Chapter 8 - 3D Leadership in virtual teams

Question 1

What 11 characteristics make for a prototypical, high-performing team leader? (characteristics of a great virtual team leader)

Answer 1

1. Be proactive, organized, and able to make trade-offs.
2. Have the skill to select the right mix of people.
3. Be flexible, understand different cultures, and overcome language barriers and misunderstandings.
4. Meet deadlines, set expectations for team members, conduct resource, and budget planning, and develop new talent.
5. Motivate others, maintain a positive attitude, and resolve conflicts fairly.
6. Build a special relationship with each member, share rewards, and credit, and engage in small acts of kindness with team members.
7. Be realistic about timelines, make priorities clear to everyone, and have a high level of technical expertise.
8. Able to identify strong leads in host countries, and get the right skill set on team.
9. Work with stakeholders and keep them informed (relationship management)
10. Be a good knowledge-sharing role model.
11. Apply 3D Team Leadership principles.

Question 2

*What are the 4 best practices for leading the “I’s” in global virtual teams?

Answer 2

1. Find ways to connect with individual team members by building relationships. Do not focus solely on task-related items.
2. Make a routine of conducting regular check-ins with each individual member through e-mail, phone call, or even a text message, this reduces feelings of distance and disconnectedness that members commonly experience in virtual teams. This helps establish rapport.
3. Set expectations must be similar in content across members. Firstly, mismatched expectations from different members can generally lead to motivational problems, dissatisfaction and lower individual performance on a team. Secondly constructing similar expectations can help build shared norms and reinforce a team’s charter which typically answers the questions of who (thier roles), what (the vision, mission, goals and tasks), when (the frequency of meeting, adherence to deadlines), where (in face-to-face versus electronic meetings) an why (the team’s purpose).
4. Invest time and resources toward training, developing and coaching specific members who demonstrate deficiencies.

Question 3

*What are the 4 best practices for leading virtual teams as a whole?

Answer 3

1. Team Design, Team Building, and Team Process
   -Team Design: Set clear goals and expectations for the team as a whole. Provide some level of team rewards or a mixture of team and individual-based rewards.
   -Team Building: face-to-face team building is still your best bet. Be opportunistic about company-wide or industry conferences where it might be possible to gather as a team. Look for creative ways to bring your team together
   -Team Process: Includes things like problem solving, decision making, conflict management, goal setting, planning, and communication. Leaders should try to get team members face-to-face when engaging in idea creation or other innovative team behaviors
   Team states include shared perceptions of team empowerment, trust, and psychological safety
2. Task and Company Structures
   -To encourage participation, you should look to use task and company structures to your advantage.
   -To avoid burnout of both the leader and members, predictable leadership tasks like agenda creation, meeting facilitation, and overseeing electronic discussion should be rotated among members.
   -To create awareness of each team member’s expertise, members can pair up with one another to work on short-term projects and then rotate those members so they get to work with other members.
3. Communication
   -Improve the richness of communication by creating shared understandings and higher levels of trust.
   -Establish clear communication norms and protocols.
   Leaders must negotiate the roles in the team (use a team charter).
   -For highly controversial, emotional, or complex messages, use richer communication media (e.g., face-to-face, videoconferencing) instead of leaner media (e.g., email, chat).
4. Virtuality
   -You should try to find opportunities to give your team cursory face-to-face with one another and place extra emphasis on building trust.
   -You should try to ensure your communication methods allow for as much nuance and natural interaction as possible.
   -Electronic discussion threads like slack can also help streamline idea exchange

Question 4

*What are the 5 best practices for leading the subteams in a virtual team?

Answer 4

1. Focusing on subteams is especially important because they can emerge along faultlines relating to geographic locations and national origin.
2. Highly diverse teams have to encounter some challenges early on, but ultimately benefit from having more unique perspectives
3. Manage within, between, and across-subteams. Which is even more complicated in virtual teams.
4. you will have to put much more emphasis on leading and managing interdependence between subteams
5. Err on the side of building and maintaining interdependence between subteams because this is the most likely to be the place where overall team functioning breaks down.

Question 5

*Four steps that leaders can take to help their teams make the best subteams for later success

Answer 5

By tweaking how to run subteams so it aligns with virtual teams:

1. Assigning subteams a specific purpose so that they work for the good of the whole team and not for their subteams best interest. This can apply to virtual teams
2. Rotate team members to different subteams when feasible. This could be difficult with team members in different locations. One of the biggest advantages of a global virtual team is to tap the expertise of people no matter where they are in the world.
3. Increase the number of subteams within an overall team. To foster breakthrough thinking and idea generation, you should use subteams in virtual teams with members from, and located in, several different countries.
4. Ensure that team members have have an overall sense of team identification.