CHAPTER 8

Virtual Teams and the Future

What will virtual teams look like in the future? With the workplace undergoing change at the speed of light, we may have to consult science fiction for a possible answer. Will colleagues sit in their offices in front of incredibly complex machines? Or will we become officeless human beings, performing our jobs while wearing personal networks? I have had multiple discussions about the “death” of the workplace and the “birth” of the virtual space, and you may have as well.

Technology is so embedded in the workplace that we take its marvels for granted, yet the human adjustment is still in a state of flux. This is the reality you face, and leading successfully requires a new set of skills in light of voluminous data, rapid information flow, and intense collaboration. We are all wired and connected, yet many people feel so disconnected. Given the circumstances, I wonder how we will maintain that most basic human need for interaction, communication, and connection.

Connection is a common denominator across the human experience, and it goes beyond time and space, transcending all boundaries. This book began with the first leg of your journey to create this human connection across your team, and subsequent chapters explored ways to Set Up, Follow Through (through implementation and performance), and Refresh your team. Now, let’s conclude with a look into the future of virtual teams.

Throughout this book I introduced a number of principles, tools, and examples to guide your journey down the virtual highway. To master the virtual equation and make these elements work together, you have to become the connector. In fact, your greatest role as a manager is to link the various parts of your team to accomplish the goals that led to its formation in the first place. You may need to shift gears, perform team tune-ups, realign, and refuel your team’s energy along the way.

Look at how quickly our world is transforming. Technologies and industries unheard of just fifteen years ago are well integrated into our lives, and some of the most valuable companies in the world today did not even exist back then. The Internet opens up a vast wealth of information that we have incorporated into daily existence. It is difficult to keep up with all the new developments in technology, much less understand their implications. It’s as if we are driving 200 miles (321.87 kilometers) an hour and only look at the rearview mirror. But don’t get too comfortable with today’s world—because it’s changing as you read these words.

Moving from Agent of Change to Agent of Connection

Because of the complexity of our modern world, dramatic as well as incremental changes will occur, and many of them will be beyond your control. In the not-too-distant past, effective leaders were considered Agents of Change, with sole responsibility for getting their teams to rise to organizational challenges. That no longer works, as no one person, regardless how talented and hardworking, is capable of mastering all that is required of business leadership today.

Leadership issues always surface in my consulting and coaching engagements. Over the years, working internally in organizations and as an external practitioner, I have facilitated discussions about what makes one leader more successful than another and worked with executives to sharpen their capabilities in this area. At the beginning of my career the concept of “managing change” was at the core of these sessions. However, about a dozen years ago I began shifting my focus from viewing the leader as an Agent of Change to what I have come to call an Agent of Connection.

Here is what led to this mind shift: I was called in by a large financial services firm to help facilitate the rollout of a complex, large-scale IT project. After working with managers from various locations for several weeks, I noticed that managers who oversaw successful launches were those who collaborated with individuals outside their own span of control. It wasn’t a matter of understanding what needed to be “changed” and trying to manage that change; their success was directly related to how well they connected with others and their willingness to trust their own team to solve issues. I saw clearly that one person could not do it all. Leadership itself was changing.

Leadership in the virtual workplace has reflected the paradigm shift that has occurred, bringing a new order of business relationships and a new definition for the role of the leader. The very nature of a dispersed team means that virtual leaders like you can no longer successfully manage through command-and-control techniques. Leadership takes confidence in your team and the tenacity to integrate people, despite time and space constraints. Your team members may be out of sight, but they can’t be out of mind.

And so a different kind of leadership is emerging, which focuses on connection and collaboration and encourages people to rise above their differences and connect at the human level. At its core, this leadership is rooted in the human element and reflects an increased level of trust and transparency. This updated role as the Agent of Connection is your most important role as a virtual leader.

I developed a set of leadership behaviors that I call GlobaLeadership (GL). The letter L is shared by the words because leadership is both shared and global in a dispersed team environment. As one of my favorite clients, who managed a virtual team for a medical device manufacturer, has said: “It doesn’t matter whether or not you are a global manager, and it isn’t important if you don’t have a global assignment—you are global.”

