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Leading From a Distance: Five Lessons For Success

Guest post by: Richard Lepsinger

Article Overview: Not just anyone can lead virtually. It takes someone with the right mix of technical, interpersonal, and communication skills to successfully lead a virtual team.

Leading From a Distance: Five Lessons For Success

Leading a team of diverse employees with different needs is hard enough. Scatter those employees across different geographic areas, where face-to-face contact is infrequent, priorities are constantly shifting, and there is little time to address their individual needs, and you can begin to understand why leading a virtual team is one of the most difficult jobs in business today. It takes a special breed of leader to get the job done right. In order to help businesses understand which behaviors are directly associated with highly effective virtual team leadership, we conducted a global study of 48 virtual teams. We wanted to understand what differentiates the most effective virtual team leaders from those who are less successful.

To be effective, team leaders in a virtual environment must be especially sensitive to interpersonal, communication, and cultural factors to overcome the limitations of distance. If you are a team leader, get your team organized, set goals and establish the direction in which you would like the team to go, and always keep members engaged through timely feedback, team building exercises and periodic face-to-face meetings. Our study found that there are five key lessons that the best distance leaders follow:

Lesson #1: No Trust, No Team.

Effective virtual team leaders constantly look for new ways to infuse team spirit and trust into their teams which helps to boost cooperation. However, less effective leaders find it difficult to build relationships and develop collaboration.

Successful virtual team leaders help build an environment that supports collaboration by finding ways for team members to interact and communicate informally. For example, you might choose to use 'same-time' technologies such as Instant Messaging to help increase more spontaneous communication. Another important component of promoting collaboration is productively managing conflicts that emerge. Because conflict can often initially go undetected in virtual environments, you must proactively look for signs of it and quickly take steps to resolve it.

What are the warning signs that people issues need more attention? You may notice that team members work independently and do not collaborate or effectively interact with other members of the team. You may also notice that an "us versus them" mentality has developed between locations or sub-groups. What can you do to improve communication and relationships among team members? In addition to the ideas above, we suggest several actions:

• Bring your team together face-to-face at least once early on
• Develop a team page where virtual team members can share information and get to know one another
• Build a collective "resource bank" to share experiences
• Find ways to "spotlight" team members
• Send newsletters or updates to the team
• Create ways to virtually celebrate successes as a team
• Partner team members at different locations and rotate these periodically

Lesson #2: Create a "High Touch" Environment

Electronic technology has made virtual teaming possible but is not a perfect substitute for human interaction. One of the greatest performance barriers is the inability to replicate a high touch environment in a virtual setting. While meeting face-to-face requires time and expense, virtual teams that invest in one or two such meetings per year perform better overall than those that do not.

Poor communication, a lack of engagement, and lack of attention during virtual meetings are a few of the warning signs that a high touch environment has not been achieved. There are, however, several things that can be done to reverse this situation:

• Leverage synchronous tools (e.g., Instant Messaging) to increase spontaneous communication
• Use tools such as electronic bulletin boards to create a sense of shared space
• Carefully choose communication technologies that match the specific task
• Develop a communication strategy but re-examine these processes over time
• Make wider use of videoconferencing

Lesson #3: Watch Out for Performance Peaks

While virtual teams who have been working together for more than three years tend to be more successful than teams working together for less time, many virtual teams face a performance peak around the one year mark. When you see the warning signs of a performance peak-team members get along well but do not produce results, an apparent lack of direction, team members not committing adequate time to the team-there are four actions you can take:

• Clearly define team roles and accountabilities to minimize frustration and misunderstandings that can damage morale and derail productivity
• Review team processes regularly
• Periodically collect feedback from various stakeholders to assess the team's performance
• Based on the outcomes, identify barriers to high performance, as well as steps that can be taken to overcome these barriers

Lesson #3: Communicate team goals and direction, OVER and OVER.

Successful virtual team leaders clearly articulate team goals and direction to ensure that everyone has a shared vision. They also periodically revisit these factors to both reinforce their importance and make adjustments as necessary.

Clearly communicated, shared team goals are especially crucial for virtual teams because they give members a sense of purpose and meaning that sustains them when they are working alone or without regular direct contact with the team leader or other team members. Clear goals also help to unify the actions of a geographically dispersed team and keep members focused on execution.

Lesson #4: Empower your team members.

Because people are often expected to work more independently in virtual teams, finding ways to delegate work, to give team members freedom to make decisions and to monitor work become particularly important for success. The best virtual leaders set up processes for monitoring progress and follow up frequently, but avoid micromanaging. Monitoring makes it possible to identify potential problems early on, prevents disruptions in team activities and service to customers, and ensures that your team members are held accountable for the quality of their work. To accomplish this we suggest that you:

• Ensure you understand each team members' role and your role related to team decisions and activities.
• Set people up for success by clarifying expectations, who's accountable and the due date for a task of assignment
• Have regular calls or check-in meetings to review progress on team goals or deliverables. Don't wait until the due date to check in.
• Keep your promises and commitments. As soon as you realize that you cannot meet a commitment let team members know and solicit their advice to get things done.
• When a deadline is missed or a commitment is not met, instead of looking to affix blame, ask and encourage people to ask three "accountability questions:" What did I do that might have contributed to this problem? What can I do to get things back on track? What can I do to prevent this from happening again?

Lesson #5: "Soft" Skills Are Essential

The presence of "soft" skills makes a difference in virtual team performance. We found that virtual teams that have been through skill development activities perform better than those that have not. Yet, despite the strong link between training and virtual team performance, many organizations do not make this investment. What can you do to develop virtual team members?

• Use selection criteria or assessments when identifying virtual team members
• Teambuilding sessions-ideally conducted at an initial or subsequent face-to-face team meeting-to help team members get to know each other personally, strengthen working relationships, and create team momentum that can enhance team effectiveness
• Assess development needs for team members and team leaders and conduct skill building focused on these areas
• Reassess needs over time

The Bottom Line

As organizations continue to expand the use of virtual teams, virtual team leadership will play an increasingly important role in driving overall organizational effectiveness. These study findings have important implications for the selection and development of leaders of virtual teams. Organizations should select leaders who have the skills and characteristics to translate the five lessons required to effectively lead from a distance into action. In addition, organizations should periodically assess the effectiveness of leaders of virtual teams in order to provide targeted feedback about how they can improve their performance.

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Article Tags: virtual team, virtual team leaderinterpersonal and communication skills, virtual teams



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