Recent Commonwealth Club mtg had speakers talking about crisis and opportunity in today’s climate.  Useful for sharing with your teams and other leaders.  Watch it here. Thanks to David Sibbert for sharing this.

A recent post at Richard Florida’s Creative Class focused on the virtual workplace.  My clients are continually working to find ways to create, organize, and lead distributed teams.  This post offers an insight the leaders need to consider–unfortunately all are not as effective working remotely or “at home”

Ironically, the most effective telecommuters and home-based workers are those who are naturally great at connecting with people and intuitive, good communicators. This is one of the messages in Kate Lister and Tom Harnish’s new book, Undress for Success: The Naked Truth About Making Money at Home (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). Introverts tend to be less successful working from home.  Another key message is that slackers need not apply — successful home-based workers tend to be self-starters, highly motivated, and dedicated.

APPLICATIONS

• Those that are effective in groups are also the same ones that work well remotely.
• We do not always have the luxury to select who’s on the team; to the extent possible, select those with distributed team experience and the motivation to make the adjustments needed for a distributed teams to work.
• Create a virtual office for the team and use it as “the team’s office”; some teams actually stay on-line together in these “virtual offices” even though they are located in multiple global locations.

Recent post from Harvard had three key items for teams  that are facing changes:

Team-building exercises can be a helpful way to regroup after layoffs or restructuring. Create a productive exercise for your team with these three tips:
1. Acknowledge tough times. Recognize the difficulties but don’t let things devolve into a gripe session. Instead, refocus on the path ahead.
2. Keep it relevant. The best exercises involve real-world problems, not just fun activities. Have your team solve an immediate or pressing business issue and be sure they can build on what they’ve learned when they return to work.
3. Customize the program to your team. Don’t use an off-the-shelf model for your team-building activity. Use an approach that fits your company and team culture.

APPLICATION (for Project-based Work (PBW) Teams):

For distributed teams, also include “touching base” with each team member virtually with web cams. Focus  not just on the team’s work but also on:

• how the individual is coping
• support for innovative ideas and approaches
• what’s working
• what you can do as a leader to enhance their work environment
• future PBW that may be appealing to the member’s skills, experience, and aspirations

More and more teams are distributed and have to conduct meetings, negotiations, and other work remotely and virtually.  Costs and other economic factors are increasing the number of us who work this way. For example, the graphic below shows where Cisco’s WebEx services were being used on April 28, 2009–a global collaboration cloud.

A variety of tools are available to support such collaboration.  Robin Good provides a comprehensive mindmap of collaboration tools, developed with crowd sourcing.  A Google search provides even more.  Recently, I talked with friends who work for two, different global technology companies.  One rarely travels, the other is in a different country each week.  From those conversations, here are some tips for leading distributed teams:

• schedule & conduct every meeting, even short discussions, with one person on a web platform (such as , HP Virtual Room,  Cisco WebEx, Microsoft LiveMeeting, or similar tools).  Even if you do not need it every time, it is ready and part of your leader tool kit.
• treat the meeting web site as if the team is in your office–they are, just virtually; share as if you were in your office
• everyone on the meeting logs in and has ability to lead and share in real time
• use the white board for brainstorming, notes, etc.
• give everyone the “leader’s pass code”; then if leader is detained on another call or can’t come at last minute, someone else can open the meeting and lead it
• use agendas as a guide → adjust immediately at beginning of meeting if new developments have occurred that change priorities of what needs to be discussed
• assume nothing and be as clear as possible about who needs to be in the meeting and why