When I observed the team calls, it was noticeable that the group had a very positive and sociable climate. Team members were very polite and most of the conversation sounded like “Yes, yes, thank you, good idea.”  It was quickly clear, though, that individuals were not surfacing concerns or proposing alternative approaches.  As a result, the team was missing out on the benefits of diverse thinking and the new ideas that can result when team members promote different points of view.

In the course of the team intervention, we discussed how their polite culture, though positive in many ways, was impacting honest information sharing and effective decision making.

Together we created a strategy to pressure test all decisions and make sure that opposing points of view were surfaced. To facilitate this, the group would make a “temporary” decision, as they had done before. Then for the next 15 minutes, each team member was required to brainstorm every possible reason the decision might not be a good one. Questions such as “Who else in the organization will not like the decision?” “What could possibly go wrong?” and“What potential unintended consequences might result?” helped to identify possible objections and weak spots.

After exploring the pressure test list, the team would change or modify the decision, confident that all information available had been factored in.

Team decision making dramatically improved as a result of this strategy.  When I revisited the team two months later, many team members privately thanked me for making the sharing of critical thoughts part of their team responsibility.

Leveraging Diversity in Your Teams

Many virtual teams, like this one, struggle to leverage the diversity of their team members for effectiveness. Most often, it’s because people have a natural tendency to avoid conflict and suppress respectful and healthy differences of opinion. A virtual setting only adds to the problem, as it creates even more of a challenge to break in and suggest an opposing point of view. Without the body language clues and the information relationship that happens face to face, the leader and the team often do not realize what is missing.

Here are three ways to ensure your virtual team truly leverages the value that diversity brings.

1. Create team agreements that encourage a healthy conflict of ideas.  Consider using the pressure test format, or something similar, to create a structure for surfacing concerns and testing alternatives. Another great technique I often recommend is Edward de Bono’s “Six Hats” thinking process. You can learn more through his book Six Thinking Hats.
2. Reward clear and gentle truth telling.  Demonstrate this behavior as a team leader and acknowledge others when they do so.  This will encourage team members to speak up about important issues, particularly when it is uncomfortable.
3. Pay close attention and address personal conflict immediately.  It’s important to make a clear distinction between personal conflict (a disagreement between people) and idea conflict (a difference of opinion or new idea). Ensuring you have a conflict of ideas without personal conflict takes emotional intelligence and a clear focus on team dynamics.

Great virtual teams leverage their diversity by bringing together the best thinking across organizations, specialties, and cultures. Use these tips to ensure your team has more healthy conflict and better results.

About the author

Carmela Sperlazza Southers is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies who specializes in increasing organizational, team, and leader effectiveness in the virtual work world.

Even organizations with the most successful work from home programs confirm that some individuals work better in an office environment than they do from a home office.

What about you?  Here are some of the traits I’ve seen that might suggest working from home might not be the best fit for your personality or work style. Strongly reconsider working from home if:

1. Your favorite part of work is the friendships and social nature of the workplace.  Working from home can be isolating and lonely.
2. You don’t have basic computer maintenance and troubleshooting skills.  At some point, you will probably be required to identify whether your technical problem is related to software, hardware or internet connectivity without support from your IT help desk.  Do you routinely clean up and back up your system?  Unless these tasks are as natural to you as brushing your teeth, you might want to reconsider the home option.
3. You need external validation for your good work.  From time to time, we all want and need to hear from others that we are doing a good job.  At the same time if you find yourself regularly reporting on your work so others will recognize your accomplishments, you may miss these rewards.
4. You do not have excellent time management, organizational skills and self-discipline. One of the advantages of working from home is that you are less likely to be distracted by others.  At the same time, many of us are our own worst enemy around staying focused.  Home can have as many distractions as an office if we are not careful.  And in reverse, without self restraint you could also end up regularly working 10 – 12 hour days leading to resentment and burnout.
5. You do not have an office space that can remain organized and quiet.  Working on the kitchen table when the kids come home from school and want a snack may inaccurately communicate to those on your conference call that you are not prepared for serious work.
6. You have been told (or suspect) that your email communication is not clear or makes others uncomfortable or angry.  Since more of our communication is via email and messaging, we need to be highly sensitive to the impact of our communication on others. Without the ability to fully communicate face to face, and to pick up on the subtle clues around misunderstanding, frustration or anger, we can negatively impact others’ desire to work with us, and not be aware of the impact our communication has on teamwork until significant damage has occurred.

