303 Tips for Virtual and Global Teams

by Richard Brenner

Is it a global team or is it a global catastrophe? Global teams are now officially the way of things. Everything about such projects or operations is more difficult than face-to-face teams, including figuring out how to declare victory when failure is what actually happened…

A view of the Earth from Apollo 17. Courtesy NASA. hat's a global team? You'll find various definitions if you surf around a bit, but the main features of a global team are what make them so difficult to manage — the people are dispersed geographically, they meet infrequently or never, and they come from different cultures.

Is your organization a participant in one or more global teams? Are you the owner/sponsor of a global team? Are you managing a global team? Is everything going well, or at least as well as any project goes? Probably not. And the troubles people encounter are traceable to the obstacles global teams face when building working professional relationships from afar.

What you'll learn from this tips booklet

Skip to the Details: How To OrderRead 303 Tips for Virtual and Global Teams to learn techniques for managing global teams — tips and insights that could take you a lifetime to invent on your own. You'll learn:

How to build trust in a multicultural team where what defines "trustworthy" differs from person to person.
How to run a telephone meeting effectively when a third of the attendees speak the language so poorly that it's difficult to understand what they mean, but since they all do it the same way, they understand each other perfectly.
How to minimize errors when critical documents are translated from one language to another by people who know how to translate, but who don't know even the basics of the subject matter.
How to divide the work so as to minimize turf battles and battles over budget.
How to minimize resentments when only some members of the team are selected to attend the worldwide recognition banquet.

Who can benefit

This tips booklet addresses a broad readership:

Organizational leaders who want to guide sponsors and leaders of global teams within their organizations
Sponsors of global teams who want better results faster
Leaders of global teams and global project managers who want to adjust their approaches to the special requirements of a global or dispersed configuration
Members of global teams who want to learn how to excel in the global team environment

The key to success for a global team
is building a sense of team despite
the obstacles of separation

What you do with it depends on your role in your organization. Here are just a few ideas:

Organizational leaders: Use the booklet as part of a program for enhancing your organization's sophistication with global teams. Pick and choose ideas, add your own insights, and get the message out to the organization. Or have us customize the booklet to your organization to create training and reference materials for sponsors, project managers, team leads, and team members.
Sponsors of global teams: Downside surprises are anathema. To maximize your chances of getting what you want from the team, it helps to know what they need to get the job done. And what the team needs in the global dispersed configuration is different from what a less dispersed team needs. This booklet gives you insight into these needs — even about things the team itself doesn't recognize. Use these insights to manage risk, to project needed resources, to craft agreements among and between partner organizations, or to create your own tips booklet specifically for your team. Or let us work with you to customize these ideas to your particular project.
Leaders of global teams and global project managers: Whether managing a crisis or creating a risk management plan, understanding the problems and pitfalls of the global dispersed organization helps you deliver a successful project or operate with enhanced predictability.
Members of global teams: Even experienced professionals can learn from this tips booklet how to excel in the global dispersed team configuration. You need new skills for communication, negotiation, and even for meeting people. This booklet suggests some of these skills, and it will get you thinking about many more.

What's in this tips booklet

This booklet includes a range of suggestions for helping people work better together in the global, dispersed team context. It's packed with tips and techniques for:

Understanding the nature of global and dispersed teams
Building and maintaining a high level of trust
Planning your communications
Dealing with dispersion
Taking account of socio-cultural differences
Taking account of language differences
Allocating the work with dispersion in mind
Being smart about voicemail and email
Be effective on the telephone
Making your face-to-face meetings count
Celebrating achievements
Leading telemeetings proactively
Participating fully in telemeetings

And it's all packaged in a single, compact e-booklet. Load it onto your Acrobat-enabled PDA or laptop and carry it with you on your next trip.

Some sample tips

Here are some sample tips.

For meetings, create a program, not just an agenda: You'll probably circulate a pre-meeting information packet, and following the pattern of face-to-face teams, we tend to think of this as the meeting agenda. But for dispersed teams, it ought to be much more, because one of our goals is to foster relationships and trust. Think of it as a program. Model your program from the document you receive at the theatre, the ballet, or a sporting event. Include not only the agenda, but also roles and responsibilities, and short bios and photos. Include links to exhibits and to each person's personal home page, or relevant items in the Project Family Album. The program need not be an attached document; it can be links to pages at the project's Intranet site.
Align budget authority with capability: As you partition task responsibility among the different team components, take care to partition budget responsibility along parallel lines. When the two partitions are incongruent, tensions can develop as one budget control center attempts to export work (and therefore cost, schedule and risk) onto other budget control centers. By keeping the two partitions congruent, you limit these tensions and their associated politics.
Appreciate the accounting system illusion: Many organizations are seduced by the apparent economies of dispersed teams because the accounting system presents a false impression of where projects incur costs. Accounting systems lack line items for activities such as "building trust" or "informal water-cooler communication." Unfortunately, it is precisely this kind of item that sustains the most dramatic cost increases in the dispersed or global configuration relative to the face-to-face configuration. Take this illusion into account as you plan the dispersed project — you will have to find ways to sup-port these increased costs.

What readers say

Here's a sample of reader's comments:

You're stuff is brilliant! And -- Thank you for sharing these ideas.
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The articles are great, I enjoy getting them, and you always have something very interesting to say, or good points to raise.
I really enjoy my weekly newsletters. I appreciate that the newsletter is a quick read and is much more intellectually stimulating than, say, reading a Dilbert cartoon.
You fill a need that went unmet -- a sort of Dr. Phil for Management!
I have found your articles extremely accurate, inspiring and applicable to day-to-day. You have a great writing style and the lessons that you have shared with us are invaluable.
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