Tips For Successful Leadership In A Virtual World
What kind of challenges do you face with leadership in a virtual world? Let’s say that you are a leader in a global organization. You work in New York but have direct reports in China, Japan, Brazil, Germany, England, Turkey and South Africa. They each have their own direct reports locally. You are responsible for national results. Before you even begin your building a virtual team, here are a few of the challenges.
• Travel: How often are you going to have to fly around the country to meet your direct reports?
• Relationships: How will you get to know them? How will you build rapport? How will you develop small talk about their personal interests?
• Performance: How will you assess what kind of job they are doing? How will you evaluate their leadership skills? Their development of staff? Their results? When and how will you actually observe their performance?
• Communication: How will you keep your direct reports updated? So much happens in a day; how will you have time to keep them in the loop?
• Delegation: You don’t see them. How will you know who is capable of doing what? How will you track their deadlines?
• Teambuilding: How can you build a strong team when they’ve never even met?
• Email: How will you use email effectively to manage your team?
• Conflict: With people so dispersed, how will you even know when you have a conflict with a direct report? Or when they have a conflict with each other?
• Promotion: How do you evaluate when someone is ready for promotion? Conversely, how do you keep from being “snowed”? How do you know when it’s time to eliminate a poor performer?
• Teleconferencing: When will you have time for longer, boring teleconferences?
• Walking the talk: In the old days, we did management by walking around. We showed people what we wanted by our own actions and body language. We “walked the floor.” How will your direct reports observe you? See your style? How can you “model” if you don’t see people?
These are only a few of the challenges of leadership in a virtual world in today’s new business environment. The old skills of yesterday are no longer sufficient. Remember when you could actually walk down the halls and “drop in” on your direct reports? You could observe how they ran meetings, see them with direct reports, or even sit in on conversations. When completing performance evaluations, you could list examples of things you personally observed. You could look into their offices and see more organization would be helpful. You could see family photos or awards, and be prompted to ask about the kids or favorite hobbies. They dropped into your office or you went to lunch together to build a relationship. Remember all that?
Management seemed more straightforward then.
Well, those days are gone.
WELCOME TO YOUR LEADERSHIP IN A VIRTUAL WORLD!
WELCOME TO VIRTUAL TEAMS!!!