For many people, working from home provides an environment that can eliminate a long commute and provide a quieter, more productive atmosphere with fewer distractions.  For others, working from home can seem isolating, poorly directed, and unsupported.  And while some of these items are skills that can be developed, others may be fundamental aspects of your personality.  If you, or others you know, are considering working from home, keep this checklist in mind to ensure you are both happy and successful in this new environment.

What are your thoughts and experiences?   Share them in the comments section.

About the author

Carmela Sperlazza Southers is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies. Her posts on increasing organizational, team, and leader effectiveness in the virtual work world appear on the fourth Monday of every month.

Here are ten blunders organizations typically make when implementing telework.

1. Let everyone telework. Employees who are effective teleworkers have strong organizational skills, self-discipline, and comfort with a lack of frequent social interaction. Select good or great performers with the right skills and attitudes to ensure success
2. Provide no orientation to life in a virtual office—assume they’ll figure it out. Working virtually requires clear agreements on how and when communication happens and how to keep aligned to goals and motivated by the “esprit de corps” necessary for true teamwork.
3. Provide inadequate technology support. Make sure teleworkers can conduct basic troubleshooting of their own system, and ensure quality IT support is available when needed. Continually monitor issues such as bandwidth and ease of access to systems.
4. Assume your managers know how to lead virtually. Many leadership practices we have learned work only in a face-to-face setting. Leading people you don’t see requires a more sophisticated level of leadership—new skills are needed.
5. Have no structure to ensure collaboration and team spirit. One day every week or two should be set aside when everyone needs to be on site to enable collaboration, the sharing of best practices, and good old-fashioned face time. Though we often are not aware of its importance, the informal team building that happens naturally when people work together needs to become a priority now.
6. Insist on frequent conference calls to share information. Conference calls are for collaboration, decision making and involvement. One-way communication in conference calls interrupts real work and leads to multi-tasking and disengagement.
7. Hold meetings where some are in the room and some are calling in. These types of meetings increase disengagement and feelings of isolation. If you must have these meetings, use our tips from previous blogs: 3 Ways to Put Life Into Deadly Virtual Team Meetings, 4 Tips to Make Your Next Virtual Meeting More Compelling, to maximize their effectiveness.
8. Have no plan for monitoring performance or recognizing effort. Rewrite your performance measures so you monitor results instead of activity. Although this can be a challenge, everyone benefits when accomplishments are clear and recognized.
9. Promote people based on visibility. This is a secret, and often valid, fear of many who agree to telework. Individuals who are seen in the hallway often are selected for special projects, recognition, and promotion. Make sure visibility happens for work results, not just for showing up on site.
10. Implement it and forget it. Telework, whether routine or in response to a crisis, is a change for leaders, workers, IT departments, and customers. Continuously monitor how well it is working for all stakeholders, and build in strategies to both recognize success and improve processes.

Work is what we do, not where we sit. If implemented effectively, telework can empower employees, increase innovation, improve customer service, and save money and time for everyone. Use this list to ensure your effort succeeds in every way.

About the author

Carmela Sperlazza Southers is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies. Her posts on increasing organizational, team, and leader effectiveness in the virtual work world appear on the fourth Monday of every month.

The more that virtual teams become our normal way of working, the more we realize how difficult it is to build the positive relationships so critical for team success.   A face-to-face meeting for team building is best, yet most teams can’t afford that luxury.

