Teamwork 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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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Facebook & Twitter Talk Not Empathy-Evoking

Surinder Kahai — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:49:08 +0000

Some months back, Betsy had blogged about a New York Times article by Clive Thompson on how technologies such as Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter lead to ambient awareness. She wrote: “These technologies make it convenient to quickly and easily give or get updates with a number of other people. Although each individual message might have little meaning as a stand-alone, researchers have found that reading frequent updates about a friend will, over time, give an observer a fairly sophisticated understanding of that friend and lead to the development of an empathic relationship“.

A recent article in Wall Street Journal offers a counter viewpoint. The author of the article, Julia Angwin, initially thought that the small talk enabled by Facebook and Twitter was replacing the need to ask someone “How are you?” Since small talk is an important part of building relationships that enable people to work and play together, she sought out to test whether digital small talk was as effective as real talk. She decided to investigate whether the updates she was getting via Facebook or Twitter were authentic, i.e., whether they reflected the true states of the individuals behind them.

By calling up her mom and a couple of friends, Julia found out that the daily digital updates did not actually give a true picture of these individuals. For instance, her mom’s garden was doing fine — just like she had mentioned in her tweets — but she was really upset about a friend’s illness — something that she had not tweeted about. The digital updates were not deceitful but, according to Julia, they were creating “a cocoon of information that may not paint a full picture of the truth.” She finds the daily digital feeds as reassuring but the next time she meets someone, she plans to ask “How are you, really?”

Which viewpoint do you agree with? Does Facebook and Twitter talk evoke empathy? What has been your experience? I invite you to share your thoughts below.

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Preventing Poor Performance in Teams

Surinder Kahai — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:49:43 +0000

According to Harvard’s Richard Hackman, a leading expert on teams, there is a widespread belief that teams make us more productive and creative and that they are the best way to get a job done. In a May 2009 Harvard Business Review interview, Professor Hackman cautions us that problems with coordination, motivation, and competition often cause a team to perform worse than expected. Here are some of his ideas for improving team performance. I have included my ideas about what they mean for a virtual team leader.

Set a clear direction. The team needs to have a clear direction that everyone agrees on. We have seen in our research on leadership in computer-mediated teams that clarity on what the team is supposed to do bolsters team creativity and productivity. In virtual teams, clearly specifying what the team is expected to do is extremely critical because even differences in locations from which team members come can give rise to differences in the agendas of team members (see our past post on how location matters in virtual teams). Moreover, getting the team to agree on the direction is critical too. Getting the team to work on a team compact is helpful for bringing about agreement.
Teams should consist of people who matter. Professor Hackman cautions us against including team members for political correctness or to not look exclusionary. Such individuals often don’t want to be on the team and they lead to a dysfunctional team. Virtual team leaders should use the team’s direction to determine who can make a positive contribution to the team. In fact, the leader should use ideas about how a potential member could make a positive difference to sell the team to that member. People will join if they see that they can make a positive difference. The leader should make sure that there is a deviant in the team — someone who will challenge the team often and prevent it from becoming complacent. Also, the leader should avoid double digits, i.e., build a team of no more than nine people in order to keep the team manageable.
Teams must be real. Professor Hackman tells us that his experience with teams, including senior executive teams, shows that team members are often unclear about who is on the team. This is likely to be an even greater problem in virtual teams because team members don’t see each other. We suggest the a virtual team leader should create a list of team members, their roles on the team, and their skill sets and strengths at the outset of the team’s project. These details should be displayed prominently in a shared portal or, if a portal is not available, they should be made available in a shared location. An example of what I mean here can be seen at the portal of the Organizational Communication & Information Systems Division of the Academy of Management. At this portal, pictures and other relevant details of division members are rotated for display every time somebody visits the site (when you visit the site, hit the refresh button in your browser to see pictures being rotated).
Be who you are. Leaders should take advantage of their strengths and add members or bring outside help to compensate for what they lack. Virtual team leaders can take advantage of systems like IBM’s Beehive to determine who might have the skills that they lack (see our digest on IBM’s Beehive). Professor Hackman warns against leader’s trying to emulate someone that they are not or trying to follow any leadership model because there is no single right way to lead a team. Effective leaders are like jazz players who improvise constantly as they go along.
Focus on the team’s processes. According to Professor Hackman, many team leaders focus on enhancing individual performance rather than enhancing teamwork. Leaders can enhance the level of teamwork by conducting a launch meeting, midpoint reviews, and a debrief at the end. We have advocated this whenever we have suggested creation a team compact at the beginning of a team’s functioning and conducting After Action Reviews (AARs) during the team’s work. During the AARs, leaders should make sure that the norms that the team laid out in the team compact are followed. Professor Hackman shared an interesting point that in organizations with the best HR departments, teams don’t perform well. This is because such departments focus on individual performance rather than on preparing the organization to be great at teamwork.

