Leading Virtual Teams

Virtual teams (teams composed of individuals who are not co-located) are becoming the norm. They present a variety of advantages over traditional teams, but come with their own set of problems and limitations. Recognizing both positives and negatives of virtual teams will improve your ability to leverage strengths and mitigate some of the potential problems.

Strengths: Geographical customer perspectives represented, global agility, improved execution of global products / services, enhanced diversity, improved ownership of output by global stakeholders, improved customization for regional customers.

Challenges: Communication, core team ownership, change management, core team meeting effectiveness & efficiency, coordination of execution, homogenization of global stakeholder expectations.

Leveraging Strengths: Having team members residing where ideas and perspectives originate can produce a large advantage. Team leaders should therefore ensure virtual team members are engaged in the creative processes associated with the initiation phase of projects. Virtual team members are also in place for roll out or execution of finished products / services and can obtain first-hand feedback from remote or local customers / stakeholders. Team leaders should leverage this information availability by meeting with team members regularly. Virtual team members typically have differing perspectives and thus diversity becomes a strength. Team leaders should leverage this diversity in the early, creative stages of projects. Virtual team members are more adept at getting buy-in from their local stakeholders, so team leaders should leverage them throughout the process to ensure input, commitment and ownership by local stakeholders. Finally, virtual team members can represent regional or local expectations allowing products and services to reflect these needs and perhaps take on regional characteristics. Bottom-line: Team Leaders must recognize and leverage the strengths of virtual teams to ensure the advantages play out in their projects.

Overcoming Challenges: By far the greatest challenge is communication. We suggest that at the beginning of each major project you set aside time and money to allow for at least one face-to-face meeting with all virtual team members. This can initiate good communication and encourage familiarization with other team members, minimizing communication issues further into the project. It “greases the skids” for future communication. At this first meeting the core team should conduct the work breakdown structure or create the project plan. This starts the project with the ownership typically lost in virtual teams. It will bind the team together as they part and go to their respective work locations. As changes occur, team leaders need to draw input from other team members, ensuring that ownership and commitment are continued. Meeting agendas published in advance do much to ensure meeting efficiency and effectiveness. Following the same format each meeting and keeping them brief and on task also helps. The work breakdown structure or project plan creation process also helps maintain coordination of tasks and assists by clearly defining responsibility for each task. Minutes distributed to key stakeholders by their local virtual team members will help homogenize expectations globally. Bottom-line: Team Leaders must ensure that virtual team members participate in the creation of the project plan / work breakdown structure, gain ownership and then meet regularly. Doing these things will mitigate a majority of potential problems.

As you can see, virtual teams come with challenges, but we hope you see that recognizing the strengths and potential problems associated with them is the first step to leveraging the strengths and mitigating the challenges. This is a relatively new phenomenon and so definitive answers do not always exist yet. If you have experiences with virtual teams and ideas or suggestions that may help others, please submit them to us at the e-mail address below and we will revisit this topic again in the near future.