Virtual Team Success

Leader to Leader16

I have discovered another impact of the virtual team,” exclaimed a project coordinator of the “Gaia Project” (a disguised name). “It keeps me up all hours of the day and night!” In just over a year, the roughly three dozen people associated with the Gaia Proj-

ect collaborated to set a time-to-market record for designing a new subsystem de- manded by main players in the evolving global automotive markets. The effort spanned more than a dozen time zones, half a dozen languages, and four continents. Most, but not all, came from the same company, and there were a score or more specific func- tional, managerial, or other specialties. Different cultures, countries, and languages; dif- ferent companies, work sites, and skill-sets; plus different processes and hierarchical levels—all collaborated within the integrating construct of a commonly shared goal.

Sound familiar? Well, if not, welcome to the world of virtual teaming—a phenome- non sweeping the global workplace as fast as the tentacles of the Internet are encir- cling your office, home, car, and cell phone. Like it or not, you are interconnected, and that means you can work with any person from any enterprise in any place at any time on any challenge. The list of opportunities fueling the demand for such collab- oration includes partnering, joint ventures, strategic alliances, outsourcing, customer and supplier relationship management, plus hundreds of less exotic corporate inter- actions. Whether your organization has 10,000 people or just 10, you will face the challenge of working virtually with people down the hall, around the corner, as well as across continents and oceans. As a result, your work group will need to develop new and different rules of engagement—including when and how to interrupt one another’s dinners!

Virtual teaming was little more than a novelty phrase in the early 1990s when The Wisdom of Teams was first published. Our purpose in writing that book was to chal- lenge conventional wisdom that teaming was merely about engendering a feeling of

B Y J O N R . K A T Z E N B A C H A N D D O U G L A S K . S M I T H

The Discipline of Virtual

Teams “

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togetherness, teamwork, and empowerment. Instead, Wisdom argues that team performance requires adher- ence to a simple set of disciplined behaviors that we call “team basics.” When applied to appropriate perfor- mance challenges, that discipline produces results that are clearly superior to what small groups can obtain op- erating in a traditional hierarchy under a command-and-control discipline. Millions of people have since acted on the key mes- sages in Wisdom:

• A compelling and commonly held performance challenge is what creates teams, not the desire to be a team.

• Teaming demands a six-part discipline whereby a small number of people with complementary skills commit to hold themselves mutually accountable to a common purpose, a set of common goals, and a commonly agreed-upon way of working together.

• Unlike hierarchy, team leadership is more about building mutual account- ability and performance focus than making decisions and delegating tasks.

• If your small group can achieve its per- formance goals through the sum of in- dividual assignments and achievements, then you should not use a team ap- proach. Traditional hierarchy and a single-leader discipline is a more effi- cient way to meet your goals. But if your group’s performance objective re- quires people to deliver work and results jointly, with multiple leadership inputs, then you are well advised to use the team discipline.

Our latest book, The Discipline of Teams, argues that vir- tual work groups that seek team performance must master two different disciplines: “single leader” and

“team.” Paradoxically, each discipline becomes both eas- ier and harder to apply because of group work tech- nology, also called groupware. While groupware includes some old friends like phone and fax, it is increasingly characterized by new acquaintances, for example, threaded discussions (the ability to order verbal inter-

changes by topic, person, date, and time) and “simulchats” (a melding of teleconfer- encing and computer chat room technol- ogy). But proficiency in groupware is not the critical factor in virtual team perfor- mance. In fact, it is clearly secondary to the basics of team discipline. If the people in your group get this wrong, they will e-mail themselves straight into a nonperformance booby trap: relying on technology to ele- vate performance when the real problem is undisciplined behavior.

Two Disciplines, Not One

Team performance, be it virtual or not,is primarily about discipline—leader, peer, and self-imposed. So start by recog- nizing that your group must master two disciplines, not just one. Each demands more than applying the mere fundamentals of effective group behavior that most of us have been trained in for years now. For ex- ample, what really mattered to the Gaia Project was not technological proficiency. It was how the members differentiated be- tween two critical situations: individual tasks and goals that members could achieve under clear single-leader direction, and

critical collective work that demanded real-time col- laboration, multiple leadership, and the disciplined be- havior of a real team. These options have little to do with technology, although both can certainly be en- abled by groupware.

