write two or three short paragraphs for EACH reading with an insightful and critical thinking reference related to Virtual - Remote - Telecommuting Teams and/or the academic practical learning content

LEADING TEAMSMaking Virtual Teams

Work: Ten Basic Principles

by Michael D. Watkins JUNE

, 0

Consider this now familiar view from the field:

ve run a virtual team for the past 18 months in the development and launch of [a website.] I am

located in Toronto, Canada. The website was designed in Zagreb, Croatia. The software was developed in St. Joh s, Newfoundland; Zagreb, Croatia; Delhi, India; and Los Angeles, USA. Most of the

communication was via email with periodic discussions via Skype. I had one face-to-face meeting with the team lead for the technology development this past December

Could this be you? Virtual teams have become a fact of business life, so what does it take to makethem work

effectively? On June 10, 2013, I launched a discussion around this question on LinkedIn.

The result was an outpouring of experience and advice for making virtual teams work. (I

define

“virtual teams” as work groups which (1) have some core members who interact primarily through electronic means, and (2) are engaged in interdependent tasks i.e. are truly teams and not just

groups of independent workers). I distilled the results and combined them with my own work, which

focuses on how new leaders should assess and align their teams in their

first 90 days. Because tha s

really when i s most important to lay the foundation for superior performance in teams virtual or otherwise. Here are ten basic principles for making this happen:

1. Get the team together physically early-on. It may seem paradoxical to say in a post on virtual

teams, but face-to-face communication is still better than virtual when it comes to building relationships and fostering trust, an essential foundation for

effective team work. If you ca t do it,

i s not the end of the world (focus on doing some virtual team building). But if you can get the team

together, use the time to help team members get to know each other better, personally and professionally, as well to create a shared vision and a set of guiding principles for how the team will

if possible.

2. Clarify tasks and processes, not just goals and roles. All new leaders need to align their team on

goals, roles and responsibilities in the

first 90 days. With virtual teams, however, coordination is

inherently more of a challenge because people are not co-located. So i s important to focus more

attention on the details of task design and the processes that will be used to complete them. Simplify

the work to the greatest extent possible, ideally so tasks are assigned to sub-groups of two or three

team members. And make sure that there is clarity about work process, with

specifics about who

does what and when. Then periodically do “after-action reviews” to evaluate how things are going

and identify process adjustments and training needs.

3. Commit to a communication charter. Communication on virtual teams is often less frequent, and

always is less rich than face-to-face interaction, which provides more contextual cues and

information about emotional states such as engagement or lack thereof. The only way to avoid the

pitfalls is to be extremely clear and disciplined about how the team will communicate. Create a

charter that establishes norms of behavior when participating in virtual meetings, such as limiting

background noise and side conversations, talking clearly and at a reasonable pace, listening

attentively and not dominating the conversation, and so on. The charter also should include

guidelines on which communication modes to use in which circumstances, for example when to

reply via email versus picking up the phone versus taking the time to create and share a document.

4. Leverage the best communication technologies. Developments in collaborative technologies

ranging from shared workspaces to multi-point video conferencing unquestionably are making

virtual teaming easier. However, selecting the “best” technologies does not necessarily mean going with the newest or most feature-laden. I s essential not to

sacrifice reliability in a quest to be on the

cutting edge. If the team has to struggle to get connected or wastes time making elements of the collaboration suite work, it undermines the whole endeavor. So err on the side of robustness. Also be

willing to

sacrifice some features in the name of having everyone on the same systems. Otherwise,

you risk creating second-class team members and undermining

effectiveness.

5. Build a team with rhythm. When some or all the members of a team are working separately, i s all-

too-easy to get disconnected from the normal rhythms of work life. One antidote is to be disciplined

in creating and enforcing rhythms in virtual team work. This means, for example, having regular

meetings, ideally same day and time each week. It also means establishing and sharing meeting

agenda in advance, having clear agreements on communication protocols, and starting and

finishing

on time. If you have team members working in different time zones, do t place all the time-zone

burden on some team members; rather, establish a regular rotation of meeting times to spread the

load equitably.

6. Agree on a shared language. Virtual teams often also are cross-cultural teams, and this

magnifies

the communication challenges especially when members think they are speaking the same

COPYRIGHT 0 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. language, but actually are not. The playwright George Bernard Shaw famously described Americansand the British as “two nations divided by a common language.” His quip captures the challenge ofsustaining shared understanding across cultures. When the domain of team work is technical, then

the languages of science and engineering often provide a solid foundation for

effective

communication. However, when teams work on tasks involving more ambiguity, for example generating ideas or solving problems, the potential for divergent interpretations is a real danger (see

for example this Anglo-Dutch translation guide ). Take the time to explicitly negotiate agreement on

shared interpretations of important words and phrases, for example, when we say “yes,” we mea and when we say “no” we mea and post this in the shared workspace.

7. Create a “virtual water cooler.” The image of co-workers gathering around a water cooler is a

metaphor for informal interactions that share information and reinforce social bonds. Absent explicit

efforts to create a “virtual water cooler,” team meetings tend to become very task-focused; this

means important information may not be shared and team cohesion may weaken. One simple way to

avoid this: start each meeting with a check-in, having each member take a couple of minutes to discuss what they are doing, wha s going well and wha s challenging. Regular virtual team-buildingexercises are another way to inject a bit more fun into the proceedings. Also enterprise collaboration

platforms increasingly are combining shared workspaces with social networking features that can

help team members to feel more connected.

8. Clarify and track commitments. In a classic HBR article “Management Time, Wh s got the

Monkey ?” William Oncken and Donald L. Wass use the who-has-the-monkey-on-their-back

metaphor to exhort leaders to push accountability down to their teams. When teams work remotely,

however, i s inherently more

d cult to do this, because there is no easy way to observe

engagement and productivity. As above, this can be partly addressed by carefully designing tasks and having regular status meetings. Beyond that, it helps to be explicit in getting team members to

commit to

define intermediate milestones and track their progress. One useful tool: a “deliverables

dashboard” that is visible to all team members on whatever collaborative hub they are using. If you

create this, though, take care not to end up practicing virtual micro-management. There is a

fine line

between appropriate tracking of commitments and overbearing (and demotivating) oversight.

9. Foster shared leadership.

Defining deliverables and tracking commitments provides “push” to

keep team members focused and productive; shared leadership provides crucial “pull.” Find ways to

involve others in leading the team. Examples include: assigning responsibility for special projects,

such as identifying and sharing best practices; or getting members to coach others in their areas of

expertise; or assigning them as mentors to help on-board new team members; or asking them to run a

virtual team-building exercise. By sharing leadership, you will not only increase engagement, but will also take some of the burden

off your shoulders.

10. Do t forget the 1:1s. Leader one-to-one performance management and coaching interactions

with their team members are a fundamental part of making any team work. Make these interactions a regular part of the virtual team rhythm, using them not only to check status and provide feedback,

Finally, if you are inheriting a team, take the time to understand how your predecessor led it. I s

essential that newly appointed leaders do this, whether their teams are virtual or not. Because, as

Confucius put it, you must “study the past if you would

define the future.” I s even more important

to do this homework when you inherit a virtual team, because the structures and processes used to

manage communication and coordinate work have such an inordinate impact on team performance.

You can use these ten principles as a checklist for diagnosing how the previous leader ran the team,

and help identify and prioritize what you need to do in the

first 90 days.

Michael D. Watkins is a professor at IMD, a cofounder of Genesis Advisers , and the author of The First 90 Days (Harvard

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