Keeping Your Virtual Team Connected by Balancing Technology Management and Leadership
What are some of the challenges of balancing technology management and leadership? Today’s knowledge workers can work productively anywhere, thanks to mobile devices, fast network access and online collaboration tools. Working remotely is quickly becoming the norm, and in this challenging business environment a growing number of new companies now provide virtual assistance (virtualworkteam.com), virtual meetings (buzzumi.com), and various virtual collaboration tools have emerged to aid with virtual teams project management. Global marketplaces for virtual teams and distance team members, vendors and freelancers, such as oDesk, Guru, Elance are becoming more widely used. Many companies now develop technologies and systems for building online reputation, trust, conflict resolution and for connecting team members to operate remotely and globally.
Technology is a great enabler that helps us create efficiencies and fosters quick decision-making. But the human connection is what drives business success and it’s difficult to achieve it without developing relationship with virtual teammates.
How do we help to enable the human connection while also balancing technology management and leadership? That’s the question that has occupied my mind for the last two decades, and it is urgent now more than ever. My book has been recently featured on CNBC Bullish on Books where I identified the four core principles of virtual team success and explained how to keep remote team members organized, communicative, and productive without ongoing face-to-face interactions.
These four principles are:
1. Ensuring effective communication processes
2. Creating accountability and trust mechanisms
3. Establishing procedures to manage conflict
4. Developing work systems to get deliverables out the door
Today, you may be like many virtual managers, with a team that has been working together for a long period of time and largely functions on automatic pilot. Some of these managers may hope that results will improve on their own (as if producing the same actions produces miracles), while others may struggle to incorporate the increasing demands of our precarious world into already-strained professional relationships.
As a virtual teams project management leader, please encourage your team members to use their energies to develop stronger human connections with each other and with you. And don’t forget, if they see these items personified in your actions and attitudes, you will get the results and the relationships you need to ensure that your virtual team is performing at optimum levels, in spite of geography and remote connectivity. These tips for balancing technology management and leadership are sure to help your virtual team.