Teams, including virtual teams, can be beneficial to organizations. Too often, we think that teams will somehow figure out where to go and how to get there (see related post). But, as Professor Hackman has laid out, they require active leadership to ensure success. In a virtual team, active leadership is even more critical. I am not sure how many team leaders are aware of that and are trained for successful team leadership.

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Lessons in Leadership and Other Interesting Items

Surinder Kahai — Mon, 04 May 2009 02:43:01 +0000

With the semester ending soon, things are awfully busy at the university. It’s been challenging to find time to sit down, reflect, and write new posts. Rather than not post anything, I thought I will share some of the interesting articles I read recently.

Today’s New York Times had a couple of articles that provide good lessons in leadership. One of the articles reproduces an interview with Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney. According to Mr. Iger, optimism is an important part of leadership. In another article, Gregory Spierkel, the CEO of Ingram Micro, shared lessons that have helped him rise during his career. I thought the most notable was the following: “be willing to take an assignment that is less glamorous than you would like, and … make something out of it. You need to surprise your boss or the people around you. Either turn a project around faster or leave it in better shape than it was. People will trust you and give you more responsibility and more interesting work.”

The Scientific American had an interesting coverage of research by Stanford scientists who found that humans have an innate intent to synchronize and cooperate with others. Interestingly, if we are made to engage in collective movement with others (such as march around campus in sync with others or sing the national anthem in unison), we feel more connected to them and trust them more. We may even be willing to incur direct costs to cooperate with others. I thought this this finding has tremendous implications for how we make members of virtual teams collaborate. For instance, as part of team building activities, members of a virtual team could be made to carry out a synchronized action (e.g., swim in unison) in a virtual world. According to the article, such an activity would promote pro-social behavior and trust. Team members would sacrifice self-interest for the good of the group.

Another Scientific American article discussed the use of virtual worlds by therapists to address real problems. For instance, virtual environments have been used to treat troubled teens by letting them role-play and see the impact of their behavior from another person’s point of view. I thought the article provided a good example of the Proteus effect, whereby seeing one’s behavior in a virtual world affects one’s attitudes and, hence, subsequent behavior in the real-world. Virtual world researchers at Stanford have provided us with numerous examples of this from their research (see our past digest where we have covered this).

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The Under-Estimated Importance of Friendships

Rebecca Jestice — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:57:15 +0000

We have said often and heard from others that maintaining positive social communication and relationships and creating opportunities for socialization are important for effective and satisfying work in virtual teams (e.g. see New Year Resolution: Be Happy ; Spread Your Virtual Smile, Really). Even though team members are often communicating over geographical distances, personal interaction and forming bonds with distant co-workers can help with conflict resolution and overall satisfaction with the team. Research is backing up the importance of friends to our health and well-being. A recent article in the New York Times discussed research that has shown that friends are often more important to survival rates of those facing health crises than family or a spouse. Friends not only helped in the face of crises, but seemed to contribute to overall well-being and longevity. Surprisingly, distance among friends does not lessen the positive benefits.

