Term Paper on "Security and Privacy on the Internet"

Term Paper 6 pages (1800 words) Sources: 4 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Making Virtual Teams Work

Introduction

Creating virtual work teams nationally or even globally versus those that

are centralized requires two fundamentally different organizational

strategies, with each requiring a fundamentally different skill sets on the

part of managers and their staffs. The employees that comprise virtual

work teams need to have higher than average levels of initiative,

resourcefulness, ability to keep themselves moving towards goals,

organized, and able to manage time effectively. Kerber and Buono (2004) in

their research summarized in the article Leadership Challenges in Global

Virtual Teams: Lessons from the Field provide an excellent analysis of what

it takes to create strong virtual work teams, and one of the most important

attributes is the level of experience and maturity of team members when

they are located across a broad geographic region. Combs and Peacoke

(2007) provide a series of pragmatic insights into the management of

virtual teams including the development of team etiquette and ground rules

for making teams spread across broad geographies work efficiently. When

the research accumulated and analyzed for this paper is organized into a

framework, the role of the manager for virtual teams emerges as more of a

facilitator and coach than autocrat. The role of process and

communications enabler, a distance learning coach if you will, is what best

practices in managing virtual teams is all about. Of all process areas

that causes many virtual teams to fail is alack of focus on knowledge

transfer and the accumulated learning through the entire organization.

Conversely, best practices in managing virtual team has more to do enabling

and fostering a high level of knowledge sharing, and group-level learning

as if these processes can get integrated into virtual teams they will

become highly effective at synthesizing information and quickly reacting to

it. This paper analyzes the characteristics of successful distance

managers and the strategies they use to manage virtual teams.

Characteristics of Successful Distance Managers

The unique set of skills required to make a virtual team effective begins

with a strong focus on creating credibility for the remote team, who are

rarely seen together physically in one location. Kerber and Buono (2004)

juxtapose the heightened need to create credibility for virtual teams

relative to the more steady and gradual approach to creating credibility

for managers of teams that are collocated. Creating and sustaining trust

and credibility form the foundation of the successful virtual work team of

training professionals in any organization. This credibility needs to be

fostered while at the same time fostering the growth of processes necessary

for learning and ongoing thought leadership emanating from the virtual

team.

Once the manager of a virtual team has created that foundation of trust and

credibility throughout the organization by quickly producing results, the

team needs to begin contributing to more strategic and longer-range

projects, despite being virtual. These strategic projects require that

each of the team members fulfill the tactical requirements of their job yet

not get consumed with them full-time. This can be difficult when many

tactical and often urgent, activities in the regional offices where they

were located dominate their time. Managing remote team members to stay

focused on the strategic projects surrounding training took significant

skill and the ability to clearly show the outcomes of achievement of the

many tasks at hand. The manager of the virtual work team has to find

innovative approaches to keep a team focused on strategic priorities and

synchronize the team's efforts to the attainment of performance goal or

objective. Attaining strategic goals as a virtual team creates even greater

levels of credibility and establishes a team as a respected contributor to

any organization.

Yet to get to this level of performance, the manager of the virtual work

team has to become more aggressive and focused than his counterpart

managers who had collocated teams. To manage performance, the virtual team

manager has to create structures and routines that could compensate for the

lack of continual in-person contact while pushing up the level of

accountability and expectations to the virtual team members. Second, the

virtual team manager has to make sure these leadership functions and values

were distributed to each team member, as Bell and Kozlowski (2002). There

needs to be a very clear definition of roles in virtual teams to alleviate

any confusion, conflict or wasted effort.

To accomplish these two critical leadership steps, the virtual team manager

has to first bring together in person the virtual team members to give

everyone a chance to first meet each other, and second, to provide an

opportunity for relationships to get formed. The best virtual teams invest

in these in-person activities regularly to strengthen the bonds between

team members and further clarify and strengthen each contributor's unique

role as part of the virtual team. Third, getting together in person also

provides an opportunity for both the asynchronous and synchronous forms of

communication, all of them electronic, to be planned for, initiated and put

in place. Fourth, conference calling times need to be defined for a

maximum of 90 minutes every other week, in addition to one-on-one telephone

meetings between the leader and each team member, evaluation of progress

towards objectives, measures of client satisfaction, quarterly reports of

departmental business accomplishments, performance appraisals completed on

time and personal development plans.

Given the significant amount of responsibility each of the virtual team

members has for strategic projects and their many project and individual

contribution goals, the role of the virtual team manager quickly needs to

become one of leading by example when it comes attitude, work ethic and the

passion for achievement. In virtual team leaders need to be the "true

north" of attitude, achievement and direction towards objectives, including

being a model of how to be passionate about their work and its contribution

to the broader company organizations. A leader must be the emotional

foundation of strength for a virtual team; to be dispassionate is to fail

in the role of virtual team member. In fact the best performing virtual

teams demand a manager who exceeds the team members' expectations for their

commitment, attitude and focus on results, according to Mindell (1993).

Ultimately the success or failure of any virtual team rests with the

manager and their ability to get experienced team members to consistently

deliver above-average performance and make greater than normal levels of

contributions. Managing a virtual team must center on exceptional results

and the delivery of performance that seasoned and exceptional team members

are capable of requires nothing less than a leader with total commitment

and passion for the ole and vision of the team they manage.

Keeping Virtual Team Members Engaged Alleviates Many Problems Early

Analysis by Kerber and Buono (2004) also point to the need to keep virtual

team members focused on their strategic priorities first, and not become

involved in the many tactical and often unrelated tasks associated with the

departments who happen to be in their regional office where they work.

Keeping business development professionals focused is especially difficult

from a distance due to their skill set being easily used in pre-sales,

sales, and post-sales activities. One could easily see a sales person

getting a chance to bring in a senior manager or senior business

development executive for a new product introduction, and this pattern

would just increase if the customer engagement went well. Staying focused

on their priorities takes maturity and initiative on the part of the

virtual team members.

Another critical area for virtual team members' success is the ability to

quickly see how their results not only underscore their values as

individual contributors, yet also giving them recognition as part of the

global effort their teams are responsible for achieving. Often virtual

teams have highly structured set of deliverables, which require a high

level of cooperation and collaboration between both other virtual team

members and collocated teams in headquarters to accomplish the tasks and

objectives necessary to complete the strategic objectives. Virtual team

members need to be quite skilled in project management to be able to

coordinate and collaborate across both virtual teams and collocated teams

in the headquarters locations as well.

Technology Implications of Virtual Teams

There are literally thousands of electronic tools and applications

available for enabling virtual teams to track progress towards their shared

goals and objectives. What many researchers have found however that many

of the virtual teams don't need so many tools and technologies as much as

they need a clear understanding of the processes that are needed for

ensuring a high level of communication, and therefore trust, being created

as a result.

Technologies as simple as e-mail to as complex as Intranet sites and

portals pervade virtual teams, yet their effectiveness in many companies is

limited to content management instead of synchronizing strategies that lead

to goals be attained. That's because the underlying processes necessary

for teams to accomplish their goals are not defined prior to intensive

levels of technologies being applied to virtual teams. What needs to

happen instead is a re-definition, a business process management… READ MORE

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