Seven GlobaLeadership Dimensions

Picture yourself at the hub of a wide network of connections that enables you to achieve competitive advantage. You, the Agent of Connection, are at the center of this GL model, surrounded by the seven dimensions that are critical for effective virtual team leadership. These dimensions are:

1. Vista-Leadership

2. Innova-Leadership

3. Adapta-Leadership

4. Diversa-Leadership

5. Communi-Leadership

6. Collabo-Leadership

7. Edu-Leadership

Each dimension represents a necessary skill in organizational leadership; however, rarely does one single individual excel at both a core business function and all seven dimensions. For this reason, I consider the true virtual leader an Agent of Connection, because the leader is the one who links individual team members who have complementary strengths in one or more of these critical dimensions. This leader assesses the competitive landscape, determines which dimensions are essential for success, and then orchestrates the efforts of a strong team that contains these qualities. Figure 8-1 describes the seven dimensions of leadership.

Figure 8-1. The seven dimensions of leadership.

Perhaps your team has already developed the capability for some of these seven dimensions. When situations arise, individuals who possess these qualities take charge and perform. But leaders, I believe, are made—not born—so you and your team can focus on specific actions and behaviors to strengthen these dimensions. Here are seven tips for each of the seven dimensions.

Seven Tips to Sharpen Your Vista-Leadership Strategy

VISTA-LEADERSHIP

Futurist * Visionary * Boundaryless * Strategist

1. Imagine where you see the organization headed. At the end of each quarter, ask yourself how your actions will impact people in the next year, and then in 5, 10, 20, and even 100 years! What future do your actions create? How will you help to shape trends in your industry?

2. Schedule regular communication with colleagues aimed at sharing information on future trends, such as new products, strategies, and business opportunities.

3. Become aware of how your organization’s mission genuinely furthers your personal, regional, national, continental, and global mission. Think far out.

4. Eliminate the practices, habits, and attitudes that restrict your future vision, such as fear of irrelevance or continually engaging in linear thinking. Notice the emotional cues that cause you to stay mired in the clutter of the present so that you can better manage those emotions.

5. Blur some boundaries. Seek to resolve your problem by reading a magazine focused on a different industry, asking a friend for advice, and/or observing how a colleague in a different company addresses similar issues. A simple change in perspective can help you expand your thinking.

6. Anticipate entrepreneurial options and create a comfortable atmosphere where people feel safe to think creatively.

7. Understand the ripple effect of changes in the global market and know how they affect your business. For example, how do changes in availability and price of oil, natural gas, power, and plastic affect your company and your function? What can you do to circumvent challenges associated with depleting resources?

Seven Tips to Sharpen Your Innova-Leadership Strategy

INNOVA-LEADERSHIP

Innovator * Creative Through Chaos * Beyond Cutting-Edge

1. Be an informed risk taker, an abstract thinker, and someone who can remain creative through chaos. Take chances, experiment, and learn. Develop the ability to simultaneously hold competing/conflicting ideas and remain calm in the present storm.

2. Understand how risk taking is viewed in your company’s culture. What role does your network of support play in generating your innovation and risk taking? What and/or who are the forces that block creativity and change? How will you neutralize these roadblocks?

3. Actively create disruption to further the organization’s advancement. Understand that innovation is not a tidy process. You must be ready to take risks even if it leads to disorder, because creativity relies on freedom. Systems destabilize when they are ready to advance.

4. Allow yourself to think unusual thoughts and to use odd processes. Talk about your ideas and exchange information with experts in your field or with someone from a different discipline. Try drawing your ideas or using words to spark free association. Analyze your ideas only when you have gotten all of them out.

5. Stimulate creativity in others; make it clear to your team that taking risks and making mistakes are allowed, as long as the mistake is acknowledged, but not repeated, and something is learned from it.

6. Informally or formally reward others for thinking of a new idea or learning something new.

7. Consider how your company’s products can be adjusted to market needs, natural resources, and talent resources of a particular region or country. Remember, Innova-Leadership is about informed risk taking. The most successful risk takers are also precise, realistic, self-controlled, and logical.

Seven Tips to Sharpen Your Adapta-Leadership Strategy

ADAPTA-LEADERSHIP

Responsive * Multidirectional * Master of Duality

1. Learn to be a multidirectional thinker and actor; adapt at thinking various thoughts simultaneously.

2. Focus on incremental change, one experiment at a time. Break down decisions into smaller steps, and use direct and indirect feedback to adjust your next step.

3. Notice paradoxes and contradictions that create tension in your company, and harness that tension into creative solutions.

4. Understand your industry’s trends around the globe. What do these global trends require for you to change? How do you want to influence these global trends?

5. Analyze and prioritize data to understand what matters and what does not; learn from experience and adjust your course accordingly.

6. Do not stay rigidly attached to your original plans and analysis if circumstances necessitate change. In today’s quickly changing business environment, plans do not always occur in clear and successive steps.

