An After Action Review (AAR) is a simple but effective tool for improving team processes. It should be conducted regularly to create a smoothly running team that learns from its experience. You may also conduct an AAR for any occurrence within the team that you want to investigate and improve. Targets of the reviews might include protocols, decisions, work processes,… Read more →
Fittingly, “Leading Virtually” has been operating as a virtual team over the past several weeks. I am currently in New York City, while each of the other team members are located in various parts of New York State and Pennsylvania. The whole team has not had a chance to get together for some time as everyone works on their own… Read more →
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… Read more →
The other day I found a link to a book review on Twitter. The book is called Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive. It provides summaries of research about persuasion and how to be successfully persuasive. One study in particular had me thinking about an approach to change and innovation that I am very interested in. The… Read more →
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… Read more →
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… Read more →
The Leading Virtually team regards virtual collaboration technology as a new wave of options for human interaction. Much like the advent of the Internet changed the way we communicate and interact, our growing ability to connect in virtual worlds has a similar potential to drive social change. In our modern world it’s easy to forget that at other times in human… Read more →
The Leading Virtually blog contains many articles that virtual team leaders are likely to find useful for effective team performance. But the articles are arranged chronologically, with the most recent ones appearing first. We believe that our readers would benefit if we took our blog posts and organized them on the basis of issues that virtual teams face during different… Read more →
The Leading Virtually blog contains many articles that virtual team leaders are likely to find useful for effective team performance. In this page, we have taken our blog posts and organized them on the basis of issues that virtual teams face during different stages of their lifecyle. Specifically, we describe the different stages of a virtual teams lifecycle and, for… Read more →
Cost cutting and doing more with less is in the air. Rarely does a day go by when you don’t face pressures yourself to do more with less or hear something similar from others. At the beginning of the week, WSJ had two articles on how businesses are trying to improve productivity or manage with less (Stores count seconds to… Read more →