. Ensures that team members know how to use communication technology effectively. 29. Acts like serving the customer is the most important priority. Coach 30. Transfers responsibility and builds problem-solving skills in others by asking questions rather than always giving answers. 31. Ensures that members of the the team have effective ways to communicate with each other. 32. Allocates time and money for training and development activities. 33. Deals with poor performance appropriately. 34. Exhibits good feedback skills and teaches these skills to team members. 35. Ensures that the team develops and uses appropriate technology protocols (agreements on how to use e-mail, voice mail, Web conferences, etc.). Living Example 36. Provides a personal example of the way people act in a virtual team setting. 37. Admits mistakes freely and openly. 38. Follows through on agreements. 39. Is willing to do things that are personally inconvenient if it helps the team. 40. Will do what he or she thinks is right even if it may be disruptive to personal career goals. 41. Behaves consistently with corporate values and ethics. Remember that a self-assessment only provides your point of view. The most accurate way to complete an assessment of your management skill is to gather data from those you lead. A periodic assessment of your effectiveness as a virtual team leader is a good way to provide the opportunity for feedback, personal development, and organizational improvement. Our experience indicates that leadership effectiveness is the single most important variable associated with virtual team success. Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 3 Critical skills for virtual team leaders include things like helping team members become self-sufficient, communicating effectively over technology, managing performance from a distance, dealing effectively with multiple cultures, helping their team improve its culture when necessary, training team members in technical, interpersonal, and business skills, eliminating barriers to performance, and setting a personal example of how to act on a virtual team. The seven competencies for effective virtual team leaders include: leader, results catalyst, facilitator, barrier buster, business analyzer, coach, and living example. A Leader inspires and motivates through vision, not management techniques. The results catalyst helps the team stay focused on getting good results. The facilitator gets the team the resources it needs and helps the tea members interact as effectively as possible. The barrier buster eliminates impediments to increased performance. The business analyzer optimizes the whole of the business rather tha just the team he or she leads. The coach works to improve both individual and organizational performance. The living example provides a personal role model of organizational values and ethics. Note An earlier version of the “Seven Competencies of the Virtual Team Manager” was published in The Distance Manager (McGraw-Hill, 2001). The questions for the “Distance Manager Effectiveness Assessment” are a sampling of our assessment tool of the same name (The Fisher Group, Inc., 2010) and are used by permission of the authors and copyright holders. Chapter 4 What Virtual Team Employees Need from Their Manager Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done. —Peter Drucker We would like to share a personal (and somewhat embarrassing) example of how easy it is to make mistakes as virtual team managers. A few years ago we experienced some challenges associated with shipping and retrieving training materials to and from some of our clients. Our team is composed of consultants (who are normally on the road and/or located in other states from our corporate office in Oregon) and customer service and materials coordinators (who are located at the corporate office). As company leaders we immediately diagnosed the problem and created a thorough tracking system that we created. This gave us the confidence that things were under control when we and the other consultants were on the road. Once we instructed the materials coordinator how to implement the solution, we assumed it was fixed. Not long afterward, however, the problem resurfaced, and materials shipped to another client site were somehow misplaced. Frustrated, we called a special team meeting to resolve the problem before it affected other clients. During the meeting, we realized that we had used the very approach we cautioned our clients against. For some time we had recommended that managers “share the problem, not the solution” as a way to empower others. But instead, we had only shared our solution and asked people to implement it. We controlled the people (by conferring blame and demanding that our idea be implemented) instead of the process (discussing our ideas with others and focusing on the tools and techniques necessary for fixing the problem). We apologized for mandating a solution and began to control the process instead. We described the problem and invited the materials coordinator to develop a new work process of her choosing that would solve it. The coordinator created a new, less cumbersome tracking system that did just that. The problem went away, and the coordinator felt that she had been empowered to solve it. Where before she had just been implementing someone else’s solution, she now had a feeling of ownership for implementing and maintaining her own solution to the problem (which we discovered in the discussion, by the way, was more due to our lack of communication than to the material coordinator’s lack of attention to detail as we had assumed). We discovered how easy it is to slip back into controlling the person instead of managing the machines, techniques, or series of steps necessary to accomplish the work. Our new mantra at work is “We need a better process” instead of “Who made the mistake?” As a consequence, virtual team members have created