Broadly speaking, a team compact is a document that: Establishes guidelines and boundaries for behavior within a team. Clarifies what’s expected of each member at different stages of the team’s task or project. Determines a framework for interactions in the present as well as future time. A team compact is similar to the team charter that project managers create for… 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 →
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 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 →
A project leader recently asked me how to promote cooperation among members of his virtual team who are at different locations. This is a common issue that virtual team leaders struggle with. Virtual teams often consist of subgroups of team members located in separate locations. This division of team members can give rise to social categorization within the team (i.e., those who… Read more →
Every once in a while, you come across something that defies the conventional wisdom that you need face-to-face contact to build strong social relationships (see a recent article that relies on this wisdom). A New York Times article “After Blogger’s Plane Crash, Virtual Becomes Personal” that was published on September 6, 2008 is one such item. In this post, I… Read more →
My fellow bloggers and I have made many recommendations on this blog about how to improve the functioning of virtual teams. When we recently presented these recommendations to an audience, we were told that it would be useful if we could take some of the most critical recommendations and frame them in a way that makes it easier for someone… Read more →
The LeadingVirtually.com team has launched a new section on “Virtual Team Tools” that features various useful tools that can help you lead your virtual team effectively. Our research-based virtual team tools have been used successfully by a large number of distributed teams and have proved to be invaluable in smooth virtual team operations. You can access these tools by clicking… Read more →