7. Know how to navigate the politics of your organization. Your company is a global maze. There are indirect routes, direct routes, dead ends, turns, monotony, and a myriad of choices. How are you navigating this maze? In any organization, there are gatekeepers, idea stoppers, influencers, coaches, resisters, champions, and just plain jerks. What is your role? What do you want your role to become?

Seven Tips to Sharpen Your Diversa-Leadership Strategy

DIVERSA-LEADERSHIP

Culturally Aware * Universal Citizen * Globally Attuned

1. Become culturally aware of the world around you; stay globally attuned to your team’s varied needs.

2. Employ various management styles to deal with multiple cultures. Adjust your management style to the needs of each individual on your team. Consider the individual’s generation, location, cultural norms, strengths, and other pertinent differences.

3. Involve people from multiple backgrounds in key decision-making processes through feedback, brainstorming sessions, strategic planning, product development, and focus groups. Ensure communication channels exist that are conducive to all people contributing their strengths.

4. Be aware of language and translation barriers among you, your colleagues, vendors, investors, and customers. Have patience, be open to questions, and be willing to ask questions when you do not understand someone. Listen actively, paraphrasing what people say to show that you understand them.

5. When working with multiple cultures, eliminate disruptive habits such as using the same word often, speaking rapidly, or using judgmental words. Simplify and emphasize what you want to say. Avoid using sarcasm since some people may take it seriously.

6. Know the history and politics of the countries in which your colleagues work. Seek information from multiple sources.

7. Understand the big picture and how it relates to multiple geographical conditions. When reading your favorite newspaper, take notice of your reaction to a specific story or event. Then interpret that same story through the eyes of both a colleague and a customer in several of your company’s key markets.

Seven Tips to Sharpen Your Communi-Leadership Strategy

COMMUNI-LEADERSHIP

Transparent Performance * Continuous Communication

1. Develop your own personal communication systems to funnel information to you. Examples include weekly virtual meetings, a quarterly on-site meeting, and as-needed phone conversations.

2. Ask open-ended and clarifying questions. Open-ended questions probe without leading. Examples of probing questions are: “Tell me more about X,” “What happened as a result of X—how did it affect you?” and “What are some possible responses to improve the situation about X?”

3. Communication problems can run deeper than simply understanding the words and the language. Realize and be sensitive to the fact that while people may appear to understand something, they may not fully understand how to interpret it because of cultural differences.

4. Use technology to your advantage. Technology will never replace the human element; it is simply a new medium to aid communication. Go through all of the communication channels available to you and brainstorm things that you can do to make your message more palatable and real to your audience. What medium allows you to be most yourself with colleagues in different locations? How can you take that to the next level? After you’ve brainstormed, ask your audience members if what you are doing works for them.

5. Listen to people to create trust and expand possibilities. Challenge yourself to listen to everyone equally—your boss, direct reports, colleagues, and support staff. What are your listening criteria (level of education, age, rank, nationality, intelligence, skills, etc.), and do you want to expand them? What relationships can you build by listening better?

6. Develop behaviors that invite people to clarify misunderstandings. Does your tone of voice encourage people to question, challenge, and honestly communicate with you, from answering simple yes-or-no questions to clarifying more complex concepts?

7. Continually share information and communicate to people who need to know about your work processes, decision-making style, and concerns—wherever they are. This approach will reduce the chance of misunderstanding.

Seven Tips to Sharpen Your Collabo-Leadership Strategy

COLLABO-LEADERSHIP

Cultivates Relationships * Facilitates Universal Wins

1. Be a networker, an influencer, and a facilitator of relationships—encouraging the expression of opinions.

2. Create a cooperative interaction among team members by subordinating personal goals to the interest of group. Look for win-win solutions.

3. Bolster your professional network both internally and externally across divisions, business functions, ranks, tenure, and locations. Aim to establish new relationships with people of a different generation and nationality than you; connect virtually to others and nurture new and ongoing relationships.

4. As you build your network and listen to the needs and skills of the individuals in it, proactively seek to connect people in your network with each other: Give referrals and connect people who have shared interests.

5. Expand your network to creative alliances, partnerships, joint ventures, strategic alliances, and outsourcing support companies in order to access a fuller range of knowledge, skills, capabilities, and resources.

6. Let people make decisions. Do not give all the answers or tell people what to do. Understand that you can’t do everything on your own. Continually organize your work and make sure that your output is always aligned with your objectives.

7. At formal meetings or in informal group conversations, practice drawing out information from others and synthesizing and re-framing conflict in ways that address the needs of all parties. Do not offer your opinion or advise—allow others to come up with their own solutions first.