Jon R. Katzenbach is senior partner of

Katzenbach Partners LLC, a consulting firm in New York

City that specializes in leadership, team,

and workforce perfor- mance. He has au-

thored and coauthored numerous articles and books, including, with Douglas K. Smith, the best selling “The Wisdom of Teams” and the recently re- leased “The Disci- pline of Teams.” He is also editor of “The

Work of Teams,” a “Harvard Business Review” compendium.

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Leader to Leader18

The “Y” chart shown in the figure was developed by Katzenbach Partners LLC to clarify the differences be- tween effective groups and true performance units.

The base of the “Y” describes the elements of effective group work, not performance units. The left branch de- fines the discipline required to elevate effective groups to single-leader performance units (charac- terized by speed and efficiency, leadership clarity, and individual accountability). The right branch defines the discipline required to elevate effective groups to real-team per- formance units (characterized by collective work products, shifting leadership roles, and mutual accountability).The choice of branch depends on the performance situation, as the Gaia Project soon discovered.

The difference between single-leader and team disciplines is straightforward: tasks and goals that are best accomplished by indi- viduals working within a single leader’s di- rection versus tasks and goals that require close collaboration among two or more people working together in real time with access to multiple leaders. Even the best groupware technology cannot make up for the failure to manage according to this dis- tinction. As this was colorfully put to us in an interview, “Some ‘atomic tasks’ of col- laboration cannot be broken down fur- ther!” Try to divide such atoms and your project can blow up like a nuclear bomb. Work them collectively and, like the Gaia Project, you can exceed all expectations.

As happens so often in team efforts, the easy part was farming out separate tasks to the individuals with the skills required to complete them. These are the kinds of as- signments that move a group up the left-hand branch of

the “Y” in the figure, and when people apply the princi- ples of the single-leader discipline, good results follow.

At the same time, as one project member pointed out, “The designs of modules created separately were very good by themselves, but the interfaces were not com- patible.” In other words, the different components, no

matter how well done, would not integrate themselves. Engineers and designers had to do that by working together along the right- hand branch of the “Y”—where only some of their collective efforts could be enabled by groupware. Like many groups, the Gaia Project discovered the hard way that to- gether does not mean apart, even with the assistance of groupware.

People as far flung as California and India could and did use phone calls, e-mail, video- conferencing, and a variety of collaboration tools customized to work across their net- works. They did not succeed, however, until they chose to hold a small number of engi- neers, designers, and assemblers mutually ac- countable for integrating the components—a key element in the right-hand branch of the Y.The most critical integrating behaviors re- quired co-located interactions. The mem- bers simply needed to work together at the same time in the same room!

Why? Because a small number of people who must deliver a collective piece of work

are more likely to succeed when they can be physically together, to see and interpret well beyond what elec- tronic communication can convey. Co-location permits people to respond in real time to ideas, body language, tone, and other nonverbal communications. They can ask each other spontaneous questions. They can chal- lenge ideas on the spot without offending one another.

Douglas K. Smith is a consultant specializ- ing in organization performance, innova- tion, and change, and CEO of Web River Media, a company dedicated to revolu- tionizing the rela- tionship between

storytelling and tech- nology. He is author or coauthor of several books, including “The Discipline of Teams” and its workbook com- panion, “Make Suc- cess Measurable!”

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CLIMBING THE “Y” OF GROUP PERFORMANCE

“Single-leader Unit” DISCIPLINE

“Working Group” FUNDAMENTALS

“Real-team” DISCIPLINE

1. Understandable charter

2. Good communication

3. Clear member roles

4. Time-efficient process

5. Reasonable accountability

1. Individual goals add up to group’s purpose (performance outcome) 2. Members work mostly on individual tasks that match their skills 3. Work products (outcomes) are mostly individual 4. Rigorous working approach driven by leader 5. Strong individual accountability

1. Compelling “performance purpose”—exceeds sum of individual goals 2. Members work jointly to integrate complementary talents and skills 3. Work products (outcomes) are mostly collective or joint efforts 4. Adaptable working approach shaped and enforced by members 5. Mutual plus individual accountability

performance units

thought they should take. But, often, they threw the ball into our court.”

• “Sometimes we received e-mail from people we didn’t even know were on the team.”

• “Phones are good. But sometimes it is hard to understand accents. And with the nine-hour time difference, you have to think very carefully about the questions you are going to ask.”

• “You have to make assumptions frequently.Yet even a slight misunderstanding can cause the project to suffer by many days.”

They can informally explore each other’s hypotheses and test preliminary reactions. Best of all, they can avoid fatal assumptions.

