Virtual teams are a fact of life in an era where we have more ways than ever to collaborate. But how do they differ from other teams and how can we make the most of them?
The chances are that, as a leader, you’ll be leading a team.
These days, though, that might mean many different things besides heading up a traditional department or functional team that works in an office five days a week.
Our teams may be associated with a specific project or mission, with team members drawn from a range of functions. They could be dynamic, with leadership and membership shifting and changing as we respond to changing business needs.
They might be entirely virtual or remote or, at the very least, have to meet the challenge of hybrid working.
Writing in Harvard Business Review, Martine Haas and Mark Mortensen introduce the idea that, as collaboration becomes more complex, we might best describe teams as 4-D: diverse, dispersed, digital and dynamic
It’s a description that might be made for a world where teams are as likely to be virtual as fixed in a particular location.
In many ways, virtual teams these days are simply a fact of life, and the principles relating to how they are formed, their composition and positive dynamics are the same as for any other team.
They also, however, bring specific and different leadership challenges.
In their book, Virtual Teams, Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps, define a virtual team as one that “works across space, time and organisational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication technologies”.
The book also offers a three-part framework to help us understand and lead teams virtually.
The framework consists of three components — people, purpose and links — each of which splits into three sub-components that they call virtual team principles:
As with all teams, Lipnack and Stamps see people as the most important element of virtual teams too. Purpose is the glue that holds people together. The final component, links, provides the means of communication that allows virtual teams to operate co-operatively, interact across boundaries and develop trusting relationships.
People
It’s not always the case, but members of virtual teams might be selected for their specific expertise. That means they may be more independent than in other teams, and share leadership when that expertise is required.
We need, therefore, to acknowledge that virtual teams tend to operate at different levels — individual and team — and often interact with other, completely separate, teams too. In leadership terms, this all needs to be integrated.
Purpose
A great advantage of virtual teams is that they are not constrained by physical boundaries or location. But that also makes purpose and clear goals even more important to bring and keep people together.
To perform effectively, virtual teams must formulate clear, co-operative goals to help them work together on interdependent tasks. These goals connect to overall purpose and the concrete results we see when a virtual team is successful.
Links
For virtual teams to work, they need the right tech, and Lipnack and Stamps suggest a range of media to underpin effective communication.
However, the tech is a tool for, rather than a solution to, the tricky issue of how virtual teams establish and maintain their links.
To do this across organisations and cultures, and especially without the additional cues we can take advantage of when meeting face to face, virtual teams need especially high levels of trust and trusting relationships. As leaders, we need to find ways to enable those relationships and to be especially intentional about maintaining them.
Haas and Mortensen remind us that, whatever teams have been formed to do, and however they operate, it’s more important than ever to provide the right enabling conditions that apply to all teams: “a compelling direction, a strong structure, and a supportive context”.
In particular, they need a shared mindset that will help them to overcome the challenges of navigating that 4-D environment.
Because of their distinctive nature, 4-D teams can perceive themselves as several sub-groups rather than a single cohesive team, and we’re likely to view our own sub-group more positively than others. Working digitally also means that we don’t have the benefit of the nonverbal and contextual cues we can rely on when we meet in person.
Shared mindset among team members can be fostered by actively establishing a common identity and common understanding. We need to make sure that each sub-group feels valued for its contribution to overall goals.
And “structured unstructured time” — time allocated to talk about things not directly related to the task at hand — can also build bridges.
For example, a few minutes of social chat at the beginning of a Zoom call can make all the difference, especially if team members have never met in person.
We need to find every opportunity to establish that common ground and to encourage everyone to see how team membership means that, because of our compelling direction, we have more in common that we might think.
Whether our team is entirely virtual or hybrid, we’d be well advised to bear these principles and tips in mind when bringing together and leading teams where members have limited – or no – opportunities for interaction in person.
Virtual and hybrid teams are here to stay, so the sooner we can master the art of leading them, the better.
Explain what Martine Haas and Mark Mortensen mean by 4-D teams.
Outline Lipnack and Stamps’s three principles for leading virtual teams.
Consider the virtual, remote or hybrid challenges you may have with your team. Identify two things you might to boost team coherence and performance.