What does this mean for virtual teams? Although our best friends often aren’t the same people we work with, it is easy to conceive that the benefits of friendly and personal relationships would carry over to co-workers that we spend a considerable amount of time working with. One of the most enlightening studies described in the article consisted of taking university students to the base of a steep hill with weighted backpacks. The students that were shown the hill along with a friend estimated the steepness of the hill lower than those that looked at the hill alone. In virtual teams facing difficult and possibly high-pressured tasks, bonds among team members could make the tasks seem easier and reduce stress. Like friendships in our personal life, social connections in virtual teams might be an under-appreciated resource.

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What Leads to Effective Virtual Teamwork?

Surinder Kahai — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 19:54:31 +0000

The April 2009 issue of the Communications of the ACM, a highly respected journal, published an article by Jay F. Nunanamker, Bruce A. Reining, and Robert O. Briggs on ‘Principles for Effective Virtual Teamwork.’ The authors derived these principles from their decade long experience of working with hundreds of virtual teams. I present these principles and also provide links to our past posts that may help our readers put those principles to practice.

Realign reward structures for virtual teams. Because virtual teams often have few motivators, leaders need to find ways to make virtual work consistent with individual goals and reward good performance. See one of our past posts, ‘Motivation in Virtual Teams: Lessons from Virtual Words,’ which discusses how to motivate virtual work.

Find new ways to focus attention on task. Virtual teams often lack a focal point, such as a whiteboard in a conference room, to focus attention and enable them to establish and maintain a shared understanding about the task at hand. This often leads to distractions. Shared windows or objects visible to all can help increase focus. In ‘Wonderland: A Tool for Online Collaboration,’ we discuss the use of shared objects in a virtual world for building the feeling that one is in a meeting with others.

Design activities that cause people to get to know each other. Because of their geographic dispersion, members of virtual teams often don’t know each other well. Leaders should design explicit activities to overcome this lack of knowledge of each other and promote trust and team building. Icebreakers are a great way to help team members learn about each other. Another complementary way is to build reliability within the team early on during the team’s activities. See ‘Building Trust in Virtual Teams‘ for more ideas.

Build a virtual presence. Virtual team members often tend to forget who they are working with during a virtual meeting. Reminders are, therefore, necessary. Displaying a roster of currently active participants can help, as can a leader’s implicit reminders (e.g., So what do our team members from Bangalore think about this?). In asynchronous virtual work, frequent email reminders from all team members and RSS alerts of contributions by team members to a common repository/discussion board would help. Such continuous communication also signals to team members that the project is alive and active.

Agree on standards and terminology. Diversity among team members can give rise to conflicting expectations related to how the team will work together, including the language of communication. Setting up a team compact early on during a team’s life cycle is extremely helpful. A team compact provides guidelines and boundaries for behavior within a team and clarifies what is expected from each member.

Leverage anonymity when appropriate. Anonymity may be needed on occasion for open and frank communication within the team. It is typically useful for divergent activities, such as brainstorming, and for sensitive discussions in which ideas from anyone may be perceived stereotypically rather than on the basis of their merits.

Be more explicit. In the absence of non-verbal cues, virtual team communication can be misunderstood. To alleviate this concern, details have to be communicated. To make sure that relevant details are not left out, scripts may be developed for work that tends to repeat itself (e.g., proposal preparation). Every virtual interaction should include a clear statement of purpose and expectations (including deliverables expected) to prevent misunderstanding. See additional pointers related to this principle in our post ‘It’s Not What You Say, It’s What They Hear.’ The Leading Virtually team believes that being explicit extends to social interaction as well, as described in two of our posts ‘Spread Your Virtual Smile, Really‘ and ‘Email Etiquette: Is The Thank You Email Simply A Thank You?‘

Train teams to self-facilitate. An important requirement for this is that members of virtual teams should be trained about the challenges that virtual teams face and how they can overcome those challenges. Beyond this, formal training in how to facilitate group dynamics would be ideal. The Leading Virtually team has found the creation of a team compact and the use of After Action Reviews as very useful for enabling a team to facilitate itself.

Embed collaboration technology into everyday work. Ideally, the use of collaboration technology (e.g., blogs or wikis) should not be extra work over and beyond the everyday work processes. At one of the companies I advised, I suggested that status reports or activity plans that were normally sent via email be moved to individual blogs.

