Challenges Archives - Leading Virtually

Should you care that someone’s not reciprocating your friendship?

Surinder Kahai — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 13:22:48 +0000

If I think of you as a friend, then there’s about 50% likelihood that you don’t think of me likewise.

That’s disturbing, isn’t it?

Well, it should be. Good friendship is vital to our physical and emotional health. A Harvard study that spanned more than 75 years concluded that the single most important determinant of our well-being, including financial, is the quality of our relationships, which certainly include our friendships. Even in the workplace, friendship can be a source of happiness and improve our work performance by leading to trusting relationships in which those involved have each other’s back.

What really prompted me to write this article is a recent study that examined reciprocity in friendships and the effect it has on the influence one has over another. Its finding about the existence of reciprocity was quite consistent with what previous studies have also found. Essentially, when those you identify as friends are asked to identify who their friends are, studies indicate that there is only a 34 to 53 percent chance that they would identify you as their friend.

Of course, lack of reciprocity in friendship is not really good news for developing high quality relationships. In the workplace, the lack of reciprocity in friendships can be damaging in a variety of ways. Among those is the limiting of our ability to influence others, which then affects our ability to engage others in collective action and collaborate with them — something that organizations expect us to do more of today.

The lack of reciprocity in friendships may simply be due to the fact that it is not humanly possible to be friends with everyone. Robin Dunbar, a social psychologist, has proposed a limit to the number of stable social relationships one can have: 150. The basis for Dunbar’s number is human cognitive limitations. Technology, with all its information processing prowess, may help us push beyond the limits imposed by our cognitive apparatus but, apparently, not by much. While technology may help us broadcast our life happenings to others and help us stay acquainted with others, research is reasonably clear that technology does little to strengthen our close relationships — those which can be a source of comfort and emotional support as well as amplification of our happiness. We are generally limited to only about 5 such relationships, with our spouse or significant other occupying the most premier position for many of us.

In the office, the lack of reciprocity in friendships may simply be a reflection of what Adam Grant notes to be a trend among Americans to de-emphasize workplace friendships. He attributes this to a variety of reasons including the disappearance of long-term employment with a single employer, the use of flex work hours and remote work, the availability of technology that allows us to be in constant touch with our friends outside work, Protestant beliefs that may encourage greater focus on work, and the more current generations looking at work as means to leisure time after work.

While research suggests that it may be best for you to develop a reciprocated friendship with someone since the influence you have on each other is likely to be the strongest, it is not entirely a lost cause if you see someone as a friend but your friendship is not reciprocated. A study suggests that when the goals or rewards you seek are dependent on the performance of someone who does not reciprocate your friendship, you may still be able to influence that person. Your sense of dependence on someone you see as a friend may make you communicate in a way that ends up influencing that person. For example, you may communicate with kindness and consideration that moves the other person.

So, go ahead and be friendly towards others irrespective of whether your friendship is reciprocated. Be sure to see yourself as dependent on them in some way. This will increase the level of influence you have on them and, at the very least, make you look like a leader in their eyes.

Acknowledgment: I wish to thank Theresa Sigillito Hollema for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this post.

The post Should you care that someone’s not reciprocating your friendship? appeared first on Leading Virtually.

Is Leading in the Digital Age Different?

Surinder Kahai — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 21:43:14 +0000

Many say or assume that leadership does not change in the digital age. The scant attention paid to technology in the leadership literature is a testimony to that. But, isn’t it hard to expect that with so much of our interactions and work occurring via technology, leadership would remain unchanged?

Technology is changing the fundamental human processes that underlie leadership. When we use technology, the mental processes that are triggered change due to the absence of nonverbal cues and lack of social presence. We bring different information and emotions to bear on a situation. For instance, email has been shown to trigger egocentrism. Receivers may also perceive messages to be more negative than they actually are. Attraction between individuals is also altered by electronic communication. While attraction generally decreases, it can also increase in certain conditions; we are all aware of someone who has fallen in love online.

In the digital age, with workers spread all over the globe, a leader cannot hope to supervise and manage like before. With delayed information from remote followers, direct supervision and management is not possible. Proper and more elaborate structures have to be established beforehand. For situations where prior structures are not sufficient, the intent or purpose behind follower’s work have to be clarified and followers have to be trained and empowered to deal with unexpected situations themselves. With technology-mediated work increasing unabated, there is greater need and expectation for leaders to provide an inspiring purpose and structure that would hold the followers together and propel them forward despite the numerous challenges of working virtually.

Expectations about leadership are also changing due to the workforce seeing an increasing number of workers who have grown up with technology around them. Our younger generation, which is growing up in an open, tell-all culture, is likely to seek similar information-sharing qualities in its leaders.

The digital age offers greater opportunities to take advantage of the innovation and leadership capabilities of an organization’s workers and external stakeholders. Research suggests that organizations seeking to benefit from IT investments that enable grassroots participation, leaders would need to delegate more and they would need to focus more on team building and goal alignment (e.g., through inspirational leadership).

