Improving the Effectiveness
of Virtual Teams

By Carolyn Ott

Given the global, 24/7, Internet-based nature of much of today’s work, it seems that virtually everyone is part of a virtual team.

Virtual teams offer many advantages:

* They tap talent wherever it may reside.

* They enable organizations to leverage intellectual capacity worldwide.

* They empower global businesses with a cultural richness that cannot be found except in some of the world’s largest, most cosmopolitan regions.

Whether it is offshoring or product development staffed by team members in multiple locations, the concept of working with people you may only know by telephone and e-mail is here to stay.

The cost benefits of virtual teams are well documented, but how many companies invest in the guidelines and processes to enable these work units to be successful?

Having facilitated numerous strategy and team-building sessions with globally diverse senior teams, I’ve found that even teams that are co-located often have difficulty attaining and maintaining high-performing status. The challenges for virtual teams are significantly higher. Following are some suggestions to improve the effectiveness of virtual teams:

1. If possible, hold a face-to-face kick off session where teams discuss the goals, tasks and roles of team members. This may seem costly, but the investment will speed the ability of the team to establish professional and personal bonds … and build trust. The session should be professionally facilitated so the team can keep on task and leave with clarity of roles and purpose.

2. Establish ground rules for behavior. This is especially important for remote teams. Discuss expectations like: keeping commitments, honesty, timely responses, being fully present at teleconferences, raising potential problems, and forewarning team members of absences.

3. Talk about cultural awareness. Most of us still have a lot to learn about working effectively cross-culturally. Key points to discuss among team members include working styles, communication styles, assumptions, and understanding. Plan for taking the time to really listen and understand each other. Pay particular attention to how different cultural styles handle agreements -- make sure you are clear on what your conversation really means. Some cultures say “yes” when they mean they “understand,” but are not committed. Consider ending each discussion with a review to clarify what was just discussed. For teams that are new to this, consider a session on cultural sensitivity training.

4. Take time zones into account. Think about the impact of scheduling and make sure you consciously discuss and plan for mutual work times. In addition to routine teleconferencing and videoconferencing, you must have dialogue in between scheduled sessions. Planning the guidelines for these ad hoc conversations is important -- you will need to make commitments on mobile phones and “awake hours.” Respect each other’s time and rotate schedules to ensure everyone bears the brunt of the time differences.

5. Build social rapport. Sharing a team picture, weekend plans and personal anecdotes all are common for co-located teams … but often forgotten in virtual situations. It is important to be a personal, as well as a professional, team member.

6. Discuss conflicts before they happen. Identify potential areas for misunderstanding and define actions steps to minimize or eliminate issues.

7. Assess your individual comfort zone with respect to uncertainty and complexity. With the time pressures all of us face, juggling unanticipated issues can be a challenge, to say the least. Make it a personal goal to enhance your flexibility and patience.

8. Acknowledge contributions and celebrate milestones. It is too easy for team members to begin to feel invisible and unrecognized. Make sure you have a plan to keep team members visible to each other and the larger organization.

9. Consider service-level agreements between all parties. As a group, set expectations and measures of success, and plan for reviews to troubleshoot and resolve issues.

10. Consider getting a coach for the team leader. The technical process complexities and deliverables often take precedence over the pure leadership needs of virtual teams. Often a coach can significantly increase the speed to productivity and success of virtual teams.

The key to making virtual teams work can be summed up in a single word -- trust. Team members need to develop trust in one another. It’s the glue that holds them together. The more you can build trust by following these steps, the more likely your virtual team will succeed.

Carolyn Ott is a member of WJM Associates’ executive and organizational effectiveness coaching faculty.

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Learning to Run
Better Meetings

By Deborah R. Bernstein

How much time do you spend in meetings?

According to a study conducted by MCI, approximately 11 million meetings take place in the United States every day. On average, business executives attend 61.8 meetings per month, or about three meetings a day.

At least one-third of all meetings are considered unnecessary and unproductive, and that estimate is conservative. This translates into the average executive losing nearly three days of productivity a month as a result of ineffective meetings.

To regain lost time and money, leaders need to learn to run effective meetings. Here are some steps to follow before, during and after meetings.

Prepare for Your Meeting

Meetings are shorter and more productive when leaders and participants are prepared. Taking as little as 30 minutes to prepare for a meeting can save hours of actual meeting time. Preparation allows all participants to be focused when they attend the meeting, which saves time and money and increases productivity.

