Читать книгу Power Teams Beyond Borders - Peter Ivanov - Страница 14

During my 20 years in this industry I've led many virtual teams, some of which are spread across different continents and time zones. One of the largest was a European project delivery team that comprised 30 project managers. I have also worked as head of IT for Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, which is not only a huge geographical area but one that can often have poor infrastructure.

Despite all of my experience of managing large global teams, there's one team that I still struggle to manage: my five daughters. However, I have learned lessons about management style from my interactions with them that are transferable to the world of business.

What kind of lessons have I learned from my family that might be applicable in virtual teams? Firstly, when there is a conflict in a virtual team it is often highly charged. Many managers, myself included in the early years, can be guilty of trying to deal with conflict within a virtual team by sending an email. Maybe you send an email and copy a lot of people, which makes the situation worse. Not facing the problem properly creates more problems, but in a virtual team setting it can be easy to hide behind technology. When you send emails like this, you undermine trust and team spirit. I urge you to avoid taking this path.

Start by calling a meeting with the person or people who have contributed to the conflict. Encourage a debate about the situation. Don't set out your opinion upfront, but instead get your team members to share their opinions and suggest solutions. If you do this early and encourage healthy debate, you will save a lot of time and effort further along.

While you're encouraging this debate, strive to find the solution where people choose what they do. You're creating empowerment. When you empower your team in this way, they'll be more committed to the solution you agree on.

If there is one leadership secret I can share with you that I've learned from leading a house of six women, it's not to underestimate the power of praise. So praise, praise and then praise some more.

Praise the result, if there's a result. Praise a sub‐milestone that someone achieves. Even if they haven't achieved anything, praise positive behaviour. If you can't see anything immediately that you can praise, look harder. There will be something there and this encouragement is the way to start improving performance, even from a distance.

The following are some questions for you to consider at this stage. They're self‐coaching questions and I invite you to write down your answers before continuing with the rest of this book.

1 Do you know your virtual team's personal interests, passions and strengths?

2 How can the unique personality of each team member find expression in the team?

3 How do you sustain interpersonal relationships over time and build on them for team success?