In sum, leaders need to be cognizant of how technology can change their mental processes and behaviors and adjust themselves appropriately. They also need to be aware of how the relevance and requirement of certain behaviors and tactics changes with technology so that they can change their behaviors accordingly. With so many things changing for a leader in the digital age, leadership cannot remain the same. Can it?

The post Is Leading in the Digital Age Different? appeared first on Leading Virtually.

Leadership is Becoming Harder!

Surinder Kahai — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 19:31:18 +0000

What if I told you that leading others has just become harder? And that it will become increasingly challenging in the future?

How we lead others effectively is not remaining constant. Ever-changing technology that is touching more and more of our lives is making sure of that. Leadership is all about how we influence others and motivate them to meet expectations and, in many cases, exceed them. With an increasing amount of our interaction mediated by technology, that influence process cannot remain the same, can it? Technology changes how we interact with others, how we perceive them, and how they perceive us.

Work, too, is shifting with more of it being executed by technology. The human worker is now expected to do much more to prove her/his value. As we disambiguate work using techniques such as machine learning, more of it is moving to technology. We humans are being left with the more ambiguous work for which we can’t specify clear expectations beforehand. Forget exceeding expectations in such a situation, let alone meeting them. How can we continue to influence and motivate others in the same way as before?

With technology permeating our work and consuming more of our dollars, it makes sense to make sure that we realize its full potential. Yet, it often falls short in delivering on its promise. And that is largely because leaders fail to recognize that realizing the true potential of technology involves more than writing a check for it and switching it on. I am sure they are going to tell me: “Isn’t that why I have hired IT people? Isn’t it their job to make sure that we get the bang we expect from every dollar we invest in technology?” At that point, I will have no choice but to give them the bad news that whenever we invest in technology, we also have to make complementary changes in the organization, including those in their leadership, in order to get the most out of technology. It is their job and not IT’s to make those changes.

Of course, I have talked very broadly about what lies ahead for leadership. I am going to be elaborating more on these points in my future posts.

Stay tuned!

The post Leadership is Becoming Harder! appeared first on Leading Virtually.

When the Leader is the Only One Remote From the Team

Surinder Kahai — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 20:58:37 +0000

On my LinkedIn profile, I received a suggestion in response to one of my recent posts that I cover a particular configuration of virtual teams. In this configuration, the team leader is in one location and the rest of the team is in another. There is some research on the effects of different configurations or distributions of members of virtual teams but there is none, to the best of my knowledge, on this particular configuration. I have used relevant research to put together some educated estimates of what is likely to happen.

Presence of a faultline

When the leader is the only one remote from the team, a faultline results, which then triggers social categorization on the basis of status or authority. The leader, because of the power and authority that s/he yields, will be seen by the team member as belonging to a different category compared to them. Frequent interaction among team members and lack of such interaction with the leader is likely to make their separation from the leader even more salient and provide opportunities for them to reinforce their separate identity and solidarity with each other. The leader, too, may categorize the rest of the team as those who share a role different from her/his and who are accountable to her/him.

This faultline separating the leader from the rest of the team is made worse by distance. Most or all interaction between the leader and members is now mediated by technology, which tends to restrict what is communicated. Additionally, whatever is communicated may not be shared with the whole team. The leader is not fully aware of the actual circumstances of the rest of the team just like the rest of the team is unaware of the leader’s circumstances (see a related post on the presence of subgroups in virtual teams). Under these conditions, attributions play an important role in how the leader and followers evaluate each other. Individuals have a tendency to generate explanations or make sense of the happenings around them. In a face-to-face setting, one has access to significant levels of direct interaction and observations from which to make sense but such interaction and observations are scarcer in a virtual team and sense-making is likely to be based more on one’s mental models rather than the actual circumstances.

Biased sense-making resulting from the faultline

The problem with this sense-making and the resulting attributions is that they tend to be biased. So, we not only have a clear separation between the leader and the team that lends itself to a us versus her/him or me versus them mentality, but we have each of the parties influenced by systematic biases when trying to make sense of the other. Unless a leader and the rest of the team are aware of these tendencies and guard against those by giving the benefit of the doubt to the other entity, the end result may not always be pleasant.

What are some of the biases that affect the process of making attributions? Two that are commonly cited in the attribution literature are the actor-observer and self-serving biases. These interact with one another to give rise to an interesting tendency. When something goes well, the leader is likely to attribute that to her/his leadership and actions. If something goes wrong, the leader is likely to link that with factors external to her/him. These might be the rest of the team or other factors, such as the time zone difference, if one exists. The team members may be similarly biased to attribute any positive happenings to themselves and negative happenings to external factors, including the leader.

