WITI LEADERSHIP

Leadership Skills: Leading Global Virtual Teams (Part 1 of 3)
By Marian Cook

Feeling a bit stretched lately? We all are as we frequently find ourselves on international virtual teams that stretch our work across time zones and cultures. Increasingly, the foundational work unit in today’s organizations is the virtual team, and it has gone global.

A virtual team is defined as “a group of people who interact through interdependent tasks guided by a common purpose.” It crosses “space, time and organizational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication technologies.” (Virtual Teams, by Lipnack and Stamps). Just as technology has enabled product and services markets to go global, it has also done so with both internal and external labor markets. Via global virtual teams, organizations have access to scarce talent anywhere in the world. This certainly is a good thing, but it does have its challenges.

As consultants that get derailed projects back on track, we frequently help get our clients resolve the difficulties that both internationalization and virtualization present. In the next three articles, we’ll review quick tips and real examples for improving global virtual team performance. And successful project outcomes all begin with a strong foundation of trust and communications.

According Patrick Lencioni’s The Trouble with Teamwork, the top team dysfunction is an absence of trust. Trust can manifest itself in many ways. For virtual teams, however, trust lives at the task not interpersonal level. It is critical that trust is established through performance consistency and rapid response to team members’ emails, requests for information and completing tasks. Build a culture of trust by clearly defining roles, responsibilities and communication expectations, and hold the team accountable to them. More quick tips on managing communication expectations below.Within the project team, establish communications guidelines and expectations around response times for voicemails and emails. In a recent client project performance improvement engagement, establishing a 24 hour response time was a simple but important change. With staggered time zones, missing that turn around window can actually set the response time back two days or more, and deadlines were being missed.

Build the sense of team, empower communication and codify these response time rules with a project roster or contact sheet. It should list the basics such as name, title, project responsibility, back up contact, FedEx addresses and fax numbers. Go beyond that by including normal working hours, accessibility hours, national holidays and vacations. With telephone numbers and email addresses, include how often they are checked and responded to. Adopt protocols for senders taking responsibility for prioritizing communication (urgent, FYI, action required, etc.). List any special knowledge and tool proficiency the team member has. Some include appropriate personal information such as photos and hobbies to help the team get to know each other as people and not just digital work units.


At the project’s start, set up a strong communications plan. It should begin by thinking through who the stakeholders are. Whose ‘buy-in’ is critical to ensure change will be accepted by all of those impacted? Sometimes called a “Stakeholder Analysis”, it starts by identifying these key individuals. This is no different than what you should be doing with any project except in scope. Are you thinking beyond your office walls? Who globally needs to be aware of and committed to your project? For example, in doing an analysis of an Asian market, our team did miss involving a high level Asian executive. This misstep, though quickly corrected, did cause us some unnecessary turbulence. Be sure to think through the level of commitment you need from stakeholders, how the project impacts them and how they could positively or negatively impact the project, and what their key concerns about the project might be. From this, map out a communication plan.

A communication plan is another standard project management tool that requires broader considerations with a global team. It is used to proactively identify communication activities so the right people hear what they need, when they need it. Simply put, for each stakeholder it identifies what information they need to receive, how and how frequently they will receive it, and who owns sending it to them. For example, key executives may want a quarterly in-person briefing by the project manager. Mid-level managers may require a weekly status report via email from the project coordinator.

During the project, consider using two different media for important messages. For example, judiciously consider sending a voicemail to alert a team member to respond to an important email. ‘Judiciously’ is key, since you don’t want the team to only think those emails with corresponding voicemails need attention. And you don’t need that extra work.

Another tip is to avoid showing location preference in your communication by informing local team members first. Ensure that you inform everyone at the same time, or those not co-located with you will feel excluded. They could become resentful and disengage from the project.

Consider establishing a mechanism for information exchange, such as an internal website or electronic bulletin board. As scattered people in different time zones collaborate on documents, versions can quickly become fragmented and out of sync. Time is lost trying to consolidate and manage them.

Part 2 | Part 3

A global marketplace means a global you working on a global team. While this enables top talent to collaborate, it does require a special leadership skill set and tool kit to be successful. This article is the first of three to discuss virtual global team leadership. Join us in the following articles for another set of best practices and real life examples of how to up-skill yourself and improve your virtual team’s performance. Send us your success stories and ideas with an email to mcook@ageos1.com.