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Want Your Virtual Teams to Deliver Results?
Make Sure They Have "People" Skills (January 7, 2021)
We are at an interesting crossroad in history. Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with a decade-long trend of more dispersed work teams, created a critical challenge to team performance. The ability for teams to meet face-to-face is no longer the norm, let alone a possibility, for most.
Can virtual teams be as effective as more traditional co-located teams? Does the inability to interact together physically make high performance impossible?
In our experience, virtual teams have one key advantage over traditional teams: most virtual teams are more diverse than the typical co-located team and offer different perspectives and experiences to better innovate and find creative solutions to problems. On the flip side, these differences can be a liability if team members don’t appreciate them or can’t overcome the challenges of collaborating across the boundaries of time and space. If team members can’t communicate and work together smoothly, the team’s performance will be weaker than that of a traditional team. If they can, they will achieve superior performance.
According to our research, the most effective virtual teams share four “people-oriented” characteristics:
- Style Diversity. Team members appreciate and take advantage of differences in interpersonal style.
- Shared Norms. They have a clear set of ground rules for how people treat each other within the team.
- Mutual Support. They feel interdependent, and people feel supported. This creates trust, an essential factor in the ability to collaborate effectively.
- Communication Processes. They have a shared understanding of communication roles and develop communication practices that facilitate sharing information and resolving conflicts.
When managers make a special effort to ensure that virtual team members have these four skills, versus focusing only on task and technology concerns, they will see a higher payoff. With these capabilities as a foundation for working together, virtual teams can function as effectively, or even more effectively, than co-located teams, leveraging all the benefits of their valuable differences.
What kinds of communication problems have you experienced as a member or manager of a virtual team? Have you worked with a virtual team that was especially effective at collaborating to get things done? Let us know about your experiences.
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About the Author
Michael Leimbach
Michael Leimbach, Ph.D., is a globally recognized expert in instructional design and sales development, sharing his message that it is not about what you learn but what you use. His approach has been adopted by numerous Global 1000 organizations in Australia, England, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and throughout the United States. Dr. Leimbach is Vice President of Global Research and Development for Wilson Learning Worldwide. With more than 25 years in the field, he provides leadership for researching and designing Wilson Learning’s diagnostic, learning, and performance improvement capabilities. He has managed major research studies in sales, leadership, and organizational effectiveness. Dr. Leimbach also developed Wilson Learning’s impact evaluation capability and return on investment models. He has served as a research consultant for a wide variety of global client organizations, is the Editor-in-Chief of the Advances in Developing Human Resources professional journal, and serves on the ISO Technical Committee on Quality Standards for Learning Service Providers. Dr. Leimbach has authored six books, published numerous professional articles, and is a frequent speaker at national and global conferences.