Due to such evaluations by the leader and the rest of the team, lack of trust, not liking or being persuaded by someone on the other side of the faultline, incomplete diagnosis of issues, and conflict are likely. Team performance is likely to suffer. There is research that suggests that when the leader communicates her/his evaluation of the rest of the team’s role in any negative happening, the team members are induced to make the same attribution (of their role) and experience learned helplessness. Research also suggests that there are many factors that moderate how the above tendencies actually play out. Culture is one of the factors. A leader from an individualistic culture is likely to attribute any negative happening to team members rather than to the peculiar set of conditions that may be facing while a leader from a collectivistic culture is more likely to attribute a similar happening to external conditions.

Overcoming problems due to the faultline

But the presence of a faultline caused by a leader’s separation from the rest of the team is not always bad news. Nor is the process of making attributions. A deft leader is likely to make the faultline less salient by breaking down the status difference and giving team members an equal say in the workings of the team. Such a leader is also likely to encourage greater interaction and information sharing so that sense-making is based on actual happenings and circumstances instead of mental models and biases that can lead to erroneous evaluation. A smart leader, in fact, would take advantage of being virtual and shape the attributions of others in a way which leads to her/him being easily seen as transformational and charismatic. In the absence of direct observation of the leader, the leader is in a position to communicate selective information about her/his performance or behaviors that cues the rest of the team to see her/him in a very positive light. Of course, if in actuality the leader is not transformational or charismatic, the leader will eventually be seen as hypocritical and unauthentic.

The above are some general behavioral tendencies that may show up when the leader of a virtual team is the only one remote from the team. There are many other factors that could also influence the actual happenings. Good, frequent, and open communication by the whole team and considerate behavior by all can go a long way in alleviating the ill-effects of the faultline separating the leader from the rest of the team. The leader has to set the example of open and frequent communication, including that oriented towards building social relationships, and considerate behaviors for others to follow.

The post When the Leader is the Only One Remote From the Team appeared first on Leading Virtually.

Goal Setting to Close the Knowing-Doing Gap

Surinder Kahai — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 01:57:44 +0000

In my previous post, I referred you to articles about how to lead virtual teams. As educators, we often assume that people lack knowledge and once it is imparted it will be used. But there is often a big gap between knowledge and translating it into action. This knowing-doing gap exists in leadership development as well. The field of training transfer provides many suggestions to reduce the knowing-doing gap and these focus on trainee characteristics, training design, and the work environment to improve training transfer (see an example of such research). A simple intervention that works on a personal level is goal setting.

Goal setting involves creating a list of desirable leadership behaviors, setting targets for those behaviors (e.g., 5 times per week), and monitoring progress towards achieving those targets. When creating a list of desirable behaviors, make sure that the behaviors are specific, actionable behaviors rather than general behaviors. For instance, corresponding to the general behavior of showing energy and enthusiasm, some specific behaviors would be to ‘show willingness to take on additional responsibilities,’ ‘come in early to work,’ or ‘finish the work assigned to me before others remind me to.’

To set targets, monitor opportunities for displaying desirable behaviors during the first week or two. Make a note of their frequencies. As a first pass, the frequencies of opportunities you experience could be used as targets.You don’t have to get your targets right the first time. Give yourself the latitude to adjust the targets to make sure that you don’t exhaust yourself and have the energy to perform well.

The power of goal setting has also been shown in areas other than management. The example of goal setting in the Nike+ system comes to mind (see the related Wired magazine article). This system combined the sensor in a runner’s Nike shoe with an iPod and allowed the runner to enter the target for a run and track her/his performance. The runner’s goal and performance data were then uploaded to NikePlus.com. Analysis of this data revealed that if someone persisted and reached five runs, that person was likely to keep running and uploading data. If you are changing your leadership behaviors, the implication of this for you is to be patient, especially with yourself. Don’t give up in face of the effort that may be required upfront. Once you taste some success, it will feed on itself to motivate you even more to change your behavior.

There are a few things that you should keep in mind to increase your chances of success.

Build commitment through sharing. You will find it useful to share your list and targets with someone you trust (e.g., your peer or superior). Such sharing builds public commitment to your goals. To strengthen this commitment, also consider sharing how well you are achieving your targets with them.

Preventing relapse with reminders to yourself. There is always a danger of relapse to old behaviors. While there are elaborate relapse prevention programs (see example), I suggest that you first try something simpler: set up an alert system reminding you of the most important goals you have set for yourself as part of the goal-setting intervention. For instance, set up weekly or twice-weekly reminders on your smartphone about your most critical goals. Such reminders can be effective. In a study reported in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, participants signed up for a 16-week, individually tailored e-mail program to improve their health-related behaviors. When these individuals received weekly email reminders that alerted them about their goals (e.g., go for a walk during a coffee break), they were more likely to engage in healthy behaviors than individuals in the control group who did not sign up for the program.

Show yourself some compassion. There will be times when you don’t meet your targets or you find that you have relapsed to old behaviors. Don’t be hard on yourself. Show yourself some compassion. Research suggests that those who show self-compassion are more likely to be motivated to improve after failing or making a mistake.

