challenges leading virtual teams

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  • 8/13/2019 Challenges Leading Virtual Teams

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    CHALLENGES LEADING VIRTUAL TEAMS

    For global companies, the challenge is to identify, pool and deploy their knowledge resources across a rangeof markets and settings making it necessary to work with virtual teams that rearely if ever interact face toface and frequently have culturally diverse membership. Such teams face vaorious challenges, even whentheir memebership is homogeneous:

    - Lack of cohesion.- Feelings of isolation by members.- Challenges in coordinating work among those in different time zones and often form different

    cultures.- Absence of face-to-face contact to facilitate relationship building.

    An essential elemen to overcome the challenges ofvirtual teams memebership is the emergence of aneffective leader that has to accomplish a number of important tasks:

    a. Maximize diversity while minimizing diversity.Cognitive diversity is what enriches virtual teams and leads to innovative ideas. Successful leaders have tomaximize cognitive diversity while minimizing behavioral diversity, if divergent thinking is not managedthrough a structured and clearly articulated process, it can lead to chaos.

    b. Build trust without social settings.Members are conducted mostly through electronic communications and with little face to face interaction.Therefore, these teams must rely more on expertise based trust that on traditional social cues based trust.This kind of trust is built through demonstrating that team members have the intellectual capital required tomake innovative contributions.

    This can be done by:- Creating non project related tasks before starting the main work.- Engaging the entire team in online group activities (scavenger hunts or multiplayer games.- Breaking teams into sub teams that work together on an activity or sub task and report the whole

    team.

    - Pairing members with different expertise, or form different disciplines and regions.

    c. Making the invisible visible.Given that team members can only allocate a small percentage of their working week to the far flung team,team leader shave to ensure that each local manager is aware otf their employees contributions. Further,the entire team needs to be made to feel that the organization on the whole recognizes and values theirinnovative contribution to the far flung team.

    If this does not happen, its easy for team members to lose motivation and be overwhelmed by their localresponsibilities.

    Successful team leaders must also make a concerted effort to make progress in a project visible to the teamitself. This serves 2 purposes:

    - Every team member is aware of milestones.- By calling on the knowledge stored in the collective repository, such as annotated and author

    identified documents and drawings, te am members become more aware of each others skills andexpertise.

    d. Establishing synchronous and asynchronous rhythms,Most successful far flung teams establish a synchronous as well as an asynchronous collaboration rhythm.These teams use the time between meeting to generate and evaluate ideas asynchronously. This is moreefficient because it enables team members to pick and choose when to make their contribution.

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    The likelihood of breakthrough innovative ideas emerging through this rhythm is far higher that In the teamswere to rely only on synchronous meeting to get work done.

    e. Leading by distributing leadership.With this members are encouraged to play the role of virtual meetings facilitator, team knowledgemanager, electronic discussion maintainer. Etc.

    As the leadership becomes more distributed, the team moves away from a structure where all ideas arefiltered through a central individual to a more organic and democratic process that leads to more creativeand innovative ideas.

    Teams across borders By Malhotra dn Majchrzakhttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/4f3236ba-c00f-11da-939f-0000779e2340.html

    TRAITS AND SKILLS A LEADER SHOULD DEVELOP WHEN IN CHARGE OF A VIRTUAL TEAM

    Leading any teams requires a number of skills and responsibilities:a. Being able to create a vision for the team.b. Communicate the vision with passion.c. Develop strategies for achieving this vision.d. Build coalitions of believers.e. Attract other behind the vision.f. Shape the team culture by expressing operating values clearly.- Responsibilities:a. Selecting and motivating the right team members.b. Establishing the right norms of behavior.c. Building trust.d. Setting goals.e. Etc.

    Some of these functions are difficult to execute without physical observation of team members, thereforeleaders of virtual teams have to develop competences in other areas.

    1. Performance Management and Coaching.Virtual team leaders need to be effective in adapting their coaching style to accommodate team membersform a different culture.

    2. Appropriate use of information technology.Team leaders should be careful not to treat technology as a means solving all Issues or as a obstacle ineffective teamwork.Different technologies will be used for unclear tasks which require extra communication and for tasks whichrequire more documentation and storage:

    a. Synchronous methods will work best: Instant messengers, virtual conference rooms, phone, etc.b. Asynchronous tools like scheduling software, shared common spaces or email will be of best use.

    More synchronous methods will be beneficial at the beginning of the teams existence, when the team

    members establish their relationships and build trust. After this, asynchronous methods can become morepresent.

    In general virtual team leaders need to keep abreast of the new and developed technolo gies and makeconscious selections of the tools and methods to use, and be aware what the team can handle.

    3. Managing across cultures.What matters most is that the team leader develops cultural sensibility and foster cultural understandingamong all team members in order to help them avoid tensions.

    http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/4f3236ba-c00f-11da-939f-0000779e2340.htmlhttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/4f3236ba-c00f-11da-939f-0000779e2340.htmlhttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/4f3236ba-c00f-11da-939f-0000779e2340.html
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    The basis for intercultural sensivility are respect to the others and suspending assumptions and stereotypes.They need to be willing to learn on culture differences and to educate team members on how to handlethem.

    4. Aiding in team Members Career Development and Transitions.Leaders should actively assist team members with their career development by keeping track of their

    contributions and professional growth. This has an influence on the team members m otivation to work.

    5. building and Maintaining Trust.In virtual teams trust is based on actions rather than good will (hard to observe virtually). Leaders of virtualteams need to make expectations about actions and present the actions themselves as explicitly as possibleso other can see.

    6. Networking. Building a good social network should be the very first step towards managing a virtual team. Due to theabsence of closeness and nonverbal cues, virtual team leaders need to spend more time developingrelationships.

    7. Developing and adapting standard team processes.Leaders need to be able to adapt processes to the teams tasks and setting. Experienced virtual team leadersunderstand that there might be a need for subtle differences in the way a given process is implemented, ascompared with similar cases where other teams were involved.

    Duarte, Snyder 2006 pp. 76 88

    Then we can conclude that there are 6 leadership practices of effective leaders of virtual teams:

    1. Establish and maintain trust through the use of communication techonology.2. Ensure that distributed diversity is understood and appreaciated.

    3. Manage virtual work life cycle (meetings)4. Monitor team progess using technology.5. Enhace visibility of virtual memebts within the team and outside in te organization.6. Enable individual member of the virtual team to benefit form the team.

    LEADING VIRTUAL TEAMS ARTICLE BY ARVIND MALHOTRA.

    http://l480greatbasin.s3.amazonaws.com/Leading%20virtual%20teams%20(2007).pdf

    http://l480greatbasin.s3.amazonaws.com/Leading%20virtual%20teams%20(2007).pdfhttp://l480greatbasin.s3.amazonaws.com/Leading%20virtual%20teams%20(2007).pdfhttp://l480greatbasin.s3.amazonaws.com/Leading%20virtual%20teams%20(2007).pdf