Seven Tips to Sharpen Your Edu-Leadership Strategy

EDU-LEADERSHIP

Develops Global Talent * Guides Learning

1. Provide opportunities for your direct reports; guide their career development and help them design their own performance improvement and career plan.

2. Provide regular feedback—whether acknowledging a positive outcome or correcting a performance mishap—soon after the occurrence.

3. Tailor development activities to the particular needs of your direct reports and your team, regardless of their location, position, or role. Adapt traditional practices (such as apprenticeships, employee sponsorships, group mentoring, retreats, and job rotation) to fit your group and resources.

4. Look for appropriate opportunities for you and/or your staff members to participate in projects for other departments that provide the chance to learn new skills. Offer to exchange teaching your unique skills for learning a new one.

5. Include people in your team who are more skilled in a particular area than you are. Understand that the limits to your own knowledge, skills, and functional experience limit what you can offer your direct reports; therefore, be open to connecting your subordinates to developmental opportunities outside your scope.

6. Adapt your management style to the style that your employees respond to best. Consider how the various aspects of their societal culture—law, language, politics, religious and spiritual beliefs—influence their performance and productivity.

7. Forecast the business environment in the next five to ten years. What can you do this year to develop yourself and your people for that future? What aspects of learning are going virtual?

And the Future …

Looking toward the future, respondents from our virtual teams study agree that VTs are here to stay, pointing to the need for a greater understanding of this work arrangement and the development of new strategies to optimize business results. According to 70 percent of respondents, virtual teams will increase in prevalence and will be considered the norm in conducting business (see Figure 8-2). According to their responses, this trend is occurring partly due to increased cost-effectiveness and the pressure of globalization. As this shift occurs, new technologies will improve the performance of virtual teams (47 percent). In addition, respondents expect that new techniques will be developed to overcome the unique challenges encountered (11 percent), as more business leaders become exposed to virtual work environments.

Increased flexibility for employees was highlighted by 9 percent of those interviewed, making virtual teams an attractive work option. In our research, we found that 4 percent of respondents believe that workers in countries such as India, Russia, and China will contribute a greater share of the global workforce. Only 2 percent of our interviewees believe that the quality of work will decrease in the virtual environment. This low statistic is reassuring as Figure 8-2 shows the trend increasing rather than stabilizing or disappearing.

Figure 8-2. The future of virtual teams.

Virtual Mindset Shift—The Next Decade

Within the next decade, the phrase virtual mindset will be commonplace as organizations strive to maximize their resources in a world of hypercompetition. Virtual leaders will be responsible for instilling this point of view in team members. No matter what differences in culture, national characteristics, or personal style these individuals bring to the group, they will need to adapt a worldview to effectively meet the needs of the organization. And working leaders, like you, will be front and center in making this mindset a reality as you propel your team along the virtual superhighway.

I believe that the term virtual team will lose its meaning as work arrangements will increasingly trend toward being partly virtual and partly on-site. As younger generations step into the workforce their lifestyles will lend themselves to flexible work arrangements, and virtual work will become an accepted norm. Advances in technology will create more options to work in more convenient places. People will need to create their own strategies to form an acceptable boundary between work and home. (We already see how being connected 24/7 has eroded boundaries between our work lives and our private lives.)

As American humorist Will Rogers noted many years ago, “Even if you’re on the right track you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” These words are as timely now as they were almost 100 years ago, when Rogers said them. The extraordinary breadth and depth of change means that no country, organization, or person can plan on doing things the same way year after year. At the heart of this change is the complexity that makes it impossible to master what Thomas Friedman, in his book The World Is Flat, calls “the next layers of value creation.” Global leaders responsible for virtual teams are on the front lines of these shifts. It will be up to you to master the various skills and aspects of bringing value to your organization, and that will require balancing the Seven Dimensions of GlobaLeadership.

Of course, how you choose to balance these key dimensions will also change in response to competitive forces. It is important to understand this, and to realize that each era has demanded more from its leaders than the one before. Perhaps the greatest change is that going forward, business conditions require leaders as well as teams that can bring these dimensions to life. That is actually good news, because if you and your team succeed at mastering these GlobaLeadership dimensions, you will benefit from having motivated colleagues to support and sustain your efforts.

It’s Time to Refresh Your Team

Somewhere along your virtual journey you need to Refresh the team. Virtual teams are, after all, often temporary work arrangements with shifting priorities, so teams need to keep motivation high, shift gears, perform tune-ups, and refuel their energy. Figure 8-3 is a list of key points to consider when Refreshing your team.

