Читать книгу Power Teams Beyond Borders - Peter Ivanov - Страница 10

Over the years, I have developed a highly effective method called ‘Virtual Power Teams’, which comprises 10 Big Rocks. These are the 10 key success factors for retaining the gravity in your team and unleashing the virtual team's power.

I want you to imagine that your virtual team is a human. The first part to consider is the head. This is the logical, cognitive element and it's where you'll find the first three of the 10 Big Rocks that are essential to every virtual power team's success.

These rocks are:

1 Personality in focus

2 The Strengths Matrix

3 Interdependent goals

Personality in focus – this means you need to consider the personalities of every person you include in your team. If, as a manager, you don't believe this is important for remote teams you're making a big mistake. Later on in the book I'll give you an exercise that can help you get to know your team members quickly and intimately. It's important to know how to achieve this when you're managing a remote team. So, the lesson is not to ignore personality when you're choosing your team or recruiting, but instead to put personality in focus.

The Strengths Matrix – this is all about exploring and identifying the key strengths and natural talents of each team member. All too often people can feel anonymous and feel as though they're being treated as a resource. By identifying people's strengths and making everybody else aware of them, you'll make every person in your team feel like a hero who has a special talent that's vital to your success. This is about helping everyone in the team understand that they're not anonymous, but that they're understood. That they've been chosen to be part of this bouquet of skills and with this mix of talent we can achieve anything.

Interdependent goals – goal setting is very important in virtual teams. This rock is about making sure that everyone has their own goal and that everyone is clear on what they need to do to deliver. But more than that, the team will be organised and managed in such a way that they all have the freedom, within budgetary and time constraints, to decide how best to deliver on that goal. Micromanagement is not an option. This is about empowerment. It's about allowing people to set and choose their goals, not simply delegating tasks.

With these three rocks that make up the head of your team, you're aiming for clarity about who your team members are and what goals you're all aiming to achieve.

The next part of the body that I want you to consider is the skeleton and muscles. This is the dynamic part of the body, and therefore of the team. The next three rocks are:

1 Meetings and agenda

2 Knowledge management

3 Regular feedback

Meetings and agenda – this means deciding which online meetings and conferences you need to have as a team. You may have a core leadership team, as well as extended teams, and you need to be clear on how often they will meet and what format these meetings will take.

Knowledge management – this is about how we manage knowledge. It ties in with the Strengths Matrix, but rather than being about skills it's about the knowledge or expertise that individual team members have. I'll talk more later about how you can define knowledge champions or knowledge custodians within your team.

Regular feedback – this can sometimes be scarce in regular teams, but it's even more of an issue in virtual teams. But for your virtual team to be a success, it's essential that you institutionalise feedback. You need to make sure that communication with your team allows everyone to have an equal contribution. You want to establish structured communication where everybody can contribute, rather than taking a manager‐centric or problem‐centric approach.

From the skeleton and muscles we move onto the heart, which is my personal favourite. There are three rocks that are essential in this part of the ‘body’:

1 Recognition

2 Diversity

3 Winning spirit

Recognition – did you know that the number one reason for people leaving a company is a lack of recognition by a direct superior. That means people are leaving jobs not because of the company they work for, but because they don't feel recognised by their manager or boss. In virtual teams, it's important to recognise progress despite the distance and I'll give you tips on how you can do this and make sure everyone in your team feels seen.

Diversity – if you have a diverse team from multiple cultures, you need to think carefully about how to establish the optimal team culture. There are three areas in particular that you need to consider: leadership, decision‐making and conflict. In leadership, you have the choice between egalitarian and hierarchical and I'll explain how you define the optimal leadership style for your team. With decision‐making, you have the choice between top‐down and consensus and, again, I'll help you understand how to find the optimal way for your team to make decisions. In terms of conflict, you have confrontational versus non‐confrontational approaches. I'll help you reflect and consider different cultural considerations when deciding how best to manage conflict within your team.

Winning spirit – establishing winning spirit in your team when people are spread across time zones and cultures can be challenging. But if you can establish this winning spirit, anything is possible. I'll give you advice on how to establish this winning spirit across your virtual team.

The tenth rock is next generation leaders. This is very important because it is no good having this wonderful virtual power team at the top if there is no one coming through behind them to take their place. You need to make sure you are connected to all the layers of your organisation and think about how you can involve people at all levels in delivering your agenda.

According to Google's Project Aristotle, where they researched the characteristics of high‐performing teams, they found that the number one characteristic high‐performing teams have is psychological safety.

This means that the people in those teams are willing to share their vulnerability and don't feel pressure to keep up the appearance of being perfect. The benefit is that when they come up against a task that doesn't play to their strengths, they're not afraid to ask for help. This makes the team a powerful unit. It makes 1+1+1 much more than three.