Don’t delude yourself via self-enhancement tendencies. Research suggests that assessing how you are doing relative to your goals could easily become an evaluation of one’s self in addition to an evaluation of outcomes. Be on guard against the self-enhancement tendency, which is the desire to see oneself as a winner irrespective of actual performance. Such a tendency distorts one’s cognitive processes and is likely to be accentuated by low performance and perceived personal responsibility for that performance (these threaten one’s self-image). This may show up as revision of one’s targets in order to look good or excessive attribution of poor performance to outside influences.

Contrast a desired future with present reality. When you set goals and plan desirable actions and targets, consider the obstacles or challenges you are likely to encounter. Recent research indicates that when you don’t consider the challenges, your goals and related actions are likely to become mere fantasies. You are unlikely to create realistic plans that can increase your goal commitment and help you succeed. Such mental contrasting helps by stimulating process simulation and if-then planning.

We are often inspired by new knowledge we may receive to change our leadership behaviors. But we are challenged to translate our inspiration into action. I have outlined a set of steps to close the knowing-doing gap and become a more effective leader.

xvltbjyl [test]

The post Goal Setting to Close the Knowing-Doing Gap appeared first on Leading Virtually.

Leading Virtual Teams Continues To Be Challenging

Surinder Kahai — Fri, 05 Jun 2015 22:54:13 +0000

Talk to those who coach leaders and they will tell you that leading virtual teams continues to be challenging. The interesting thing is that that there is fair amount of relevant research that can benefit leaders. Unfortunately, such research never makes its way to the general public. We academics do a pretty good job conducting rigorous research but we are not good at disseminating our research. I had started this blog to share what research is telling us about leading virtual teams. There are quite a few articles there that are likely to be helpful for anyone leading work over electronic channels, including those who are not leading pure virtual teams. A fair amount of our work in teams gets conducted over electronic channels such as email, instant messaging, wikis, blogs, etc. even if we are not part of a pure virtual team.

Here are two sets of five articles each that can help someone interested in leading virtually get started. Start with the first set and move on to the second set to learn more about the topic. The articles are likely to be beneficial even to those who are not formally responsible for leading work over electronic channels. Leadership is not something that rests only with those put into leadership positions. Others also end up exercising influence numerous times; whenever that happens, leadership is being attempted.

Set 1

Set 2

I would love your feedback on these articles. Also, let me know if there are topics related to leading virtually that you would like me to write about. I would benefit significantly from knowing what you in the field are struggling with. It will help me focus my writing.

The post Leading Virtual Teams Continues To Be Challenging appeared first on Leading Virtually.

No Email Reply? Don’t Let an Unanswered Email Get the Better of You

Surinder Kahai — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 17:03:58 +0000

Technology is meant to connect us. Instead, it often creates feelings of isolation. Such as when there’s no reply to our emails. We don’t care as much when our email to a company’s customer service is unanswered but when we send it to someone we know or an individual we are trying to establish contact with, not receiving a reply leaves us unsettled.

Why?

Don’t we encounter silence in a face-to-face situation too? Why doesn’t that unsettle us?

Silence in a face-to-face situation can be awkward too. But it can be resolved quickly by reading the other person’s body language or by simply asking a question. If the question is unanswered, we may still be able to make sense of the silence by using the greetings and the small talk we exchanged (or their lack) that day with the other person.

In the absence of such possibilities in a virtual situation, silence no longer remains as such.

It produces thunder!

We begin to think of all possible reasons behind the silence. In a world where people have constant access to email, we find it very strange and shocking that the receiver has not responded. Distress, feelings of isolation and loss of control, frustration, anger, negative self-appraisal, bad mood, and a host of related effects occur as a consequence of email silence. Damage to one’s relationship with the unresponsive individual is usually not far behind.

Often, these reactions are unjustified. Why? Because it may not be as bad as you think.

Quite often, the other person is very busy or immersed in something else due to which our message is put away for a response later. But then the receiver gets caught up in the daily routine and our message remains unanswered despite good intentions. And we may erroneously conclude that the receiver doesn’t care about us or our email. In a NY Times article about unanswered emails, someone mentioned that she sometimes doesn’t have the time to give a careful response and puts off responding till later. Eventually, time goes by and after some time she feels that she has waited too long and is embarrassed. What does she do? She does not respond! So, you see, you may have not received a response because someone cared too much and not less!

Sure, there are times when things are really wrong because of which there is no response. In a research study, Catherine Cramton found that the US members of a virtual team misjudged the silence of their Portuguese partners after an electronic vote as consent when, in fact, the latter were expressing their disagreement with the chosen idea. You may have someone playing games with you by not responding — that individual may simply be trying to get an upper hand in the relationship with you. Then there are occasions when we are expecting some favor from the receiver of our email and the receiver wants to turn down our request but, instead of embarrassing us, does not respond.

So, there are times when email silence isn’t bad and there are other times when it is. Did someone say that email silence can be confusing?

Can we do something about it?

In virtual teams, we can reduce email silence considerably by drawing up a team compact in which we outline the rules of engagement. These rules of engagement typically cover expectations about email communication, including acceptable delay in responding to emails.