So how do you build team spirit when you can’t have a retreat or even just meet for coffee at the end of the day?   The key is tapping into the creativity and lighthearted nature buried within our business minds.   Here are three enjoyable activities to build relationships and team spirit.

How do you celebrate?

• If you search world holidays on the web you’ll find that almost every day is a holiday somewhere in the world. Holidays are culturally important, and how we celebrate reveals a lot about us as individuals.
• Ask one or two team members to share a few photographs and chat for five minutes in your next team meeting about how they celebrated their latest holiday.  What foods did they eat, what were the activities, what was being celebrated?

Guess the desk. 

• Ask team members to send in a photograph of their office (or home office) desk.  Show the photo and discuss what the desk reveals about its owner.
  • Does a bowl of fruit mean the person is health conscious?
  • Are there family photos?
  • How many technological gadgets are on the desk?
• After the discussion, ask team members to guess the desk owner’s name.   The owner then gets an opportunity to reveal him/herself and to clarify or explain anything noticed by the team.   

The most unusual thing …

• Use this as a conversation starter for the team.  When you send out the meeting agenda ask them to be prepared to answer a question. For example:
  • The most unusual thing I ever ate …
  • The most unusual place I ever visited …
  • The most unusual event I witnessed …

When building a virtual team, encourage that fun-loving side of you to emerge. Relaxed creativity can provide just the lift needed to build the positive relationships and esprit de corps that are the keys to successful virtual teams.

About the author

Carmela Sperlazza Southers is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies. Her posts on increasing organizational, team, and leader effectiveness in the virtual work world appear on the fourth Monday of every month.

That’s a missed opportunity.

Reports can be emailed, updates can be left on voice mail, but conference calls are our opportunity to pool knowledge, build enthusiasm and move forward. Great conference calls are productive, interesting, and highly participative.

Want to make sure that your next virtual meeting is more than just a chance for people to catch up on their work?  Begin with a compelling agenda.  Here are four ways to get started.

1. State your agenda items as questions.   Change “Project Implementation Update” to What have we learned so far from the project implementation? or What is—and what is not—working in our implementation?  A question stimulates thinking and prepares your participants to reflect and anticipate.
2. Clearly state who is leading each agenda item. For example, “Fred facilitates brainstorming on the challenges we might face with this implementation. (10 minutes)  Bring your ideas.”  Be sure to include how long that item is expected to take and how meeting participants will be involved.
3. Ensure your agenda addresses important issues that sound interesting and engaging.  Instead of “Regional Updates” try, What are we doing that’s new? What new barriers are we discovering?  Email the spreadsheet monthly reports later if necessary.
4. Build continuous improvement into your meetings.  End your meetings with a very quick poll.  Go around the room (if using a seating chart) or call roll and ask each person for a few words of specific feedback on what went well or what the group could do better next time. Hold people accountable for providing specific feedback.  Instead of “good meeting,” push for a specific comments like, “It was helpful to hear the perspectives from finance on our plan.”  Letting people know they will be asked for feedback at the end encourages participants to pay attention, which improves interaction and ownership in the success of the meeting.

Conference calls and virtual meetings are how we build teams and accomplish work in the virtual world. Compelling agendas make the times that we work together more interesting and enjoyable.  Use these four tips to get the most out of your next meeting. There will always be more emails to answer.

About the author

Carmela Sperlazza Southers is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies. Her posts on increasing organizational, team, and leader effectiveness in the virtual work world appear on the fourth Monday of every month.

For those of us who work at home or remotely, or even in an office, it’s a great time to refocus on what we do—consciously or subconsciously—that looks like work but often isn’t.

Here are three ways that people pretend to work.

Attend meetings

Our egos tell us that it is critical to stay fully informed on any project that has the potential to even slightly impact us. Even though meetings are largely ineffective, attending lots of them keeps you very busy. When you attend lots of meetings your calendar stays full—and yet you accomplish very little. This is perhaps the best way to pretend to work without really working.

