How close can you be to someone without any face-to-face contact? Pretty darn close. I'd wager that everyone reading here has had moments of pure love for someone they only know online. The stories are legion and yesterday's post, "Building Social Relationships in Virtual Teams," from Surinder Kahai over at Leading Virtually, tells yet another touching tale of a virtual community swinging into action when one of its own faced extreme trauma. So extensive was the outpouring for a blogger that The New York Times covered it: "After Blogger's Plane Crash, Virtual Becomes Personal."
I have my own stories to tell in this regard, of course, and the study we did some years ago with Ann Majchrzak and Arvind Malhotra--"Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?"--that appeared in Harvard Business Review produced data supporting the belief that face-to-face is not necessary to team success. Preferable, perhaps, more human and fuzzy-wuzzy, absolutely...but alas not required.
Here are the four points Surinder makes in his post, all of which speak to our putting more effort than ever into the human dimension, i.e. better to spend time connecting to people than to the internet (says she, whose "high-speed" modem has literally been taking three hours to download mail for the past few days!). Uh-oh, back to Surinder, whose principal point is that positive affect is the single most important aspect of leading virtually (at least in this post):
- Building social relationships via electronic communication,
- Relevance of social relationships to leading virtually,
- Creating a shared identity to build relationships, and
- Setting a positive tone to build social relationships.
