CHAPTER 1

What Is a Virtual Team?

Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision and the abilityto direct individual accomplishment toward organizational objectives. It is thefuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.

—Andrew Carnegie

Let's consider three common situations involving virtual team management.Meeting challenges like those described here are part of what we discuss in thisbook.

Case One: The Global Team Management Challenge

Not too long ago we worked with a manager at Cummins Engine, Inc. He was locatedin the U.K., but the small teams reporting to him were scattered across morethan twenty countries. An especially bright and capable leader, the managerfound that he would seldom see a more significant challenge than coordinatingthe work of people sharing a common office. Leading global teams, for example,sometimes seemed like tiptoeing through an unmarked minefield. People haddiverse cultural backgrounds and often interpreted the same e-mail in different(and sometimes contradictory) ways. Offense was taken when none was intended.Confusion and duplication of effort occurred with alarming regularity. Findingtime for meetings that didn't conflict with someone's sleep schedule or nationalholiday was almost impossible. He was also concerned about the communicationchallenges associated with running an operation that required almost immediateaccess to him 24/7. How could he lead a balanced work and personal life when hewas constantly tethered to work by his smartphone and computer?

Case Two: Can a Group of Remote Employees Really Function Like a Team?

A manager from IBM went through a significant downsizing in his organization,leaving him with 65 direct reports spread across the continental United States.Turnover was high enough that even with a grueling travel schedule, he couldnever meet all his direct reports in person before they transferred away.Unfortunately, temporary travel restrictions for nonmanagers made it impossibleto get his team together in one place at the same time. All their meetings hadto be Web meetings or teleconferences. But how could he help the team membersget to know each other well enough to trust each other? Would they ever reachthe comfort level that would allow them to openly admit mistakes, offerconstructive criticism, share their best ideas, or ask each other forassistance? How could he help them—especially those who worked alone fromtheir homes—overcome their inevitable feelings of isolation?

A team that shares a common office could get to know each other by taking breaksor having lunch together. Informal interaction in the hallways, at the watercooler, or in the parking lot builds relationships and a sense of common teamidentity. Celebrating birthdays and childbirths, sharing pictures of childrenand weddings, informally telling work stories about organizational disasters andvictories and any of the thousand other tiny social interactions that connectpeople and create a social lubricant that facilitates working together wouldlikely never happen. Was it even possible to create a highly functioning team inthis situation?

Case Three: Can a Team That Shares a Common Office Be Virtual?

A manager of a sales team at the high-tech distribution giant CDW told us thatshe struggled with the challenges of managing people who were never in theoffice. Her sales team was almost always in the field working with customers.She was a good manager and had a track record of positive accomplishments, butmany of her leadership practices were based on the traditional management modelthat assumed regular face-to-face interactions. She knew how to pop over acubicle and help someone she could see was struggling with an assignment, how togather an obviously confused group together for an emergency meeting, how tocorrect a misconception she overheard in the lunchroom, how to take fulladvantage of those fortunate moments when you run into someone in the hallwayyou need to speak with, or how to watch people and tell from their expressionsand body language whether they understood or agreed with her.

When she observed gossiping, whining, blaming, or other behaviors she knew woulderode the effectiveness of the team, she intervened immediately. If she sawcliques forming, behaviors that indicated disunity or silo thinking, orindications of the early stages of conflict brewing, she resolved them. She knewhow to rally the troops when the tone of their comments indicated that they werediscouraged. To continue the military analogy, she liked being on thefrontlines, helping the wounded, and personally leading charges far into enemyterritory. "But," she asked in an interview, "how do you lead a team over theInternet?" It felt to her like calling in orders to the battlefield when she waslocated in a tent, blinded and deafened by separation from her army, a millionmiles away.

The Challenges of Working with Virtual Teams

We have hundreds of these stories about the challenges of working with what arewidely known as "virtual teams." They come from operations as diverse as largemultinational insurance companies to the staff office of the U.S. Senate, andfrom jobs that range from Microsoft executives to Swedish R&D scientists in amining explosives company. Even though these are very differentorganizations—both private and public, blue collar and white collar, largecorporations and small home-based businesses—they share a common problem:How do you manage people you seldom see in person—especially when thatgroup of people is supposed to be a cohesive and productive work team?

Why Are Virtual Teams Becoming So Common?

The bad news is that these types of operations are difficult to manageand they are increasingly common. Since the industrial revolutionstarted more than a century ago, organizations have had employees who didn'twork in the same location as their manager. But in the last several years, thenumber of these operations has exploded. Why?...