Pat Lencioni's written the book on dysfunctional teams and, bless him, he's trying to put his stamp on the dysfunctions of virtual teams too. Close, no cigar.
A fawning post on another blog led me to Lencioni's short piece on the three blunders of virtual teams, in his view: they underestimate the challenge of being virtual; they waste their face-to-face time socializing too much and/or going over details; and they don't know how to hold good conference calls.
In all my days in this field, I've yet to meet a team that UNDERestimated the challenges of being virtual. Not a one. Makes for good copy but I really don't think this is accurate.
On the second point--that teams waste their face-to-face time--some do, but this is hardly the norm. Again, in my experience, virtual teams work very very hard to capitalize on their face time.
On the last point, almost-bingo. Most virtual teams do not have very good conference calls; most benefit from the simple pointers; but, not to beat a dead horse, I gotta take issue with Lencioni's prescription: a good speakerphone and a decent agenda are not the only sine qua nons. Research indicates that without screen sharing (web sharing, web conferencing, i.e. something to look at that is meaningful to everyone on the call), attention will wander; that status reporting is death to conference calls; that unless people say their names each time they speak, others are often lost; and that it's critical to get "voices in the room" at the beginning and have "voices leave the room" at the end of calls.
What this makes me realize: I owe the blog a list of best practices in conference calls...which I thought I'd posted long ago but will do straightaway.
Interesting, I couldn't help but comment on the point about wasting face2face time socializing. I understand social connectivity in virutal teams is paramount to build trusted relationships. Social contact both online and f2f is fundamental to trust.
Posted by: Kirsten McMahon-Cook - Satellite Team Solutions | Thursday, 08 October 2009 at 12:07 AM
Audio conference calls can be very difficult for keeping everyone engaged. Most people I know put it on mute and multi-task. I've found video meetings force people to pay more attention as you can see them, and would recommend [deleted - sorry}.
Posted by: Alan | Thursday, 08 October 2009 at 09:07 AM
Kirsten, I agree. Socializaton builds trust, as you say, whether people are together or not, and, frankly, I've never run into a virtual team that went to the expense of bringing everyone together then didn't get any work done.
Alan, I appreciate the comment but I don't allow people to advertise here.
Posted by: jessica lipnack | Thursday, 08 October 2009 at 02:33 PM