But we experience many situations outside of virtual teams in which our emails go unanswered. How do we deal with such situations?

For that we first need to look at some research. Research by Yoram Kalman and Sheizaf Rafaeli on response latency in electronic communication indicates that about 80% of responses get posted within the average response time and 97% of the responses get posted within 10 times the average response time. This is true for responses in various kinds of computer-mediated communication systems, including email and group discussion forums. Using the Enron email dataset, the authors found that the average time to respond to an email was about 29 hours. If we assume that this figure applies elsewhere too, then there’s a 80% chance that your email will get responded to within 29 hrs. Even if it does not get responded to within this time, there’s still about a 17% chance that your email gets will get responded to within another 11 days. After that, assume that the silence is for good.

Thus, research suggests that we wait for about 12 days before taking action for lack of response to our email. Of course, to the extent our email is time sensitive, we would need to act before that. Also, we need to be sensitive to individual differences. For some individuals, the average response latency may be more or less than the 29 hours we have assumed. To the extent we know enough about someone’s email behavior, we would need to adjust for that too. One recourse when we encounter silence might be to resend the email if we believe that the receiver may have simply forgotten. When we are uncertain, research suggests that a more effective action might be to make our request via another medium, such as the phone. For very critical emails, I have found it to be effective to let the recipient know that I would be following up by a certain date to see if there is any part of my email or request that needs additional clarification. If I don’t get a response by the follow up date, I call (or, if possible, stop by the persons office) to check if there are any questions or issues I can address. If there are any bad news, they come out during that call (or visit).

If none of the above actions work, don’t let the silence get the better of you. If you are seeking something very critical from the unresponsive person, figure out another way to get it. Else, it may be time to move on. If a response comes out of the blue in the future, as it sometimes does, count it as a blessing!

The post No Email Reply? Don’t Let an Unanswered Email Get the Better of You appeared first on Leading Virtually.

How Important Is It To Manage Temporal Diversity in Virtual Teams?

Surinder Kahai — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:44:34 +0000

During the last weekend, I had a chance to observe a couple of workers who were installing new backsplash in my kitchen. One of them was setting the tiles as quickly as he could. It was clear that he wanted to finish his task and get out as quickly as possible. The other went about his work patiently. He took measurements for tiles to be set at the edges, cut the tiles according to measurement, and finally set those tiles. When setting the tiles he had cut, he would look over the work of the first worker and tweak the tiles on the wall in case they were not aligned properly. Occasionally, the first worker would question him about what he was up to and he explained that the alignment of the tiles was not proper and he was fixing it. I remember the first worker telling the second one that it wasn’t a big deal if the tiles were not perfectly aligned. The second worker responded that he felt uneasy if the alignment wasn’t proper. “The quality of what we produce is important to me,” he added.

What I saw in action were two individuals, one who emphasized speed and the other who emphasized quality, somehow balancing their differences in a way that helped them perform effectively as a team. I wondered if this is what happens in a team when team members differ in terms of their emphasis on speed, quality, and other performance goals. Does such diversity help a team address different and, oftentimes, competing team performance expectations that are typical for many teams? Or does it create conflict among workers and hinder team performance? Are there any ways in which this diversity can be managed so that it benefits rather than hinders team performance? Interestingly, these questions were quite similar to those that motivated a recent study reported by Susan Mohammed and Sucheta Nadkarni in the Academy of Management Journal. The authors examined how team temporal diversity can be effectively managed to maximize team performance. Certainly, there is more to diversity within a team than just temporal diversity but what Mohammed and Nadkarni found helped me get closer to the answers I was seeking.

Dimensions of temporal diversity
Mohammed and Nadkarni defined temporal diversity as variations in members’ time urgency, pacing style, and time perspective.

Time urgency is a personality trait that reflects how concerned someone is about conserving time. Time urgent individuals feel that time needs to be conserved. They feel chronically hurried and are continuously focused on how much time is remaining for an activity. On the other hand, those who are not time urgent don’t feel highly constrained by time. They feel less hurried and are not concerned with the passage of time.

Pacing style refers to how individuals pace their effort when working towards deadlines. People vary from those who begin working on their tasks right away (early action individuals) to those who start working close to the deadline (deadline action individuals). In between, you find steady action individuals who spread out their work evenly.

Time perspective reflects the importance given by an individual to past, present, and future time frames. Those with present time perspective tend to focus on immediate pleasure, take more risks, and plan only for the near future whereas those with future time perspective tend to be highly goal-oriented, consider future consequences, and plan beyond the near future.

Temporal diversity can help but you need temporal leadership
Mohammed and Nadkarni viewed temporal diversity as helping a team perform better provided it is managed appropriately. They suggested that one way in which temporal diversity could be managed is via temporal leadership. They defined temporal leadership as the extent to which team leaders scheduled deadlines, synchronized team member behaviors, and allocated temporal resources. According to the authors, strong temporal leadership helps the team reduce the problems associated with temporal diversity and put it to work to meet diverse performance expectations, thereby helping team performance. On the other hand, weak temporal leadership, the authors contended, hinders team performance by failing to curb the problems arising from temporal diversity and being unable to put it to good use.