While groupware helps people share words, thoughts, and ideas, it lacks many of the informal essentials of communication and collaboration that only face-to-face interactions can provide. The obstacles experienced by the Gaia Project were typical:

• “We didn’t understand what the software group in Europe were saying in their e-mail. Either their tone or their thoughts. There were actions we

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Once the Gaia Project members realized they needed the team discipline to accomplish collective tasks and goals, they were able to eliminate troublesome barriers and get back on track. One contributor, who was temporarily moved from India to California, said,“There were prob- lems on technical issues slowing the project down— things not possible to solve even by talking on the phone every day. Once I was transferred to San Jose, the project sped up considerably.”

Using the Technology Well

Jackie Moore is the U.K.-basedhuman resource director for American Express Technology (AET). As leader of a virtual- team effort, she quickly learned that although groupware tech- nology can help in getting a small number of people to work virtually, it cannot “do it for you.” In April 1998, when the human resources and develop- ment team supporting AET reorganized, shared pur pose rather than location determined team membership. Jackie wound up with a team of direct reports scattered throughout the world who had to provide their clients with on-site representation and local support. Their efforts were integrated around a common vision: helping technology experts of American Express partner with business leaders to grow the overall company.

They created a team to meet a clear performance goal: to deliver valuable technical support and client service in a world of virtual work.

Groupware has helped them share information, build rich databases, interact across time zones, and store and

access complex work products. They also had to com- municate frequently with one another and their clients. The core of their challenge, however, was neither de- fined nor resolved by the technology. They still had to create trust across different cultures, apply multiple lead- ership approaches, meld the complementary skills of different members, integrate individual and collective work products, and enforce individual and mutual ac- countability. These are the basics of team performance, and they demand disciplined behavior. In short, apply- ing the right disciplines, although facilitated by tech- nology, was not superseded by technology.

Performance units like AET still have to inject strong, direct lead- ership at times, as well as shift and share the leadership role at other times.They also have to integrate individual work products with collective work products and en- force mutual as well as individual accountability. And they have to do this without the benefit of frequent, informal personal in- teractions, facial expressions, and body language.

We asked Jackie’s team to share the lessons they learned in making the best possible use of groupware without falling victim to it. They echoed the experience of the Gaia Project as well as other suc- cessful virtual teams we have worked with over the years (see box, next page).

The virtual team challenge can be more difficult than the nonvirtual team challenge. Jackie and her team members, like participants in most successful virtual teaming efforts, are true believers in team performance. They recognize that a virtual team can be as successful as a nonvirtual team—provided the members are relentless

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Applying the right

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The Challenges of Virtual Teaming

❖ Access is expanded, but time zones complicate the task:

“People on the team have a mind-set that our virtual team provides an amazing opportu- nity.You can design something in the morning, e-mail it out, and by the next day have everyone’s input and suggestions.”

“Time zones have been the biggest adjustment. When you need to speak to someone, they won’t be there!”

❖ People are thrown into virtual situations without any training or context:

“We had no training because it hasn’t been recognized as a separate need. I don’t think many leaders understand my (VT) world.”

“It was odd to meet my boss for the first time a month after I had taken the job. Not nec- essarily bad, but definitely a strange way of joining the team.”

❖ Technology makes teaming harder as well as easier:

“The database helps but if it isn’t continuously being main- tained, it can become out of date really quickly.”

“Documentation and dialogue are critical to making con- scious choices. Technology played a role in that, but you need context.You can misin- terpret e-mail very easily.”

“Ground rules were put in place—to return e-mail in 24 hours, to record vacation days on the database, to let people know where you were and when you were going to be on site.”

❖ Nonvirtual time is critical, particularly during the kickoff:

“It is really important to have the team meet face-to-face as early as possible.You either pay up front or you pay a lot more later. Making the initial invest- ment of getting everyone to- gether is really important.”

“Face-to-face meetings help because people revise their

initial impressions and credi- bility gets established.”

“You don’t reap the benefits to a good kick-off there in the meeting.You don’t even reap the benefits two months later. It’s not until a year down the road that you realize how integral that kick-off meet- ing was.”

❖ The leadership challenge is heightened:

“Our leader provided direction, guidance, vision, communi- cated with high-level cus- tomers and translated their vision to us—the same things a leader provides on a regular team.”

“Trust is a larger issue on a virtual team—much more than in a traditional team environment. The leader has to make sure that people feel that everyone is being treated equally and held accountable. The leader . . . has to spend time enabling it.”

