Leading a Team of Change Agents in a Global Corporation:
Leadership Challenges in a Virtual World

by Kenneth W. Kerber & Anthony F. Buono

You lead a project team or department with members located throughout the U.S., perhaps around the world. You don't have the budget to get together in person frequently, maybe ever. Demands are high, performance is not what you had hoped, and at times it feels like people are spinning apart.

What can you do to enhance the performance of your virtual team?

What is your role as a virtual team leader?

How can you build high quality relationships when people seldom, if ever, see each other in person?

What can you do to manage virtual relationships more effectively using the communication technologies already in place at your company?

And how can you manage performance and ensure accountability at a distance?

Introduction

The pressures associated with getting new products and services to worldwide markets are prompting organizations to choose the best people for projects, regardless of their location. This development has resulted in a rapid increase in distributed work groups, or virtual teams as they are more commonly known. Like any team, a virtual team is a group of people who work on interdependent tasks guided by a common purpose. But unlike traditional, collocated teams, a virtual team works across space, time, and organizational boundaries that often extend across nations on a global basis (Lipnack & Stamps, 1997). Through advanced communication technologies, global teams are developing the ability to "work together apart" (Grenier & Meters, 1992), completing assigned projects while rarely, if ever, meeting face-to-face. Yet, while a growing number of organizations are increasingly using virtual teams for a variety of different purposes and functions, there are lingering questions about the effectiveness of such teams, the role that team leaders should play, and the types of interventions that change agents can use to launch and sustain these teams over time. This paper examines these questions through a field study of a global virtual team and concludes with recommendations for effectively leading teams in a virtual world.

The Attractiveness and Challenge of Virtual Teams

Virtual teams allow organizations to bring together critical contributors who might not otherwise be able to work together due to time, travel and cost restrictions. In addition, virtual teams can enhance the available pool of resources by including people from outside the sponsoring organization, such as consultants, supply chain affiliates or members of partner organizations. Virtual teams also allow organizations to hire and retain the best people, who may be either unable or unwilling to relocate, and to facilitate dynamic membership changes as a result of changes in project requirements or the unexpected loss of team members. Just as importantly, virtual teams facilitate the implementation of corporate-wide initiatives in global organizations and are especially valuable when implementation must be adapted to local cultures.

While many of the challenges associated with virtual teams are similar to those of collocated teams, the difficulties are complicated by the added dimensions of time and distance (Cascio, 2000). Team leaders typically find that gaining alignment and commitment to the team's purpose are more challenging for virtual teams, especially those that are unable to meet face-to-face when the team is forming. Moreover, in the absence of face-to-face communication and interaction on a daily basis, virtual team members may have less understanding of each other as people, potentially contributing to more frequent misunderstandings and conflict.

To overcome these challenges, virtual teams typically rely heavily on communication and information technologies, such as company intranets, team conference calls, e-mail, video conferencing, and various groupware applications to tap into the intelligence of team members. While the expansion of electronic communication technologies has facilitated a rapid increase in the use of e-teams (Kostner, 2001), most virtual teams still rely heavily on travel and face-to-face interactions to create team cohesiveness. Especially during team formation, for example, most prescriptions still focus on the importance of personal contact and socializing between team members as contributing factors to trust-building and the team's success (Creighton & Adams, 1998).

Virtual Team Leadership

Ultimately, the challenge for leaders of virtual teams is to create a level of collaboration and productivity, without travel and face-to-face meetings, that rivals the experience of the best collocated teams, and to accomplish these outcomes against the backdrop of the chaotic changes facing nearly every business today. Leaders of truly virtual teams must be able to facilitate team cohesiveness from afar — a level of cohesiveness that is as high as or higher than when people meet face-to-face — by taking full advantage of existing and emerging collaborative technologies. However, addressing this challenge will require not only the application of the latest communication technology but also appropriate modification of the best of our more traditional methods for achieving effective team collaboration.

A Case Study of Virtual Collaboration

This paper is based on an in-depth, longitudinal field study (2001-2002) of the launch and facilitation of a virtual team in the corporate training and development function at a company referred to as ComCorp. While many virtual teams are created to resolve a particular problem or fulfill a specific task, disbanding once the job is completed (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002), this particular team was envisioned as a long-term, permanent part of the corporate structure. Team members were expected to fulfill multiple roles, problem-solving and implementing solutions with colleagues, some of whom they had never met in person.

The Context and Challenge
At the beginning of 2001, ComCorp was roughly a $3 billion company with approximately 8,000 employees worldwide, including a new President and CEO. Founded in 1979, the company was a pioneer in the computer networking industry. Along with many other large high-technology companies at the beginning of the new century, ComCorp was challenged by the turmoil associated with deregulation of the telecommunications industry, the dot-com boom turned bust, and reduced capital spending for computers and computer networking equipment after the extensive Y2K preparations by many large and small companies around the world. As a result, ComCorp's revenue was declining, putting pressure on the company to restructure and downsize its operations.

Prior to 2001, the Training & Development (T&D) team at ComCorp was a loosely affiliated worldwide group of 16 experienced professionals who, structurally, reported to various Human Resources directors, each supporting a different part of ComCorp's business. Except for a group of individuals who reported to the corporate T&D director, the top priorities for these training and development professionals reflected the needs of their respective business units and regions rather than those of the corporation as a whole. At the end of February 2001, five members of the T&D team left ComCorp (including the corporate director), and the remaining people were centralized under a new director who was promoted from within the group. The new team consisted of 11 people (including the new director) who were located in California (3), Illinois (2), Massachusetts (2), England (2), Ireland (1), and Australia (1), all of whom now reported to the new T&D Director as part of the HR organization.