Be hyper-responsive on emails and phone calls

Don’t read or think too much about each email, just respond quickly. In fact, responding to emails while passively attending a meeting can ensure that neither activity is truly productive. When you keep your email up all day and respond immediately, you can feel a great sense of “pretend” accomplishment. Since sending emails results in receiving more emails, you can honestly say, “I got 150+ emails today. I am exhausted!” This is probably very true.

Focus on speed and quantity, not quality, of communication

The accepted best practice around emails is this: If the third email hasn’t clarified the issue—pick up the phone. Ignoring this rule means you can have long strings of emails that show activity without really accomplishing work. Make sure you have an email trail that recaps every action taken. This ensures that you can always justify your lack of productivity by pointing to a flaw in someone else’s email.

Have you been caught by any of these strategies? Although I don’t know anyone who deliberately uses these strategies to avoid work, I suspect we have all had extremely busy days when we questioned our productivity and accomplishments.

Just in case you want to be very productive (which you do), here are some tips:

• Carefully choose which meetings, and how much of each meeting, you will attend.
• Focus on the quality of your communication, including reflecting or researching before you respond.
• Let others know your priority to set aside times for focused concentration, professional development, process improvement, and idea generation. Let people know when you will and won’t be available to respond quickly.

Using these strategies will require less energy, less activity, and fewer emails, and therefore will result in higher productivity.

Well, okay … you can still pretend to be tired, even if you‘re not!

About the author

Carmela Sperlazza Southers is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies. Her posts on increasing organizational, team, and leader effectiveness in the virtual work world appear on the fourth Monday of every month.

One thing is certain – trust is at the heart of a successful work from home policy. If your work from home policy isn’t based on the premise that your employees are trustworthy, and if the boundaries of the policy don’t nurture and protect trust, you’ll find that allowing employees to work from home will be an ongoing source of suspicion, resentment, and irritation.

Working from home can provide tremendous benefits to both the employer and the employee. Studies have shown that working from home can increase motivation, productivity, efficiency, and allow for better work/life balance. I know that when I work from home I often work longer, harder, and accomplish more than when I’m in the office.

Based on my experience in managing a large team composed of a mixture of office-based and home-based associates, here are some tips I’d pass along:

1. Have a written policy. The policy should include who is eligible to work from home, technology requirements, communication norms, etc.

2. Be clear on performance expectations. It’s easy for people to fly under the radar when working from home. Make sure goals are clear, regular one-on-one meetings are scheduled to stay in touch, and performance evaluation standards are clear.

3. Deal with performance issues. Don’t let poor performance slide. It’s easy to adopt the “out of sight, out of mind” philosophy with remote workers but you should treat them the same as you do associates in the office. If you noticed an employee arriving to work 40 minutes late every day you’d have a discussion with him/her, right? Do the same with your telecommuters.

4. Evaluate people on results. It’s critical to have some sort of performance metrics in place to gauge an employee’s effectiveness. Whether you adopt a Results Oriented Work Environment philosophy, have employees keep time sheets, or audit work samples, it’s important that you have a method of evaluating a remote worker’s productivity and effectiveness.

5. Be transparent and fair. Publish your policy. Talk about it with your team. Let everyone know exactly where they stand when it comes to working from home. Vague or inconsistent telecommuting policies breed suspicion and resentment in teams.

6. Set people up to succeed. Make sure your remote workers have all the tools they need to succeed such as the right training, technology, and equipment. Remote workers need to be high performers in their role and be technologically savvy in order to operate independently.

Working from home isn’t for everyone. Not every employee has the home work environment, personality type, or work ethic to be a successful telecommuter. Working from home can provide just as many distractions as those found in the office so it’s important to have clear boundaries in place and be consistent in how you apply the policy within your team or organization.

What is your experience in working from home or managing those who do? Feel free to share your expertise by posting a comment.

Randy Conley is the Trust Practice Leader at The Ken Blanchard Companies and his LeaderChat posts appear the last Thursday of every month. For more insights on trust and leadership, visit Randy at his Leading with Trust blog or follow him on Twitter @RandyConley.