The results from the study that Mohammed and Nadkarni conducted using 71 teams from a process outsourcing provider firm in India supported the authors’ contention that temporal diversity can help a team perform better if temporal leadership is strong. They found that time urgency and pacing style diversity were more positively related to team performance when temporal leadership was stronger. In other words, teams can benefit from having a mix of high and low time urgency members as well as a mix of those who differ on how they pace their assignments. But to get this benefit, team leaders must set milestones, prioritize tasks, remind members of important deadlines, build time for contingencies, pace the team members, and coordinate team members’ efforts to help the team meet its deadlines. If they don’t, then diversity may harm rather than benefit team performance. Mohammed and Nadkarni did not find diversity in future orientation as playing any role in influencing team performance.

Mohammed and Nadkarni found another interesting result: strong temporal leadership improved team performance, irrespective of whether temporal diversity in the team was high or low.

What does this mean for virtual teams?
Virtual teams, or teams engaged in remote work, often consist of individuals from different cultures. Individuals from different cultures tend to have different visions of time. Americans, for instance, possess a clock vision of time and see time as a scarce commodity which must be conserved. Those belonging to the Hindu or Buddhist culture, on the other hand, adopt a timeless vision of time. They view the world as engaged in simultaneous destruction and creation. In such a view, the passage of time is not important because whatever goes, comes back again. Whatever is happening today will happen again in the future. Such differences among team members are likely to introduce temporal diversity within the team and create an opportunity for enhancing team performance with the help of temporal leadership.

Leaders of teams engaged in remote work can create temporal leadership within a team by helping it develop a team compact and regularly conduct after action reviews (AARs). The development of a team compact helps a virtual team set milestones and prioritize tasks. It helps the virtual team coordinate its efforts — the team assigns clear tasks to its members and creates a schedule for the work due from the members. The team also creates a timetable for team meetings and conducting AARs. During the development of a team compact, members of a virtual team also agree to how soon they will respond to messages from each other. When a virtual team conducts AARs, it gets an opportunity to revisit the team compact and review how it is faring in terms of following its schedule and meeting its milestones and deadlines. During the AARs, the team may also change its schedule or create a contingency plan for the remainder of the project if necessary.The development of the team compact and conducting regular AARs, therefore, give the whole team the opportunity to engage in temporal leadership and manage the temporal diversity that may exist in the team. By letting the whole team engage in temporal leadership rather than imposing a set of task assignments and a delivery schedule on them (as it happens in the case of team charters), team leaders increase the likelihood of team members responding effectively to temporal leadership and working together to improve team performance.

Even though team compact and AARs are useful tools for a team engaged in remote work, they are not always embraced enthusiastically. Mohammed and Nadkarni’s results have provided me with a strong justification for recommending the team compact and AARs to virtual teams. I often get quizzical looks when I recommend these tools to the virtual teams that I supervise. Team members see the development of a team compact and conducting AARs as trivial exercises with little value. They sometimes argue that they are professionals and they don’t need to be reminded regularly that they have to complete their work. What I see missing in these individuals is the realization that they are working in a team and that there are bound to be differences in how each individual approaches the work assigned to that individual. As the study by Mohammed and Nadkarni demonstrates, team members may differ on the basis of time urgency and pacing style. While each team member may approach their individual work professionally, because they have to work with each other, they need to manage their individual differences related to time urgency and pacing style. In fact, by managing their individual differences, they may be able to harness their different traits or styles to benefit team performance. Even if there is no temporal diversity in the virtual team, creating a team compact and conducting regular AARs provide opportunities to the team to engage in temporal leadership and improve team performance.

The post How Important Is It To Manage Temporal Diversity in Virtual Teams? appeared first on Leading Virtually.

Yes, Leadership Changes in a Web 2.0 World

Surinder Kahai — Tue, 11 May 2010 23:16:50 +0000

A recent Harvard Business Review blog post by James Champy argues leadership does not change in a Web 2.0 World. Mr. Champy’s core points are that (a) leadership requires relationships and personal engagement and (b) technology does nothing to alter this requirement in leaders. Based on his points, Mr. Champy seems to suggest that the most appropriate way forward for a leader in a Web 2.0 world to is engage her/his followers face-to-face. While Mr. Champy’s core points are accurate, they rest on a very simple picture of leadership. It is only when one sees the more complex picture of leadership offered by leadership scholars, one can begin to see that the requirements for leadership are expanding in a Web 2.0 world. If all we say to leaders is that they need to keep focusing on building relationships and enabling personal engagement in a Web 2.0 world, we would be giving them advice that would be technically correct but of limited practical value.