work processes that range from an accountability system to make sure that assignments are followed up on to a new process for licensing our materials. These work processes provide direction and focus for the work whether we are on site or not. How Do You Control Distance Workers? “My biggest concern,” confided one virtual team leader, “is that they won’t be productive when I’m not there. How do you control offsite employees?” The saying goes, “When the cat’s away, the mice will play.” This has been quoted to us many times by concerned managers. We are also embarrassed to confess that we have sometimes felt this ourselves. As our story at the start of the chapter demonstrates, however, it may be this very way of thinking that lessens the leader’s ability to maintain appropriate control of an offsite workforce. Thinking that workers need to be controlled often causes the distance leader to overcontrol through policies and procedures that can actually cause the problem the leader so assiduously wants to avoid. THE PROBLEM WITH CONTROL Remote workers often feel distrusted or inadequate if their work environment is based on hierarchically generated control. This negatively affects their work. When-workers feel overcontrolled by management, he or she tends to act in one of the following ways: (1) They become compliant and dependent on the manager, (2) they resist the controls and find ways to play games to get around them, or (3) they become apathetic. None of these states promotes the highest level of employee performance. What Do Virtual Team Members Need from Their Leaders? If you ask team members what they want from a virtual team manager, you seldom hear them ask for more autocracy, hierarchy, or bureaucracy. More clarity, yes; definite priorities, sure; a sense of direction, absolutely. But more than the traditional management attributes of planning, organizing, directing, and controlling, team members want the sort of coaching and facilitation that comes from someone who sees his or her job as supporting rather than directing the team. They probably want the same things from you that you want from your leader. Specifically, we consistently hear team members make 10 requests of their leaders: 1. Coordination rather than control 2. Accessibility rather than inaccessibility or omnipresence 3. Information without overload 4. Feedback instead of advice 5. Fairness over favoritism 6. Decisiveness but not intrusive supervision 7. Honesty rather than manipulation 8. Concern for their development over apathy about it 9. Community building over mere coordinated isolation 10. Respect rather than paternalism or condescension These are not listed in any particular order, with almost all of the expectations being important to employees who have talked to us about distance leadership over the years. Let’s review these expectations. Coordination Rather Than Control The first expectation is coordination, not control. While team members appreciate attempts at coordination, they normally chafe under what they perceive to be control. Ironically, the best control of the offsite office is the control imposed from within (self-control) rather than from outside (manager-imposed) anyway. So the question is, “How do you encourage self-control without being controlling?” According to Harvard professor Richard Walton, you do it by changing management paradigms from a control orientation to what he calls the commitment paradigm (“From Control to Commitment in the Workplace,” Harvard Business Review, March–April 1985). We think he’s still right today. Figure 4-1 provides examples of the difference between the control and commitment paradigms. Figure 4-1. Difference between management paradigms HOW DO YOU BALANCE CONTROL AND COORDINATION? This is a difficult tightrope to walk. Having too many policies, for example, is often perceived as unnecessary control, while having too few is seen as poor coordination. The key to proper balance is to stay well connected to team members. If you hear things like “We really feel like our hands are tied” or “You haven’t given us much choice here,” you have probably erred on the side of too much control. Under these conditions, team members generally will not accept ownership or accountability for their work (e.g., “I was just doing what you told me to do” or “That’s not my job.”). If you hear things like “What are our Paris teammates doing?” or “We’re confused because of the inconsistency in how people do things,” you have probably erred on the side of not enough coordination. Under these conditions productivity suffers. Being out of balance on either side (control or coordination) affects morale. Accessibility Rather Than Inaccessibility or Omnipresence The second expectation is to be accessible. Even if you could be, team members would neither expect nor want you to be physically present all the time. The desire for autonomy in most distance employees is very high. “But” says Mark Nyman, who has worked with numerous virtual teams in several Fortune 500 companies, “virtual team members want their leaders to be accessible. They want to know they can reach them when they need to.” This doesn’t mean virtual team managers need to be on call 24/7, but it usually does mean that they carry cell phones just about everywhere. It also means that they make the extra effort of telling team members when they are not accessible due to vacation, illness, or personal reasons. This extra courtesy creates a sort of virtual leadership presence that employees feel they have some control over. Information Without Overload The third expectation is information without overload. If information is the lifeblood of virtual teams, the challenge for the distance manager is to provide people with what they need to sustain their health without unintentionally creating internal hemorrhaging from too much data. Keep them informed but not inundated. Explains Mike Kuczwara, senior human