The article’s authors assumed that virtual teams have technology that works and that they have been trained on that. But in our experience, that assumption is often not tenable. Nevertheless, the article offers very good principles for leading virtual teams effectively.

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The Implications of Cloud Computing for Business Leaders and Teams

Betsy Carroll — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:47:53 +0000

It’s both good and bad that I can’t take my work home. These days my biggest limitation is technology. The work I do depends heavily on several expensive software packages. My employer has a policy disallowing the organization from paying for software for home computers, and these applications are too expensive for me to buy on my own dime. So often I’m unable to work from the comfort of my home or after work hours even when I’m inclined to do so.

Recently in my field there has been a lot of talk about cloud computing, a possible solution to my dilemma. Cloud computing is the increasingly common occurrence of accessing computing applications via the Internet. Cloud computing separates the software from the logical functions of the local hardware, so instead of needing computing power or specific applications locally (e.g. a specific desktop running a particular application in your office), major computing functions are housed on a server that people access from afar, usually via the Internet. Computing power and the requisite software are purchased or used as needed.

What are some examples of cloud computing? A good example is Google Docs, which allows the Leading Virtually team to store documents and collaborate entirely online and at the team’s convenience from any computer with Internet access and no use of our own storage capacity. The National Center for Education Statistics now allows users to perform basic statistical functions (e.g., regression analysis) on the website where users retrieve the data. MagCloud, a service from HP, offers all the computing necessary for magazine production as a utility available on the web (see a multimedia presentation from NY Times about this).

One of the big selling points for cloud computing is that it significantly reduces (if not removes) the capital investment companies have to make in the applications of interest. Rather than having to buy a system or a software, cloud computing offers a new model. A company might pay an access fee or membership, rather than buying entire systems. The promise is that many people and organizations will have access to important business technology that they might not have been able to afford before cloud computing.

While that business model is interesting, and many details of its sustainability are still in question, the interesting side to the Leading Virtually team is what this means for work teams and leaders. As cloud computing gains popularity, capital resources are less of a concern or barrier for teams to access technology. This means that the way people can use technology to enable their knowledge, ideas, and creativity will be even more crucial than it is now. Cloud computing, by democratizing computing, will take us one step further into being an economy in which your knowledge and talents, rather than access to technology, give you an edge. Who might this affect?

IT leaders will spend less time focusing on managing capital investments and more time focusing on effective and efficient use of technology
IT support will not need to focus as much on troubleshooting hardware, and can invest more in training people in the organization to take full advantage of applications.
Using technology to try out new ideas will be less risky – even if the idea fails, there will be little sunk capital costs.
Even physical space and interaction might change. For example, I am currently chained to my computer, so to speak, because of specific applications I use regularly. But I work with people throughout the organization. If my applications were accessed through cloud computing, I could work in many physical spaces other than my office. This could enhance our ability to collaborate both face-to-face (by accessing work together on a computer in one office) and virtually.
Virtual teams may be formed more often and in more organizations because cloud computing will give teams the tools they need to collaborate effectively and at a reduced cost to the organization.

Workers may see an increase in flexibility of work hours and opportunities for remote work.

A potential drawback is that cloud computing may continue to blur the distinction between work and non-work time which began with communication technologies like email and work cell phones. As workers became “reachable” all the time, expectations to work outside of regular work hours have increased. Cloud computing could increase this effect. Where previously I could only perform certain work functions at my office computer, cloud computing might make it possible for me to perform those functions from home, or vacation, or anywhere. This means that leaders must also be responsible and carefully consider what they expect of their work teams. Just because work can be accessed and done doesn’t mean that every hour of the day is fair game for work. People need and often value their down time.

It seems quite likely that cloud computing is going to become more widespread, and that it will be a form of disruptive technology – uprooting old ways of doing things for new. Disruptive technology tends to breathe new life into some people and businesses while making others obsolete. IT leaders and workers alike should take note of cloud computing, and start thinking of how it can open up new possibilities for the work they do.

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