Team management - Leading virtual teams

Leading Virtual Teams
Lika Sapir + Lyronne Marciano + Royee Toledano + Raphael Chicheportiche
IMAGE
by Arvind Malhotra, Ann Majchrzak, and Benson Rosen

How many of you did a project
without actually meeting
Before we start
Leading Virtual Teams Academy of Management Perspectives

How many of you find it convenient doing
assignments online?
Before we start

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il4f7PGeiuc
Before we start

INTRODUCTION
Virtual teams
Geographically dispersed
Work on highly independent tasks
Unique leadership challenges
Communicating with minimal face to face interaction
Academy of Management Perspectives

Leadership Practices of Virtual Team Leaders
Leaders of all teams have number of responsibilities, such as:

All leaders must carry these motivation tools:
Establish right norms of behaviors
Encourage social events
Building trust
Setting goals
Preparing the team to anticipate and cope with novel situations
Fostering internal communications
Recognizing contributions

Virtual teams leaders
are different !
NO

But…
Spend time mentoring the team members
Enforcing norms
Recognize and reward members and the team
They…..

It’s harder hence they aren’t physically
present

Virtual team leaders must know:
#1: What does the virtual silence means
#2: Ensure that the knowledge is fully utilized

INTRODUCTION
There are 6 leadership practices of
effective leaders of virtual teams:
1. Establish and maintain trust using communication technology
2. Ensure that distributed diversity is understood and appreciated
3. Manage virtual work life cycle (meetings)
4. Monitor team progress using technology
5. Enhance visibility of virtual members
6. Enable individual members of the virtual team to benefit from the team

Establish and Maintain Trust Through the Use
of Communication Technology
 Establishing norms on how information is
communicated (What, When, How to post)
 Revisiting and adjusting the communication
norms as the team involves

Establish and Maintain Trust Through the Use
of Communication Technology
 “Seeing is believing”
 Equally “suffering” in the
geographically distributed world

Ensure Diversity in the Team is Understood,
Appreciated and Leveraged
Prominent team expertise directory and skills
matrix
Virtual sub-teaming to pair diverse members and
rotate sub-team members
Allowing diverse opinions to be expressed
through use of asynchronous electronic means

Manage Virtual Work cycle and meetings
Pre meetings practices
Idea divergence between the meetings and Conflict resolution during the
meeting
 Start of meetings Practice
HUMAN SIDE IS IMPORTANT AS WELL!
Sharing personal stories, recent hobbies, and major events of member’s life.
Ensure team members have clear
agendas
Request members to post their progress

 During meeting practices
IMPORTANT TO KEEP TEAM MEMBERS
ENGAGED
• “Check in” methods
• Instant Messaging
 End of meeting practices
• Ending the session with a list of action items
• Ensure the minutes and summary of the session is
posted in the repository

 Between meeting practices
ALWAYS COMMAND MEMBERS
ATTENTION
Notifications
Electronic discussion
Instant messaging
Spontaneous announcements

 Closely examine asynchronous and synchronous communications
patterns
 Virtual meeting participation
 Posts in the repository
 Experimentation of technological means
 Leaders monitor tools that work and allow flexibility as technology
evolves
“Let’s try and work virtually and find the tools we need to
do our job”
Monitor Team Progress through the use
of technology

Enhance External Visibility of the Team and its
Members
Frequent report-outs to a virtual steering
committee
(comprised of local bosses of team members)

Ensure Individuals Benefit from Participating in
Virtual Teams

Ensure Individuals Benefit from Participating in
Virtual Teams
 Virtual reward ceremonies
 Making each team member’s “real location” boss aware of the
member’s contribution
 Individual recognition at the
start of each virtual meeting

To Conclude …
Virtual team leaders must:
 Overcome coordination barriers
 Cross cultural and language barriers
 Trust and team cohesion barriers

To Conclude …
The additional challenges of fighting for each team member
Overcoming member feeling of isolation
Build team cohesion
Establish norms of collaboration and knowledge sharing
Motivating team members to make a major commitment to the teams mission
Virtual team leaders emphasize on:

A tip for the future…
Given the challenges associated with leading a virtual project
team, the payoffs need to be substantial for an organization to
embrace this relatively new way of working. Because virtual teams
have access to specialized expertise across geographical
boundaries, they are poised to develop better-informed and
more creative solutions to complex, often global organizational
problems.

Criticism about the text
 Getting members involved:
Tracking team members work is not the best way to make sure people in the team
are contributing to the job.
 Another frustrating part about virtual work is:
The constant rotation in the minute taking or in the equal suffering.
 Virtual work can be very frustrating:
How many of you ever felt too much pressure because you are tracked from instant
messaging?

Interesting points we took from the text
1. The repository brings out transparency and trust, everything is shared
and nothing is done secretly on the side.
2. The diversification of the subgroups is similar to what we experience at IDC
3. Virtual parties is an exaggerated way of rewarding people for their work

THANK YOU !!
Any Question…?

Virtual Conversation

Team management - Leading virtual teams

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