Leadership Development Plan Creating, Staffing and Managing

Leadership Development Plan

Creating, staffing and managing a virtual team to results presents a very unique set of challenges both form a logistics and leadership standpoint. Creating a state-of-the-art new packaging product that is inexpensive to ship yet durance enough to not get damaged will take cross-functional teams of experts in packaging, physics of containers, logistics, and supply chain systems, in addition to costing and financial analysis. Each of these aspects of an organization are critically important to the development, successful launch and sales of the new packaging product. This paper details the greatest obstacles a team leader would face in completing the project and delivering a profitable new product. These challenges and their recommended solutions are the foundation of this paper.

The Many Challenges Of A Virtual Team

The foundation of effective virtual teams is the insightful selection of its members, the ability to quickly create communication and collaboration throughout the geographically-dispersed group, and the definition of a compelling vision every team member can see their contributions making a difference in attaining. The most effective virtual teams that take on complex technology-driven challenges, such as the creation of an innovative packaging material, often have team members with deep expertise in a given technology or process area (Kayworth, Leidner, 2002). Often these individual contributors have definite opinions and are accustomed to working alone or having the ability to frequently influence design decisions to their own. Over years, these experts in their fields can often become galvanized their views of the world, becoming inflexible to new ideas and at times threatened by new technologies and techniques in their field.

This presents the single biggest challenge to the leader of the virtual team creating the state-of-the-art packaging for a new product. Getting experts in their respective field to freely share information and collaborate with one another in a virtual team requires exceptional transformational leadership skills and the ability to create trust (Felfe, Schyns, 2004). The first priority for managing this team is to get a solid foundation of trust between team members and the leader. Studies have consistently shown that trust is one of the most potent accelerators there are for streamlining communication throughout a virtual team (Purvanova, Bono, 2009).

For the virtual team to succeed, trust must dominate its culture and all electronic systems for communicating, from the Intranet sites to e-mails and text messages, must have this attribute of trust and fidelity if the team is to galvanize together and share information. Resistance to change and lack of trust is the single greatest cause of virtual teams failing (Felfe, Schyns, 2004).

The second most significant challenge the leader of the virtual team of packaging, supply chain and logistics providers is going to face is helping each team member over their ethnocentric views and potentially myopic mindsets. It is a common problem in managing virtual teams to see individual team members form divergent and often highly different cultures believe their specific culture is superior across a variety of dimensions (Kayworth, Leidner, 2002). This is often referred to as ethnocentrism, or the belief one's own culture is the best (Purvanova, Bono, 2009). The team leader of the design team needs to get the virtual team together in person as quickly as possible for the project kick-off to help break down these ethnocentric mindsets and see other team members as people first, not just nationalities (Kayworth, Leidner, 2002). Face time also helps to break down the myopic mindset of team members about who they are working with, seeing more dimensions of the persons on the team and not just judging them by their nationality.

Another significant challenge will be the differences in working styles and perception of authority, customs, religion, societal roles and time itself (Felfe, Schyns, 2004). Each of these attributes is critically important to manage as part of the acculturation process of the virtual team, giving team members a glimpse into other members' culture through periodic personal interaction (Kayworth, Leidner, 2002). Again the value of periodic meetings in person is evident in this recommendation.