Figure 8-3. Refreshing your team.

Put It in Park/Wrap Up

Many times a virtual team disbands after a project is completed. If you can, formally close this chapter of your team’s experience by documenting its efforts. Review team accomplishments and contributions of individual team members. You can communicate privately with each team member or, ideally, organize a public celebration during which members socialize as well as debrief one another on their work experience.

Celebrate Success Virtually

By definition, a celebration is a commemoration that is ritualized in one’s culture. National holidays, religious holidays, births and birthdays, weddings, homecomings, and the like are all types of celebrations. We humans respond positively when rewarded for our achievements, so it is no surprise that teams, whether they are on-site or dispersed, are fueled by recognition and celebration of success. Ask your team members for suggestions, or consider these small but well-received acts:

Send a handwritten thank-you note (the personal touch is always appreciated).

Have a senior manager congratulate the team or specific members.

Have a team member’s office decorated with a banner, a balloon, or an inexpensive gift.

On Your Way

As you come to the end of this book, I hope that you conclude, as I have, that bridging the human connection in this virtual world is your defining role. Creating collaboration and enabling leadership across the team is what leading in the twenty-first century is about. Gone are the days when staff members could be controlled through coercion and close supervision. Dispersed teams call for a new level of trust and transparency, with leaders capable of guiding them to connection and collaboration. It’s up to you to create a sustainable—not situational—set of values that are rooted in the human element.

Create Presence

Leading any team is challenging enough, but leading a virtual team is a whole other world of challenges. Without the luxury of being present in person, you need to create a virtual presence. Therefore, I advise managers like you to create a telepresence. You need to be visible even though you are virtual. Although technology will evolve to enable better communication that more closely simulates being in the room with someone else, it will not foster the human element. That’s where you come in.

Clearly, team members who have the opportunity to meet in person, at least once in a while, perform better than their virtual counterparts. I believe that you have to be physical to become virtual. When and if you do get together in person, use that precious time to focus on the things you can’t do virtually. And, if you can’t meet in person, then create that sense of “physical” any way you can. Recall that without the human connection there is no virtual connection.

Remember, too, that tools are no substitute for leadership, but that problems can be solved by applying appropriate tools to well-managed work practices.

Virtual teams are active social systems, and like any other social system they can be functional or dysfunctional. As you have learned in this final chapter, virtual leadership is ideally expressed through the interaction of the entire team, which offers a great opportunity to rethink leadership going forward. Indeed, we have much to learn about the different ways that future leadership behaviors can be expressed in emerging virtual environments. New and more sophisticated technologies are in the pipeline, ready to be adapted for your team. But it’s up to you and your team members to use them productively to move business interests forward.

Welcome to the Virtual Keyboard Generation

Today’s upcoming generation is the keyboard generation, and now the keyboard fits in the palm of our hand, which accounts for the ease of texting. In fact, in a given day the number of text messages far exceeds the population of the world. People are retreating more and more behind a keyboard (work and social space) instead of making real, in-person connections (in both the work and social space). It’s possible to hold five simultaneous IM conversations whereas you can have only one conversation in person. I am not sure if people who communicate the former way are truly focused, although it may be productive. The question is: Have we become too enamored of technology?

As a young child visiting Disney’s Future World, I was utterly fascinated by the scenario of a woman preparing a meal by issuing commands to her kitchen appliances while simultaneously talking to her husband (who appeared on a flat screen). Voice recognition systems and camera/video phones now exist, and there is no reason to doubt that more miraculous things await us.

It’s possible that upcoming generations will not know what a traditional team is, as more people use technology and social networks that allow constant contact. So I ask, what else can be done to ensure that virtual teams are successful? Companies can’t passively sit and wait and let things happen. They must make conscious, informed choices about what work arrangements are best. Although people can work virtually anywhere, anytime, that may not serve a particular business or unit. If companies recognize that the human connection is important, then they need to subscribe to new models. A whole generation is entering this brave new world, and its choices have yet to evolve.

Even if the future of technology is unpredictable, it is clear that virtual teams will be strongly defined by technical possibilities. Regardless of what forms these innovations take, you would be wise to follow the advice of one of my clients, a senior global director at a major electronics conglomerate: “Be simple in what you do, understand the limitation of sending a complex ‘mess’ over the ocean, and recognize that people are more alike than you think.”

As you learned in this book, by working with practical tools and techniques, you can navigate the unique challenges faced by virtual teams. I hope you use the insights I provided to guide your exciting journey in this virtual world.