A more comprehensive view of leadership

Francis Yammarino, Fred Dansereau, and Christina Kennedy offer a comprehensive picture of leadership by identifying five areas that have been important to scholars of leadership. The first area, fundamental human processes, covers psychological and related processes that enable the formation of relationships that people think of as leadership. These processes serve as basic foundations without which leadership would not be possible. These processes cover cognitive and emotional processes, attraction between individuals, the norms, values, and culture of collectives, and, finally, communication. The second area, leadership core processes, are behaviors or qualities displayed by a leader to exercise leadership. They include charisma, transformational leadership, empowerment, providing task and relationship functions to groups, and supervision and management. The third area, leadership outcomes (hereafter referred to as leadership tactics), covers the ways in which a leader puts together core processes. Examples of such tactics include team building, delegation, and participation in decision-making. The fourth area, second-level leadership outcomes, refers to the immediate outcomes of leadership core processes and includes variables such as performance, satisfaction, absenteeism, engagement of followers, and leader-follower relationships. Note that it is just this area that Mr. Champy seems to be focusing on. The last area, substitutes for leadership, covers leadership enhancers, neutralizers, and replacements.

To show how leaders will need to adapt in a Web 2.0 world, it is sufficient if we just focus on the first three areas.

Web 2.0 and fundamental leadership-related human processes

Technology is changing the fundamental human processes that serve as basic foundations for leadership. Leaders need to understand that when we use technology, the mental processes that are triggered are not the same due to the absence of non-verbal cues and lack of social presence. We bring different information and emotions to bear on a situation when communicating via electronic media. For instance, email has been shown to trigger egocentrism. It may also make receivers perceive messages to be more negative than they actually are. Attraction between individuals is also altered by technology. While individuals interacting via technology tend to have low attraction towards one another, this reverses under certain conditions; we are all aware of someone who has fallen in love online.

In a Web 2.0 world, our norms and expectations about effective leadership are changing. With proliferation of technology-mediated virtual teams, there is greater need and expectation for leaders to provide us with an inspiring purpose and structure that hold the team together and propel it forward despite the numerous challenges of working virtually. Our values and cultures may be changing such that we seek different qualities in a leader. Our younger generation, which is growing up in an open, tell-all culture, is likely to seek similar information-sharing qualities in its leaders. Additionally, the communication processes that enable leaders to instill their leadership philosophy in others are changing due to technology. The effectiveness of these tools and consequently, the leader-follower relationship that develops, varies with the presence or absence of a variety of technology-related or technology-induced factors. My previous post about the effectiveness of video conferencing illustrates this point.

In sum, several of the processes that affect the formation of leader-follower relationships are changing in a Web 2.0 world, thereby changing who is seen as a leader and what makes a leader successful. Therefore, to emerge as a leader and to become successful, one will have to be aware of how technology may alter the fundamental human processes that affect leader-follower relationships. Armed with this knowledge, one can dial down actions or steps that damage leader-follower relationships and focus on actions that promote strong leader-follower relationships.

Web 2.0 and leadership core processes

The “appropriate” fundamental human process just don’t happen. A leader has to exhibit appropriate behaviors to enable appropriate fundamental processes to occur.

Web 2.0 can be a double-edged sword for charisma and transformational leadership. While on one hand, Web 2.0 can help spread the word about a leader’s admirable qualities and behaviors far and wide and enable the development of charisma among distant followers, it can also puncture this “ideal” picture about the leader by readily making the followers more aware of the leader’s missteps. In a Web 2.0 world, leaders need to be careful every step of the way because they are tracked like never before. Thus, to help them form meaningful and strong relationships with their followers, they have to monitor their behavior and tread carefully even when they are not with their followers.

Electronic media can make it challenging for a leader to convey emotions and be transformational. However, electronic media have also been shown to help a leader when they are utilized properly. Specifically, the absence or relative lack of nonverbal cues in electronic media can remove focus on inter-personal differences. A smart leader can take advantage of this and transform the followers by making them focus on the commonality among them and a higher purpose that binds them together (read about this research).

In a Web 2.0 world, a leader cannot hope to supervise and manage in the same way as in a non-Web 2.0 environment. With delayed information from remote followers, a leader cannot expect to be very effective at direct supervision and management. Proper and more elaborate structures will have to be set in place beforehand. For situations where prior structures are not sufficient, the intent or purpose behind follower’s work will have to be clarified and followers will have to be trained and empowered to deal with unexpected situations themselves. Hiring, too, will be impacted in a Web 2.0 world. Leaders will have to be careful and choose those who are self-motivated and can discipline themselves.

Web 2.0 and leadership tactics

A Web 2.0 world offers greater opportunities for organizations to take advantage of the innovation and leadership capabilities of their workers. Research suggests that in organizations that seek to benefit from IT investments that enable grassroots participation, leaders would need to delegate more and they would need to focus more on team building and goal alignment (e.g., through inspirational leadership). Moreover, in a Web 2.0 world, organizations have the opportunity to tap into the creative and leadership capabilities of their external stakeholders, such as their customers. Here too, letting go of control while providing inspiration and a guiding hand for collaboration are likely to be vital for a leader.

