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Trevor Manning Consultancy
Achieving  Business results 
through Real-World Training 
and Leadership Development

Are Virtual Teams virtually failing

11/24/2014

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Sitting at a beachside café this week I was astounded to notice the number of people who were more engaged on their phones, than with the living, breathing people in front of them. No-one was actually talking on their phones – most were engaged in the non-real time world of email, playing games or posting updates on social media. Robots now train our kids to read and we can create an avatar to represent ourselves in virtual reality. Arguably sites like Facebook allow us to create a version of ourselves that we want to be, rather than the reality of who we truly are.

In management, few of us have our team members sitting in the same room, yet Lipnack and Stamps, authors of Virtual Teams, point to research that shows people are not likely to collaborate if more than 50 foot apart. Without taking active steps to run these teams differently, they are doomed to failure.

Four key steps that will give virtual teams a chance of success are:

1. Communicate a clear and compelling goal, ideally in a face-to-face kick-off meeting. Teams need purpose, and a reason to care, otherwise they will merely comply to the minimum requirements rather than committing to the business outcomes, required by the team.

2. Confirm the desired deliverables required by the customer (internal or external), rather than those defined by the team itself, and measure the results by those standards (key performance indicators).

3. Agree when and how to meet in this virtual world, and provide regular progress updates on a shared medium, such as a collaboration website.

4. Be human! Successful teams work well when all team members are treated as unique human beings and not just as project resources. Having fun doing the job and celebrating success are all part of creating a motivating environment for teams to excel.

Virtual teams are here to stay! Being a good leader, requires us to adapt to the environment, not the other way around.

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Can we really make objective decisions?

11/2/2014

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I have just travelled to America, from Australia  to deliver my next management training courses. It occurred to me that were I travelling from Africa, my entry experience could have been very different. Ebola is high on everyone’s minds, who travel internationally. It is a serious and highly contagious disease. Some countries have banned all travel from affected countries, other have strict quarantine measures in place. I am quite sure that were I to have sat next to someone from Sierra Leone, I would have had concerns, irrespective of the real odds of that person having had contact with the disease and how unlikely it would be transferred to me. As humans, we react to risks in emotional, not rational ways.

Living in Australia, some people abroad almost treat me as a trepid explorer, for the daily risks they assume I encounter - giant sharks, venomous snakes, poisonous spiders, deadly jelly fish…the list goes on.  Statistically, I am far more likely to be killed by a very friendly, non-threatening fellow driver on the roads, or due to a myriad of very well-known diseases that affect us all, but facts and statistics related to the infinitely small risk of encountering a big, scary event, give us no comfort.

In management, it is no different. Despite all our analytical tools for risk assessment and objective decision-making, we make decisions based on fear and uncertainty. The New York Times (Tues, 4 Nov 2014)  refers to an article written in The New England Journal of Medicine, by Dr Lisa Rosenbaum, regarding asbestos in schools. “It is widely believed that better education will keep them (parents) from behaving irrationally, but people did not respond as expected. Research by Dan Kahan, who heads the cultural Cognition Project at Yale University, indicates that people pick and choose evidence that re-enforces their sense of who they are and the groups they belong in.”

So what do we do about it? Just being aware that we are not as objective as we like to think, will help with our decision-making and make us more open to considering a broader range of alternative views and outcomes. In “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel  Kahneman, he presents very compelling proof for why our gut instinct is sometimes so good, and also why its so dangerous to completely rely on it.  

To make good decisions, we should pay attention to our “gut reaction” but sometimes deliberately over-ride it, knowing that it overreacts to scary sounding outcomes, however unlikely.

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    Author

    TMC Global has been established to provide real-world training and consultancy in wireless technology and technical management. 

    Its founder, Trevor Manning is passionate about people development and has developed training courses and business offerings that combine theory and practice to make a real difference in the workplace. 


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