“When you work in this kind of environment . . . you don’t get the daily recognition that you might have received be- fore. The leader really needs to . . . fill that gap.”

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Technology

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about applying the discipline of real-team performance. As Jared Brown, an AET team member, summarized, “When you work in a virtual team, your only option is to prove yourself through your work products. If you de- liver the work . . . you build credibility.”

The Single-Leader Bias in Virtual Work

Groups who want to succeed must work hard to takefull advantage of the many ways technology is shift- ing the way we work and collaborate. The first obstacle to overcome is built right into the technology itself. Groupware (which is often sold as “teamware”) is strongly biased against teaming in a number of critical ways:

• Excessive numbers of contributors. The team discipline demands that a small number of people collab- orate to achieve common pur- poses and goals. Rarely have we observed more than 10–12 peo- ple team up effectively without subdividing in favor of smaller numbers. With groupware’s re- markable reach, groups can grow like weeds. This growth can choke off real work. Large groups invariably work best as single-leader units or in subgroups. Jackie Moore’s “core group” stabilized at just over a dozen, but the three-dozen- plus members of the Gaia Project had to rely on subteams. In both cases, the people in the loop grew more and more numerous with time, often resulting in confusion as to who was a member and who was not. Having more and more skilled and expert contributors can provide the tal- ent you need, but the need is to put talent to work. Inte- grating larger and larger numbers of people can be costly. Too many contributors create communication and inte- gration nightmares.

• One task, one person. Groupware reinforces the already present group bias toward listing to-do items and put- ting individual names with them. Time and again we have heard admissions that the work of the virtual team always got divided into individual assignments. Yet, as mentioned earlier, this risks trying to divide up collec- tive work products that really demand collaboration and, like atoms, ought to remain indivisible.

• Subtle but powerful pressure to work alone. Even when groups self-consciously avoid the “one person, one task” bias, they can fall victim to excessive disaggregations of

essential collaborative work into individual work tasks. Say that Bill, Jane, and Ellen are assigned responsibility for collaborating on a critical analysis, document, or piece of code. Bill takes the first cut and e-mails it to Jane. Jane reviews Bill’s efforts, takes an- other cut, and e-mails it to Ellen. These three continue to engage in back-and-forth revisions until it’s time to submit what they have accomplished. Have they really collaborated? Only after a fash- ion that was cut to the cloth of individual effort instead of cre-

ative collaboration—they never actually worked to- gether in the same room at the same time. This subtle bias can cripple teams. For example, the engineers and designers on the Gaia Project repeatedly fell prey to rewriting each other’s code without acknowledging it. Only by getting together in the same room could they escape this deadly trap.

• Awkward blend of formality and informality. Groups that communicate through groupware often operate at the extreme ends of the formal and the informal. On the one hand, video and teleconferencing can feel stiff and

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A subtle bias

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agenda-driven—and is best suited for information ex- change but not problem solving. On the other hand, e-mail can invite careless, even insulting, exchanges that quickly become incendiary. Both extremes prompt rules that serve efficiency and politeness—characteristics of the best single-leader-led groups but rarely the hallmark of real teams.

• Overemphasis on speed. A major advantage of group- ware is the significant potential time savings: you don’t have to wait for face-to-face encounters. Because vir- tual work saves valuable time, the temptation is to par- cel out tasks and complete them as rapidly as possible. The lure of saving time can lead to a working approach

that precludes the collective work products and shared leadership that are essential to team performance.

Practical Pointers

So what should you do when faced with a virtualwork challenge? Here is a summary of best prac- tices we have observed. In addition, the box below illus- trates some exercises your group can employ.

1. Convene a face-to-face meeting early on. Regardless of your challenge, get your group together physically as soon as possible to confirm your performance pur- pose and goals, agree on a practical working approach,

Useful Exercises Define Success! Have your group develop a list of its most critical challenges. Pick any challenge from the list. Spend 30 minutes or so an- swering the following question: “How would you know you suc- ceeded at this challenge?”

Choose Your Discipline! Once you have defined success for any given challenge, divide your group in two. Ask one subteam to argue for applying the single-leader disci- pline to the goal and challenge at hand. Ask the other to argue for using the team discipline. Get back together and make a choice.

What Groupware Will You Use? Con- sider and add to this list: videocon-

ferencing, teleconferencing, chat rooms, e-mail, threaded discussions, document sharing, project manage-

ment, people profiles, and contact information. Now, ask yourselves which features and functions you will use and whether you will use

them regularly or only once in a while?

