Three Steps to Making Virtual Teams Work
Working as a team when your members are distributed across town—or around the world—actually is harder than people expect, says a new article in the Harvard Business Review.
“A First-Time Managers’ Guide to Leading Virtual Teams” notes that working far from our teammates hurts both our sense of shared identity and our shared context. The former triggers a feeling of “us vs. them,” and the latter hurts our “transactive memory,” the shared knowledge base that tells us who in the team knows what and who does what—a key element in keeping teams efficient.
So what’s the leader of a distributed team to do?
First: don’t panic. Remind your team that collaboration isn’t magic, but it does take some effort to achieve.
Second: focus on your shared goal. Make sure your goal is “clear, challenging, and consequential.”
And third: face the problem head-on. Talk with your team about how to overcome the negative effects that a lack of shared identity and shared context can have.
--Cheryl Rosen