resources manager at Procter & Gamble, “What I want from a virtual team manager is to keep me informed. That’s something my manager is really good at. He has the responsibility of managing a human resources team where the team members are on the road most of the time. They operate from several locations spread across the country. Something that he does that we all really appreciate is send us a weekly correspondence with key issues and facts in summary form.” REQUIRED INFORMATION VARIES FROM TEAM TO TEAM The right balance of information is difficult to maintain, and it may differ significantly from team to team. What is too much information for one team (We can’t get anything done because we have too many meetings!) may be too little for another (How do you expect us to get our work done when we don’t know what is going on?). Unfortunately, the technologies to facilitate information passing among team members can also inundate them with unnecessary detail or redundancy. When you do find the right balance, team members are appreciative. For more tips on how to deal with problems such as e-mail glut, see later chapters. Feedback Instead of Advice The fourth expectation is feedback. People generally appreciate skillfully delivered information about how they are doing. James Gautier is a member of a virtual team of middle school consultants. This team meets together physically only a few times each year. “One thing I really appreciate,” says Gautier, “is getting feedback. Sometimes one of the other consultants will sit in on a presentation I’m doing and tell me how they think it was received or Jim (the team leader) will let me know how the teachers and administrators evaluated the session. That helps when you don’t have your leader or peers around all the time.” “What most people dislike,” clarifies Dee Oviatt, a consulting team member at Pioneer Hi-Bred International, “isn’t getting negative feedback about their performance, it’s getting inappropriate advice.” While appropriate advice is helpful, inappropriate advice (not work related, unsolicited, too superficial, not based on a full understanding of the situation, etc.) can have a dramatic negative effect on morale. While people want mentoring, they don’t want meddling. There is a difference. Saying something like, “Miko, I thought it was really helpful to the team when you offered Jacob technical advice in our last Web conference,” is mentoring. Saying, “Miko, you’re too quiet in meetings. Speak up,” is meddling. You offered nothing specifically helpful to her (Speak up how? Speak up when?), and only left her concerned that you don’t approve of her behavior in meetings. That kind of comment does more harm than good. MENTORING VERSUS MEDDLING How can you tell if you’re mentoring or meddling? One way is to wait for the teaching moment when an employee solicits advice. Another is to be careful about how you word things. Saying something like “Paul, your clients let me know they loved your last visit because you took the time to listen to their concerns. They’d like to see that more often” is better than “Paul, you need to listen to your clients.” One is feedback based on data or observation. The other is unsolicited advice. The problem with giving a lot of advice (especially general advice) as a virtual team manager is that the team member often wonders how you would be in a position to offer it when you aren’t with them very often. Fairness over Favoritism The next expectation is to be treated fairly. Fairness generally ranks high in surveys about employee expectations of their leaders. This is especially important in virtual situations because perceived inequities are magnified over time and space. Favoritism of any type can affect the productivity of distance workers. “Why should I work so hard,” they rationalize, “when results count for less than whether the manager likes you or not?” In addition to the obvious problems of allowing certain team members to be perceived as favorites (e.g., “He always gets the good assignments” or “Why does she always get the best resources for her projects?”), effective virtual team managers avoid being site-, time-, or culture-centric. It isn’t fair, for example, if the same people always have to get out of bed for teleconferences. It isn’t fair if people who don’t speak English are always left to fend for themselves during meetings. It isn’t fair if the same people always travel long distances for the face-toface meetings. Good virtual team managers assiduously avoid these inequities and are willing to share in the sacrifice required of members of a virtual team. That is part of being the living example mentioned in the previous chapter. If you aren’t willing to take your turn getting up at night for a global meeting, or to come in on night shift, or travel to a remote location for a meeting, why should they? Decisiveness but Not Intrusive Supervision The sixth expectation is appropriate decisiveness. Team members don’t want intrusive supervision, but they don’t want you to be among the missing, either. When a leadership decision needs to be made, make it. Although team members want to be involved in decisions that affect the way they do their work, there are certain decisions that you need to make by yourself. The most obvious example of this is disciplinary action. Few things are more demotivating to a team than when leaders don’t resolve employee performance problems. Unresolved incompetence, perpetual lack of safe behaviors, unfulfilled customer requirements, or more blatant individual problems such as dishonesty or sexual harassment can quickly derail a whole team—even at a distance. A good coach (another one of the key competencies noted in the last chapter) knows how to work with people to help them improve. You might receive additional information for your company’s specific approach to these problems through your human resources representative. Although 360-degree