Making Virtual Teams Work Introduction

Making Virtual Teams Work Introduction Creating virtual work teams nationally or even globally versus those that are centralized requires two fundamentally different organizational strategies, with each requiring a fundamentally different skill sets on the part of managers and their staffs. The employees that comprise virtual work teams need to have higher than average levels of initiative, resourcefulness, ability to keep themselves moving towards goals, organized, and able to manage time effectively. Kerber and Buono (2004) in their research summarized in the article Leadership Challenges in Global Virtual Teams: Lessons from the Field provide an excellent analysis of what it takes to create strong virtual work teams, and one of the most important attributes is the level of experience and maturity of team members when they are located across a broad geographic region. Combs and Peacoke (2007) provide a series of pragmatic insights into the management of virtual teams including the development of team etiquette and ground rules for making teams spread across broad geographies work efficiently. When the research accumulated and analyzed for this paper is organized into a framework, the role of the manager for virtual teams emerges as more of a facilitator and coach than autocrat. The role of process and communications enabler, a distance learning coach if you will, is what best practices in managing virtual teams is all about. Of all process areas that causes many virtual teams to fail is alack of focus on knowledge transfer and the accumulated learning through the entire organization. Conversely, best practices in managing virtual team has more to do enabling and fostering a high level of knowledge sharing, and group-level learning as if these processes can get integrated into virtual teams they will become highly effective at synthesizing information and quickly reacting to it. This paper analyzes the characteristics of successful distance managers and the strategies they use to manage virtual teams. Characteristics of Successful Distance Managers The unique set of skills required to make a virtual team effective begins with a strong focus on creating credibility for the remote team, who are rarely seen together physically in one location. Kerber and Buono (2004) juxtapose the heightened need to create credibility for virtual teams relative to the more steady and gradual approach to creating credibility for managers of teams that are collocated. Creating and sustaining trust and credibility form the foundation of the successful virtual work team of training professionals in any organization. This credibility needs to be fostered while at the same time fostering the growth of processes necessary for learning and ongoing thought leadership emanating from the virtual team. Once the manager of a virtual team has created that foundation of trust and credibility throughout the organization by quickly producing results, the team needs to begin contributing to more strategic and longer-range projects, despite being virtual. These strategic projects require that each of the team members fulfill the tactical requirements of their job yet not get consumed with them full-time. This can be difficult when many tactical and often urgent, activities in the regional offices where they were located dominate their time. Managing remote team members to stay focused on the strategic projects surrounding training took significant skill and the ability to clearly show the outcomes of achievement of the many tasks at hand. The manager of the virtual work team has to find innovative approaches to keep a team focused on strategic priorities and synchronize the team's efforts to the attainment of performance goal or objective. Attaining strategic goals as a virtual team creates even greater levels of credibility and establishes a team as a respected contributor to any organization. Yet to get to this level of performance, the manager of the virtual work team has to become more aggressive and focused than his counterpart managers who had collocated teams. To manage performance, the virtual team manager has to create structures and routines that could compensate for the lack of continual in-person contact while pushing up the level of accountability and expectations to the virtual team members. Second, the virtual team manager has to make sure these leadership functions and values were distributed to each team member, as Bell and Kozlowski (2002). There needs to be a very clear definition of roles in virtual teams to alleviate any confusion, conflict or wasted effort. To accomplish these two critical leadership steps, the virtual team manager has to first bring together in person the virtual team members to give everyone a chance to first meet each other, and second, to provide an opportunity for relationships to get formed. The best virtual teams invest in these in-person activities regularly to strengthen the bonds between team members and further clarify and strengthen each contributor's unique role as part of the virtual team. Third, getting together in person also provides an opportunity for both the asynchronous and synchronous forms of communication, all of them electronic, to be planned for, initiated and put in place. Fourth, conference calling times need to be defined for a maximum of 90 minutes every other week, in addition to one-on-one telephone meetings between the leader and each team member, evaluation of progress towards objectives, measures of