To prepare for a meeting, you need to articulate the meeting’s purpose, identify the desired outcomes (including specific action steps or deliverables), and develop a concise agenda to achieve your desired outcomes. Ideally, you should communicate the meeting’s purpose, desired outcomes and agenda to the participants ahead of time. This allows them to come prepared to the meeting.

I once worked with a senior executive team who hired me to help it prepare for a three-day leadership meeting. When we started to design the meeting, I began by asking a basic question, “What is the purpose of the meeting?” To my surprise, they could not clearly and concisely state the meeting’s purpose, although they knew they needed a meeting. It actually took us a full day to reach agreement to articulate the purpose of the meeting and the desired outcomes.

This was an important step, because my clients were asking for a significant time commitment from participants, which represented a significant commitment of the organization’s time and money. Once we agreed upon the purpose and desired outcomes, it was easy to design the meeting, which was then executed very deliberately and effectively.

Facilitate Your Meeting Skillfully

Meetings are most effective when they are led by skilled facilitators who are trained in effectively managing group dynamics and employing techniques to achieve desired outcomes expeditiously. If you are running a major organizational gathering, it may make sense to retain the services of an experienced facilitator to help you plan and run the meeting.

Not all meetings require professional leadership, however, and you may achieve the desired results by attending training on basic facilitation skills. These can have a significant impact on the productivity of your meetings.

Other steps to consider during meetings:

* Establish “ground rules,” or a “code of conduct.” These are behaviors expected of and agreed upon by all participants. Participants design the ground rules as a group and agree to follow them, holding each other accountable. Examples can include: arriving on time, finishing on time, turning cell phones off, paying attention, and other common courtesies. Ground rules proactively set the tone for effective meetings as well as expectations of participants’ behaviors.

* Follow the agenda. The agenda is a powerful tool because it keeps the meeting focused, which results in a more effective use of time. The agenda serves as a road map for achieving the desired outcomes and is critical to follow -- unless there is a conscious decision to deviate, such as when other issues prevent you from following the agenda. For example, I once observed a meeting where a team was going to discuss how to communicate and implement a new onboarding process within the organization. When the meeting started, it became clear that the participants had several different definitions of what onboarding was, and there was no agreement that the organization even needed such a process. In that scenario the facilitator had to deviate from the agenda. Participants could not discuss implementation until they first agreed on a definition of onboarding … and also agreed to support it. Trying to follow the initial agenda would have been unproductive. (This example also illustrates the value of having a skilled facilitator, who can change courses effectively as needed.)


Evaluate the Meeting

Whether it’s a weekly staff meeting or a major national or international gathering, it is important to assess the effectiveness of your meetings. Ask participants: What worked well? What didn’t work well? Where could we improve for next time? This process takes all of 15 minutes, yet can provide important information to improve the productivity of future meetings.

Meetings consume resources. It is in everyone’s best interest to ensure that resources -- specifically people, time, effort, and money -- are applied wisely, judiciously and effectively.

Deborah R. Bernstein is a member of WJM Associates’ executive coaching and organizational effectiveness faculty.

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Your Career Path to Success

Characteristics of Successful Teams

By Bill Morin
Chairman & CEO
WJM Associates

Developing and maintaining high-performance teams, whether they work in a single location or around the world in a “virtual” structure, is a popular topic for management these days. As businesses expand and compete in a global marketplace, the contribution of successful teams has never been more important, and they seem to share several characteristics.

Successful teams have a common purpose. Everything should begin and end with purpose, the raison d’etre for a team’s existence. The purpose provides the focal point for mobilizing the energy of team members. Without a common purpose, people will perform a lot of tasks, many of which will get you nowhere because there is no focus, no criteria for determining which activities or tasks should be undertaken. If everyone is focused on the purpose, they are more willing to sacrifice their own self interests for the sake of the team because everyone is ultimately working towards the same goal. The clearer the goal, the more meaningful it is and the easier it will be to get people moving in the same direction.

Team members work together. In a true team, there is a healthy interdependence between members. Instead of performing as a collection of individuals working on their own, they depend on each other to accomplish clearly defined performance goals. In order to create this kind of interdependence, members of the team must have complementary skills. The more multiskilled the team members, the better.  Even "controlled conflict" is healthy for a team with a willingness to work together for a common good.