Define Your Own Netiquette! Set ex- plicit expectations regarding the groupware you will use and then monitor compliance. If you have a team groupware site, are people ex- pected to contact it regularly? Are there time limits for responding to ideas and suggestions? Are responses mandatory or optional? Will you permit flaming? Are there any lim- its to tone or language? Who gets alerted on which issues? If people in the group are not participating, what will you do? Will you limit access to files, documents, and dis- cussions? If so, who is in on every- thing and who has limited access?

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E-mail can

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establish some groupware ground rules, and get to know one another.

2. Make conscious choices about disciplines. Distinguish be- tween the single-leader and team disciplines, and choose when and how to apply each. Use performance goals to make your choice instead of the leader’s personal pref- erences or your group’s desire to be a team. Divide your tasks and goals into two buckets—that is, individual ver- sus collective work products. If most of your group’s challenge can get done through individual effort, rely on the single-leader discipline. If most results imply col- lective work products, apply the team discipline. In our experi- ence, nearly all groups—and es- pecially those that must work virtually across time, place, func- tion, and hierarchy—require both disciplines to succeed.

3. Match member skills and per- spectives to collective work products. Assign task and leadership roles in ways that take full advantage of the different skills, experi- ences, and perspectives in your group as well as others you can access through groupware. How- ever, recognize that you will need a realistic inventory of members’ talents and skills to match assignments with performance tasks.

4. Hold face-to-face sessions as often as needed. Some virtual groups require few co-located meetings beyond the initial shaping and scoping session. Others must gather together more often—particularly when mis- communication, confusion, and frustration threaten to disrupt progress. Though the group leader has a special responsibility to make these choices, the best groups encourage anyone to call for a joint session. Many

groups favor a regular schedule of co-located sessions. However and whenever arranged, face-to-face sessions are key to intensive, real-time problem solving while virtual meetings are best for efficient information shar- ing and updating.

5. Consciously shift and share leadership roles. Virtual work requires more leadership attention than co-located work. Your group should self-consciously divide up and assign different leadership roles. For example, ask different members to act as monitors and guides to groupware in- teractions. Also, remember that there are always the roles

of facilitator, note keeper, and discussion leader. Such roles are critical in the world of virtual interaction as well as in co- located work groups.Yet because group members are literally out of sight of one another, they sometimes overlook the value of these assignments. Their interac- tions suffer accordingly.

6. Pick and practice groupware fea- tures together. You cannot assume that all members of your group are equally familiar with the various aspects of groupware. In

fact, it is better to assume the opposite. Thus, it is wise (if not mandatory) for all members to participate in choosing the groupware to be used. It is also critical for members to immediately practice using the technol- ogy together so they can help one another learn as well as determine what ground rules and mutual, explicit expectations for participation are needed.

7. Agree on your own netiquette. Every real team has its own working approach that clarifies how best to work to- gether to meld complementary skills into collective work products and shared success. Similarly, virtual teams must

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Use face-to-face sessions

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self-consciously discuss and choose how they expect to apply technology to their advantage. The more explicit you can be about your netiquette, the more likely it is that your electronic networking will enable rather than con- fuse your virtual interactions.

Master the Disciplines First

Ben Farmdale, the servicemanager on the American Express team, made a telling ob- servation during our interviews: “When I joined this team two years ago,‘virtual team’ wasn’t even part of the dialogue. It wasn’t clear what we were embarking on.”

And so it is with most virtual-team efforts today—the members are not sure what they are embarking upon! They are too easily enticed by technology and lulled into ignoring the critical differences between single- leader and team disciplines. After all, they say,“We have

the groupware technology; we can generate, analyze, catalogue, and access information in far greater magni- tude than ever before! So let’s just get on with it, and let the e-mail fall where it may.”

Most of us have reaped the frus- trations of the get-on-with-it approach: continual miscommu- nications, data overload, and anal- ysis paralysis. We let in too many participants who know too little about their roles and jobs, and growing distrust results. Al- though this is a product of falling in love with technology, the real culprit here is not technology but the failure to master both the

single-leader and team disciplines so as to move forward against the performance challenges. When groups figure out how and when to use each discipline well, like the Gaia Project and Jackie Moore’s AET Team did, they can take advantage of today’s amazing technology and move mountains. ■

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Self-consciously

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