client satisfaction, quarterly reports of departmental business accomplishments, performance appraisals completed on time and personal development plans. Given the significant amount of responsibility each of the virtual team members has for strategic projects and their many project and individual contribution goals, the role of the virtual team manager quickly needs to become one of leading by example when it comes attitude, work ethic and the passion for achievement. In virtual team leaders need to be the "true north" of attitude, achievement and direction towards objectives, including being a model of how to be passionate about their work and its contribution to the broader company organizations. A leader must be the emotional foundation of strength for a virtual team; to be dispassionate is to fail in the role of virtual team member. In fact the best performing virtual teams demand a manager who exceeds the team members' expectations for their commitment, attitude and focus on results, according to Mindell (1993). Ultimately the success or failure of any virtual team rests with the manager and their ability to get experienced team members to consistently deliver above-average performance and make greater than normal levels of contributions. Managing a virtual team must center on exceptional results and the delivery of performance that seasoned and exceptional team members are capable of requires nothing less than a leader with total commitment and passion for the ole and vision of the team they manage. Keeping Virtual Team Members Engaged Alleviates Many Problems Early Analysis by Kerber and Buono (2004) also point to the need to keep virtual team members focused on their strategic priorities first, and not become involved in the many tactical and often unrelated tasks associated with the departments who happen to be in their regional office where they work. Keeping business development professionals focused is especially difficult from a distance due to their skill set being easily used in pre-sales, sales, and post-sales activities. One could easily see a sales person getting a chance to bring in a senior manager or senior business development executive for a new product introduction, and this pattern would just increase if the customer engagement went well. Staying focused on their priorities takes maturity and initiative on the part of the virtual team members. Another critical area for virtual team members' success is the ability to quickly see how their results not only underscore their values as individual contributors, yet also giving them recognition as part of the global effort their teams are responsible for achieving. Often virtual teams have highly structured set of deliverables, which require a high level of cooperation and collaboration between both other virtual team members and collocated teams in headquarters to accomplish the tasks and objectives necessary to complete the strategic objectives. Virtual team members need to be quite skilled in project management to be able to coordinate and collaborate across both virtual teams and collocated teams in the headquarters locations as well. Technology Implications of Virtual Teams There are literally thousands of electronic tools and applications available for enabling virtual teams to track progress towards their shared goals and objectives. What many researchers have found however that many of the virtual teams don't need so many tools and technologies as much as they need a clear understanding of the processes that are needed for ensuring a high level of communication, and therefore trust, being created as a result. Technologies as simple as e-mail to as complex as Intranet sites and portals pervade virtual teams, yet their effectiveness in many companies is limited to content management instead of synchronizing strategies that lead to goals be attained. That's because the underlying processes necessary for teams to accomplish their goals are not defined prior to intensive levels of technologies being applied to virtual teams. What needs to happen instead is a re-definition, a business process management series of strategies in effect put into place, to make sure the underlying dynamics of the team will be made more efficient with the technologies to begin with. Virtual teams that gain the highest levels of performance first get their many processes in place first, and then move through the iterative stages of defining their information, collaboration and shared process ownership needs first, and then layer in specific technologies to automate these processes. Only by taking a very process-centric approach to defining technology needs will virtual teams be successful in their use of collaboration, synchronization, and project management applications. The processes need to form the foundation by which applications and technologies get integrated into the workflows of virtual teams. Technology for its own sake is never a solution, yet must be an enabler of processes if the investments in technology are ever going to pay off. Summary Ultimately the virtual team member must perceive that their job has been created to allow them to excel, removing roadblocks and other distractions out of their way so they can excel. Once these conditions are created and a strong leader injects a positive and "whatever it takes" attitude, a virtual team will excel, as the team members will find it in their best interests to fulfill their own potential in the position they have taken in such a fast-moving organizational structure.