feedback activities where peer feedback is received from other team members are becoming common, group disciplinary decisions are still unusual, particularly in virtual teams where the leader may have as much interaction with the team members as their noncollocated peers do. Do not abdicate these types of performance decisions. Honesty Rather Than Manipulation Another clear expectation is honesty. In their research on employee expectations of leaders, Kouzes and Posner found that the number-one concern was honesty of leadership (The Leadership Challenge: How to Get Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations, Jossey-Bass, 1987). What was true then may even be more true in the current business environment. We have heard similar expectations from numerous team members we have talked with since the global recession of 2008–2010. They saw overly publicized mismanagement and deception (especially if they were in the financial or insurance sectors) on a scale so large that they couldn’t ignore it. It affected their expectations of leaders. They don’t want to be manipulated into false participation where the leader tries to get them to agree to his or her way of thinking. They also don’t want sugarcoating. They certainly don’t want things to be hidden from them. Concern for Their Development versus Apathy About It The eighth expectation is that the distance leader will train and develop the team members. This is especially important to employees who feel disconnected from the rest of the organization. Although perceptive employees realize that the days of employment security and companydriven career planning are gone, they do want to know that their leader genuinely cares about their professional development. Employees generally believe that organizations that focus time and energy on employee development are more likely to be successful, viable operations than those that don’t. They are also happiest when they believe they are being groomed not only for their current role and responsibilities but for future assignments, as well. Employees expect that you will be concerned about getting them trained in three categories: (1) business training to better understand their customers, markets, competitors, and financials, (2) technical training to learn how to operate the technologies necessary for them to do their jobs, and (3) interpersonal training to work more effectively with you and their teammates in areas such as effective problem solving, decision making, conflict resolution, and the giving and receiving of feedback. Remember that classroom training isn’t always the best way to develop these skills. The most effective learning often occurs from developmental project assignments or mentoring programs. Community Building versus Mere Coordinated Isolation The ninth expectation has special importance to remote workers. Virtual team members often experience a feeling of isolation that comes from not working near the rest of their teammates and leaders. The most effective managers help them overcome these concerns through teambuilding activities and other community-building interventions like those mentioned later in the book. Helping them deal with their feelings of isolation requires more than connecting them electronically with you and their peers—that’s only coordinated isolation. Building a team takes more effort. It takes work to clarify the team charter, establish operating guidelines, and get to know the other team members. This is more important than it appears at first blush. For example, one virtual team member confided to us that although the team she worked on was successful in accomplishing the project on time and within budget, the personal toll was too great. “I would never do it again,” she said. “It was too hard to receive feedback on my work from people I didn’t know and consequently couldn’t respect. My leader didn’t handle it well. She only focused on getting the task done. We burned out. Our work could have been better. Just taking the time to help us get to know each other would have made the work go faster and better in the long run. I felt like a robot instead of a human member of a team.” Respect versus Paternalism or Condescension The final expectation is to be respected. Respect is a basic human need. When it’s absent in a society, people revolt. In a business they may become cynical, apathetic, or nonproductive. While they certainly do not want condescending behavior from their leaders, they also do not want the paternalism exhibited by many well-intended corporations. Unfortunately, both condescending behavior and paternalistic behavior send the same unintended message to the recipient: “You can’t take care of yourself so I’m going to take care of you.” Even in the best of circumstances this approach can create unhealthy dependence, lower self-esteem, and stunt self-initiative. Condescension Speaking to adults like they are children. Saying things like, “You have to check with me before you talk to engineering” leaves the impression that you don’t trust your team members or that you think they are dim-witted or irresponsible. Condescension is a cousin to paternalism. Paternalism Another way to speak to adults like they are children, but it is generally done with the intention of being helpful or protective. Unfortunately, saying something like “I’ll take care of speaking to engineering; you don’t have to worry about that” can also leave the impression that you don’t think the team member is capable of handling an assignment. Instead of condescending or paternalistic approaches, consider coaching the individuals to learn the skills necessary to do the work themselves. Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 4 Remote employees have 10 common requests for virtual team managers: (1) coordination rather than control, (2) accessibility rather than inaccessibility or omn…

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