Webinar On Team Building Strategies Featuring Expert Yael Zofi
Check out this webinar on team building strategies for the virtual project team featuring author, consultant and virtual management expert, Yael Zofi.
Yael’s Highlights For Team Building Strategies From The Webinar:
Clip 1 (4:14-4:45)
That’s part of the challenge, the technology piece and the human piece and combining the two of them in this virtual environment. So making sure we have the technology to work. Sometimes the technology is more advanced than the human component but my work and my focus has been and my book “A Manager’s Guide To Virtual Teams” is about how to manage virtual teams despite time, distance, and space and using team building strategies to make sure the human connection stays alive as we advance the technological connections. We need to sort of align both together.
Clip 2 (5:05- 5:20)
We need to make sure that the good parts of establishing connections, human connections, building relationships and working together even though we are physically apart, just like we are doing right now “hello everyone” , is doable and possible and still gets done.
Clip 3 (13:20-14:00)
One of the concepts, I started writing about this back in 1999, is that we are all moving from agent of change to becoming an agent of connection. Came out first in ‘99 and then I spent some time, I write about it a little bit in my current book, the concept of agent of connection as a leader is that modern 21st century leadership is a shared leadership. In order for virtual teams to be successful, leadership needs to be a shared approach. There are seven dimensions of leadership and the combination of those dimensions needs to be incorporated for a team.
Clip 4 (14:02-14:35)
Virtual project team is not like a traditional team. It’s a different kind of team and it’s tough for a lot of my clients to understand that. It’s kind of like a team operating at a different level; the team is at different atmosphere, like driving in space instead of driving on a highway. So some of these challenges and stages of development are a little bit different in a virtual environment, one of the team building strategies, I refer to them as setup, follow through, and refresh. Refresh happens all the time because people are coming in and coming out and it is an amoeba kind of team that is constant revolving and evolving.
Clip 5 (14:38-17:47)
In the virtual environment, conflict normally starts as a misunderstanding. Conflict could be “I sent Claire an email and she misunderstands what I said, and she responds, and it becomes a little bit of an email war and then it becomes a misunderstanding that leads to that conflict. Then If you add a cross cultural factor or the fact that we have different time zones and the back and forth and then I CC the boss and then it becomes a whole other scenario.
Throughout my work and my research with virtual project teams, there are four types of virtual conflicts that come up again and again.
The first is performance conflict which is “what am I supposed to perform, what am I supposed to do?” Sometimes when we work with the hives, the regionals, or hybrid teams, a lot of my work is done with hybrid teams and they got their own challenges because they are sort of trying to be virtual but they are not or they are partial. So the performance conflict is a challenge because people might be working under an assumption reporting to one manager but really they are performance. That is one kind of conflict and there are all kinds of solutions and strategies to handle those.
The second that comes up a lot in virtual project teams from my research is identity. Like belongingness. If you think about it and talk about human connection; the first rule of connection is where do I belong. In the virtual environment, particularly when I work with teams in India and other parts other world, it could even be across the United States, do I belong to my local manager or do I belong to this other virtual team working on this new technical project or whatever it is. So the conflict that is there is the belongingness, identity conflict.
The third one is data. We get data overload. How many emails do you get a day? I’m about to go on vacation next week so I’ve spent the last three days trying to clean emails and just overload of data. So what should I focus on first is one of the biggest conflicts in the virtual environment, data conflict.
The last one, the fourth one, is social because we don’t have, especially for those might be working at home or remote locations. The social is who is on my team and what are they like and what are their personalities. One of the things when I coach virtual teams about running their virtual meetings; Wayne, I am going to read “Meetings Sucks” because I sometimes use some other curse words to say that are probably not appropriate for this. Meetings are the gathering space, however they are not efficiently run in a regular environment then in the virtual environment they are even sometimes more challenging. So the thing that I often recommend to managers in terms of social conflict is having some time in the meeting to allow for some socialization for the team.
Higher performing virtual teams have eight characteristics. One of them is they have some fun. They engage, as David would love that word as that is one of your keyword, in a social component. It doesn’t matter if they are not in the same room but they have some creative stuff; through food and through a bunch of creative stuff. Those are the four.