What many don’t realize is fewer opportunities means more control over perceptions.

When you work in the office, people see you every day.  They see you when you didn’t get much sleep, when you got stuck in traffic, and when you have a seasonal cold.  They see you when sick, crabby, tired and anxious.

Wise virtual workers ensure that everyone who interacts with them stays positive about them and their work by controlling how they present themselves.

When you work virtually, you can show up in every interaction, positive and professional.   

• On the phone: Before you answer the phone, take a minute to breathe, smile and choose a positive vocal tone.
• If you must have uncomfortable conversations over the phone, (better than via email!) you can prepare notes in advance scripting exactly how you want to communicate the message.  And you can read those rehearsal notes while on the call.
• You can also listen and make notes while others are venting.  Good notes mean you can reflect and show empathy toward their feelings and thoughts without eye contact or having your facial expressions and physical reactions give you away.
• Via email: Consider using the “delay delivery” setting rule on your emails for 10 minutes.  This way, after you hit send you have one last chance to review or reword so you don’t regret later the tone your email communicated.  (I am sure you didn’t mean it that way!)
• Video-conferences:  This is my favorite.  Go ahead and wear those pajama pants when telecommuting, just make sure you computer camera only shows how nice you look from the waist up.

It’s a rare gift to be able to show up with our best selves all the time.  Consider telecommuting or virtual work a gift for your career and life.

About the author

Carmela Sperlazza Southers is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies. Her posts on increasing organizational, team, and leader effectiveness in the virtual work world appear on the fourth Monday of every month.

Be clear on goals and tasks.  People need different levels of direction and support depending on the task they are facing.  As a leader your job is to clearly identify each of the tasks an employee has on his or her plate.

Know your people. Most employees are good at some of their tasks and still developing skills in others.  A good manager tailor’s their direction based on what an employee needs and their level of experience.  For example, a salesperson might be great at booking appointments but not so great at using the new conferencing technology to demonstrate the product.  A good manager will recognize the difference and trust the salesperson to book appointments their own way while at the same time using a more directed, hands-on managerial style, when it comes to using the new software.

Provide the right level of direction and support depending on the task.  In this case, the manager needs to take a very hands-off approach when it comes to appointment setting, while at the same time using a very hands-on approach to learning and using the new software.  As long as the manager uses the right style with each task, it won’t feel like micro-managing to the employee.  It will just seem like active, helpful leadership.

Very few employees are experts at all of their tasks these days.  Most people are good at some and still learning in others.  By adjusting leadership style to fit the task at hand, managers can move their people to higher levels of performance without the danger of being labeled a micromanager.

Immediately after the webinar, Carmela will be answering questions here at LeaderChat for about 30 minutes.  To participate in the online discussion, follow these simple instructions.

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We hope you can join us later today for this special complimentary event courtesy of Cisco WebEx and The Ken Blanchard Companies.  Click here for more information on participating.

Lencioni points out that the key to being a more effective virtual leader begins with acknowledging the fact that working remotely posing serious challenges. As Lencioni observes, “E-mail and voice mail and texting and instant messaging have all become so second-nature that we too often assume that a team member’s physical location makes little difference to the team’s effectiveness.

That doesn’t make sense to Lencioni who uses a family-based analogy to make his point. “After all, no family would say, “Well, Dad lives in New York, Mom lives in San Francisco, and the kids are spread around the country, but thanks to my iPhone and computer, it’s no different from living under the same roof.”

Lencioni observes that simple, daily interactions help build the bonds that people need to “thrive during good times and survive during challenging ones.”

For teams that don’t have the opportunity for daily interactions at the jobsite, Lencioni recommends that team leaders:

• Build relationships within the context of work
• Revisit their purpose, values and mission
• Develop trust and determine methods for hashing out differences remotely

To read the complete article visit: http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/16/virtual-meetings-conferencing-leadership-managing-lencioni.html