Teams develop a common approach. Team members must have a process for getting to the performance goals. They need a clearly defined strategy and some guidelines for how they will work together to achieve the purpose. The team members, with a leader's help, need to determine how they are going to treat each other, how they will communicate with one another, how the work will flow, etc. The more they define their expectations of one another up front, the more effective they will be.

Finally, teams members are mutually and individually accountable for achieving results. People do what they get rewarded for doing. If team members aren't held mutually accountable, it is too easy for individuals to revert back to their own self interests. It must be in the best interest of the individuals to be a good team player. As in sports, when the business team loses, everyone loses. When the business team wins, everyone wins. Mutual accountability is what builds commitment and trust.

When these four characteristics are in place, you have a solid foundation for creating synergy, which is the whole reason for establishing teams in the first place. Synergy can be defined as the optimal use of the resources that are available. It is a process that surfaces people's diverse ideas, skills, and experiences and integrates them into outcomes that are far more successful than if people were performing as individuals.

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Visit Our New Web Site

We’re redesigned our Web site to make it easier to navigate and find information. The address remains the same -- www.wjmassoc.com -- but we’ve given our Web site a whole new look and structure.

On our home page, you will now find convenient links to this newsletter and all its back issues; case studies that illustrate the work we’ve proudly performed for our clients; and articles from major business publications that quote WJM Associates on a variety of executive and organizational development issues.

There are also new descriptions of our principal service offerings:

The Advisorship -- An advisory relationship for chief executive officers, presidents and other top officers with a senior-level confidant who has significant and relevant experience. This program is designed to assess an executive’s leadership style and its impact on the organization, the board of directors, shareholders, and other constituencies.

Executive Coaching -- We offer a variety of custom-tailored programs to help individuals and teams increase their effectiveness.

Onboarding -- For newly hired or promoted executives, we facilitate their assimilation into their new organization or new role.

WJM Assess -- We can significantly reduce executive failure and improve developmental, hiring and succession planning initiatives.

Organizational Effectiveness -- We collaborate with clients to enhance their organizational performance at the team, functional, and enterprise levels by aligning people, processes, structure, and culture.

Executive Transitions -- For senior-level corporate leaders, we draw upon our full range of executive development solutions to offer transitioning professionals tailored and comprehensive assistance.

Executive Destination -- On a confidential basis, we offer a unique service for executives who independently, or with corporate support, choose to invest in their own potential. This customized and focused service is designed for professionals who aspire to acquire the leadership skills critical to career success, while learning to cope with increased stress as they attempt to integrate life, family and work.

Won’t you visit www.wjmassoc.com today?

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WJM Associates Increase Staff to Meet Growing Demand

Rick Cumberland and Scott Litchfield have joined WJM Associates as account executives serving corporate clients in New York and New Jersey.

"As the economy has improved, we're seeing a lot of pent-up demand in the marketplace among major employers who want to groom individual executives for future responsibilities and also improve the organizational effectiveness of their management teams," says William J. Morin, chairman and chief executive officer of WJM Associates. "Rick and Scott will give us the additional capacity to best serve these companies."

Cumberland comes to WJM Associates from La Rue Retail Payment Solutions, where he was vice president of sales and marketing. Before that, he held senior management positions with Data General Corporation, Telxon, and Fujitsu-ICL. He will serve clients in the high technology and venture capital sectors.

A graduate of Merrimack College, Cumberland has a BA degree in economics. He also served in the United States Air Force.

Litchfield has extensive account management experience in the consumer packaged goods, energy and human resources consulting industries. Previously, he held executive positions with Compensation Resources, Inc., and Goodrich & Sherwood Associates, Inc. He will serve clients in New Jersey and New York City.

Litchfield has a BA in history from Gettysburg College and an MBA in finance from Long Island University. A member of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), he is chair of the 2004 Garden State Council SHRM Annual Conference & Expo. He also serves as an ambassador for Commerce & Industry Association of New Jersey (CIANJ) and participates in CIANJ's Human Resources Committee.

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WJM Associates offers a wide range of services designed to help organizations recruit, hire and develop top performers. To learn how we can help you, visit www.wjmassoc.com or contact Vice President Cynthia Auman at 212-972-7400 or cauman@wjmassoc.com.

WJM Associates, Inc.
675 Third Avenue, Suite 1610
New York, N.Y. 10017
Phone: 212-972-7400
Fax: 212-972-0695
www.wjmassoc.com

Enhancing Executive and Organizational Effectiveness