As a virtual leader, what measures can you take?

We have shadowed hundreds of international virtual meetings in a wide variety of for-profit and non-profit organizations. While experience demonstrates that every team is unique, many virtual teams still share similar challenges and establish similar behaviors in facing these challenges.

@ virtual-teamwork.com, we have had the privilege of observing some of the best virtual team practices in the world, and unfortunately, some of the least effective as well…

• If you are a virtual leader, can you identify observed virtual behaviors that represent expensive inefficiencies in the organization?
• When you think about these ineffective virtual behaviors being repeated day in and day out in your organization worldwide, isn’t there a more effective way to spend our precious time and financial resources?
• What would your leadership be like if you could increase the effect and efficiency of those virtual teams even by a few percentage points – can you imagine the value?

While our approach always focuses on the positive, we have witnessed many ‘classic’ ineffective virtual practices by shadowing real global virtual teams. We fear you have seen these behaviors in action too. Many of these behaviors seem to continue as if  ‘on automatic,’ even when leaders and team members realize that interactions could be much more effective, efficient, and intense.

We can support you in bringing about change in unproductive virtual behaviors.

Is now the time to lead change in your digital collaboration culture?

Familiar with the symptoms?

@ virtual-teamwork.com, we have seen it many times in action. Do you recognize any of these ‘classic’ ineffective patterns:

• Web conferences are called, and some members have no idea why they have been invited to attend
• A few voices dominate the live-online meeting, so the other members settle back and start answering emails
• Someone says, ‘Can you repeat that? My microphone was on mute,’ and nobody realizes that mute microphones have nothing to do with the ability to listen
• Virtual meetings are held to ‘share information’ instead of engaging in a team discussion on what that information actually means in relation to the strategic goals of the department or organization
• Team members are very positive, agreeable, and polite about everything in a meeting; issues remain largely ‘unchallenged’ or ‘undiscussed’
• Web conferences go on like telephone conversations without anybody using any available interactive markup tools (polling, whiteboards, text chat), webcams, and breakout room discussions
• Performance feedback is not real, just a lot of ‘Great job! Linda’ and ‘Nice work! Chenguang’

Of course, we are only scratching the surface here, and many more ineffective patterns prevent organizations from fully exploiting their strategic potential. In addition to causing delays in digital transformation, the almost invisible costs to any organization are enormous.

The good news: there are many interventions that you can deploy as a digital leader to change your teams’ culture.  Many of the positive effects that you may bring about are also contagious; what you do in your remote team to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your virtual interactions is also noticed and adopted by other teams in the organization. Once they have witnessed a different way of working, teams learn to expect a more dynamic, effective, and rewarding virtual teamwork experience as a matter of course.

Moving towards a more effective and efficient future state of being…

When you have decided that you need to influence your virtual team to improve and intensify your virtual interactions, you can make many choices about how you want to intervene. We can serve as productive partners in thinking about interventions that make the most sense for your particular situation. Every team is unique so there are no easy, prefab solutions. Some elements that could be appropriate might be interventions like:

• individual virtual leadership training/coaching
• virtual leadership training/coaching involving you and your peer virtual leaders in the organization and other leadership stakeholders
• virtual teamwork training/coaching involving you together with your team
• virtual teamwork training/coaching for your team
• virtual team meeting shadowing and feedback rounds (peer-to-peer, leader-to-team, external expert-to-team, external expert-to-team lead)
• virtual teamwork training/coaching for your team, then follow up coaching/shadowing to make sure inputs can be implemented in real life
• virtual leadership training programs for the entire organization to ensure consistency and align perfectly with overriding strategic goals and unique organizational culture

@ virtual-teamwork.com, we have gained a wide variety of hands-on experience in successfully implementing customized programs incorporating these elements with many global organizations. We know that to build successful programs that really support you best, we need to co-create such a program with you. We need to engage you to fully understand your organization’s digital vision and overriding strategic goals. We need to comprehend your specific needs, team culture and overriding organizational goals. We need to agree on concrete, measurable outcomes that will serve as success indicators for any program we design and implement with you.

Take a look at what the process could look like and get ready to intensify your virtual interactions!