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303 Tips for Virtual and Global Teams

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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.What'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's on this page

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:

Who can benefit

This tips booklet addresses a broad readership:

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:

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.

Table of contents

Click the folder icons to reveal (or hide) chapter content summaries.

Reveal all chapter content summaries.Reveal all chapter content summaries.

Understand the nature of dispersed and global teams

Build and maintain a high level of trust

Plan your communications

Deal with dispersion

Take account of socio-cultural differences

Take account of language differences

Allocate the work with dispersion in mind

Be effective with voicemail and email

Be effective on the telephone

Make your face-to-face meetings count

Celebrate achievements

Lead telemeetings powerfully

Participate in telemeetings effectively

What readers say

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Designed for busy people

Most of us have way too much to do to find much time to read. And the time we do have is broken up into small chunks. We need the knowledge, but too often, we don't have time to get it, and we can't wade through 15-page chapters that lay out lengthy discussions.

Knowledge products from Chaco Canyon Consulting are designed with busy people in mind. Here are some features that make reading our e-books fast and convenient.

They're available on line
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Our knowledge products are available in near-universal formats—either hypertext (like this document you're reading right now), or Acrobat (PDF), or MP3. You can use them with any computer or PDA that supports the format of that product (either hypertext, PDF or MP3).
Written for busy people
Most business books are about 200-250 pages, with about 10 chapters. I don't know about you, but I don't have time to read a 225-page book cover-to-cover. There are lots of folks like us—that's why there's such a booming market in book condensations.
Our ebooks cut out that middle step. They're designed to be read by people who don't have time for the typical business book. Our tip books consist of short paragraphs, two- to four sentences per tip. Each tip has a headline in bold. You can easily scan the book for tips that seem relevant to you and read only those. Read in any order, and read them in short sittings.
We use hyperlinks
Most books, even e-books, are meant to be read off-line. Because they stand alone, they contain material that you might not want to see.
Our ebooks assume that you have the Internet nearby. If you want background material on a point we've made, just click. And some of our hyperlinks link to other places in the e-book itself, to help you tie things together is you read.

Details and how to order

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