What does Web 2.0 mean for leadership?

To be sure, the focus on building relationships and personal engagement in leadership will not change in a Web 2.0 world, as pointed out by Mr. Champy, but how a leader achieves these goals will have to change. With increasing globalization and cost pressures, it would not be optimum for leaders to travel and meet their followers face-to-face, despite the efficacy of face-to-face meetings for relationship building and personal engagement. Moreover, they would be unable to tap into the expertise and creativity of external stakeholders if they attempt to rely on face-to-face meetings with them. Future leaders will have to rely more on technology. Effective leaders will need to figure out both the opportunities and perils of electronic communication and take steps to maximize the benefits and minimize the downsides in a Web 2.0 world.

What leaders have under their control are their mental processes and their behaviors and tactics. It is these that play a role in determining the relationships and personal engagement that result. It is these that make up leadership. Leaders need to be cognizant of how technology can change their mental processes and behaviors and adjust themselves appropriately. They also need to be aware of how the relevance and requirement of certain behaviors and tactics changes with technology so that they can change their behaviors accordingly. With so many things changing for a leader in a Web 2.0 world, how can leadership remain the same?

The post Yes, Leadership Changes in a Web 2.0 World appeared first on Leading Virtually.

Is Video Conferencing a Good Substitute for Face-to-face Meetings?

Surinder Kahai — Thu, 06 May 2010 10:53:21 +0000

When air travel to and from several European cities was curtailed due to volcanic ash, people adopted Skype and other video conferencing tools in lieu of travel. Unlike email or telephone, video conferencing is thought to be like face-to-face communication but only somewhat leaner because one is not in the same place as the person one is communicating with. In other words, video conferencing is thought to vary in degree rather than in nature.

Research on video conferencing, however, paints a different picture. It argues that video-conferencing gives rise to a different kind of information processing than what takes place during face-to-face meetings. A case in point is a study by Carlos Ferran and Stephanie Watts, published in September 2008 in Management Science.

According to the researchers, communicators using video conferencing face a higher cognitive load than face-to-face communicators because of a variety of challenges, including those of identifying who is speaking, detecting movement, coordinating eye-contact, turn-taking, and conversation pacing. Video conferencing also consumes greater cognitive attention due to heightened self-awareness. Faced with a higher cognitive load, users of video conferencing may economize when evaluating the information presented the speaker. They may economize by using heuristics, such as how likeable they perceive the speaker to be, rather than the quality of the arguments presented by the speaker when judging whether or not they will adopt or use the information presented by the speaker. On the other hand, in face-to-face meetings, the communication medium does not impose as much cognitive burden, thereby leaving the receiver of any communication with adequate cognitive resources to focus on the quality of information while making judgment about whether or not it will be adopted and used.

Ferran and Watts report results from a field study in which they found support for their model of how video conferencing may differ from face-to-face communication. In a study of medical professionals, they found that participants attending a seminar via video conference were more influenced by the speaker’s likeability than by the quality of the speaker’s arguments, whereas the opposite pattern was true for participants who attended in person. The likeability of a person was based on the extent to what that person was perceived as charismatic, appealing, interesting, and friendly. The researchers also confirmed that differences in cognitive load explained these effects. Based on these findings, the authors argued that video conferencing does not simply approach face-to-face interaction — it changes what we attend to. Essentially, we end up attending more to peripheral cues in the form of a person’s likeability than to systematic or rigorous cues to judge the information we are receiving from that person via video conferencing. A word of caution should be noted about Ferran and Watts’ findngs: they apply to the use of video conferencing in seminar-like settings where participants have not had prior interaction with the presenter.

What do the results from Ferran and Watts mean for a leader? When the leader is having a tough time convincing others about the merits of a proposal but is a likeable person, s/he should use video-conferencing rather than a face-to-face meeting to make her/his case. A leader may also recruit a likeable person to present the proposal. Or, if a virtual team is using video-conferencing and the leader would like participants to be more systematic in their processing, the leader should minimize the cognitive burden of using video conferencing. This can be done by giving the users enough training on the use of video conferencing. Moreover, the users should do a dry run with each other so that they become more familiar with each other’s turn-taking pauses, pacing gestures, and other ways of regulating the communication.

Another thing a virtual team leader who can do to increase the attention to logical aspects of the information being presented is to make it easy for participants to focus on logical aspects. Having another window (in addition to the one showing a video of the presenter) that allows users to see a running slide presentation, with arguments laid out very clearly, might be helpful.

In summary, the evidence presented by Ferran and Watts suggests that video conferencing may not be comparable to face-to-face meetings because it changes the nature of information processing by its users. In that sense, it does not substitute for face-to-face meetings. Consequently, simply thinking that video conferencing can be made to approach face-to-face meetings by improving the picture quality may not suffice. One needs to focus on reducing the cognitive burden imposed by video conferencing in order to make it approach face-to-face meetings.

The post Is Video Conferencing a Good Substitute for Face-to-face Meetings? appeared first on Leading Virtually.