The Challenge of Building a Virtual Team
ComCorp's T&D team covered 17 time zones and without a budget for travel, the team had to rely on a variety of communication technologies including e-mail, voicemail, telephone, fax, and voice and video conferencing, along with a Web-based groupware application available on the company's intranet that allowed asynchronous conversation threads as well as posting of documents, links, and surveys. The task facing ComCorp's T&D team was to design training and development solutions that matched the needs of the corporation as a whole, while appropriately adjusting the implementation of those solutions according to business unit and cultural differences in a global organization. It was clear from the outset that this complex task would require joint diagnosis, problem solving, open-ended decision-making, and collaboration among all members of the team. Thus, the two most critical issues facing the new leader of the T&D team were to (1) quickly establish the credibility of the team at the executive level and (2) select strategies and tactics for fulfilling its mandate and building credibility throughout the organization with the full involvement and commitment of the team.

Defining a Compelling Challenge
Instead of focusing on "becoming a team," high performing teams — whether virtual or more conventional — focus on achieving key performance objectives that require teamwork (Katzenbach & Smith, 1993). Thus, given the special challenges of virtual teams, especially those doing complex and interdependent work, a compelling challenge that energizes the team to overcome the difficulties of spatial distance and technological mediation is essential to performance. For ComCorp's T&D team, the compelling challenge was to rebuild the credibility of the team at a time when the business contribution of every department in the company was being closely examined with the intent of reducing costs.

Creating Involvement
The changes and complexity facing the T&D team required rich, synchronous communication, yet the distance and time differences between team members radically reduced the opportunities for this type of interaction. In response, the T&D team agreed to meet once a week for 90 minutes on a voice conference call to identify and review the team's purpose and key result areas, modify objectives, understand breaking issues, examine possibilities, make decisions, and assign actions. Given the global dispersal of team members, this required participation by some team members during standard work hours (e.g., 1:00 PM), for others during their evening (e.g., 9:00 PM) and for others during the early morning of the next day (e.g., 6:00 AM). As a way of moving quickly while maximizing participation, the team leader guided team conversations by creating straw proposals, distributing them in advance to team members, listening to feedback from the team during the weekly conference calls, and then synthesizing and incorporating the feedback into written team documents that were accessible to all team members. Other forms of communication — synchronous (e.g., telephone calls between individual team members and face-to-face conversations among those people who were collocated) and asynchronous (e.g., e-mail and voice mail messages) — complemented and fed information into team meetings.

Due to the unique features of virtual teams, achieving collaboration among team members requires a disciplined approach to early team development interventions. The written team documents described in the previous paragraph included: (1) a description of the external business context and the company's internal environment; (2) a clear statement of the team's purpose, objectives and projects, aligned with the objectives of the Human Resources organization and those of ComCorp overall; (3) a description of the major responsibilities of existing and new roles within the department (e.g., the director, operations manager, marketing manager, account managers, and project managers); and (4) a description of team operating procedures, including the high-level objectives of meetings and other forms of communication such as e-mail and online discussions, performance management procedures, and team working agreements. All elements of the team document were developed collaboratively during the weekly team conference calls and were continuously updated by team members as circumstances changed and as the team learned what was most effective.

Managing Performance
Bell & Kozlowski (2002) propose that, in comparison with leaders of conventional teams, virtual team leaders need to be more aggressive in (1) creating structures and routines that substitute for more traditional performance management and team development functions and (2) distributing these leadership functions to the team. Given the dispersed nature of ComCorp's T&D team, it was impossible to closely manage the work of each team member. Moreover, it was clear that such micromanagement would be counterproductive given the experience levels of team members and the need to customize corporate training and development interventions in light of local business unit and cultural differences. ComCorp's T&D team leader established a performance management routine that included: (1) weekly team conference calls; (2) one-on-one telephone meetings between the leader and each team member (every two weeks); (3) evaluation of project objectives against work activity, client satisfaction, and business results; (4) quarterly reports of departmental business accomplishments to the executives in Human Resources; (5) an annual performance appraisal that included an extensive self-assessment by each team member; and (6) a personal development plan written by each employee with input from the director.

Demonstrating Commitment
While the challenges and strategies discussed above set a context for developing the team, a decisive factor for effective facilitation by a team leader is ultimately reflected in the attitudes that the leader has toward the team and its members rather than any specific skills or methods (Mindell, 1993). The feelings with which theory, techniques, and information are applied are often more important to human relationships than the effectiveness with which those techniques are applied. The T&D director attempted to demonstrate commitment to the members of the team in the form of three personal objectives: (1) building the credibility of T&D by adding significant value to ComCorp's business; (2) creating the conditions for T&D to be effective in a fast changing environment (creating a clear identity; maximizing information flow; and ensuring the development of strong relationships among team members); and (3) supporting the success of each T&D team member through coaching, feedback, tangible rewards, and personal development. The director also made a public request to be held accountable for these performance objectives.

Illustrative Team Outcomes
During the T&D team's first year, the team successfully implemented three major corporate-level projects, including a suite of organizational change programs, a redesign of the firm's performance management system, and a series of programs designed to close gaps in ComCorp's business management capability. Beyond the success of these specific projects, conversations with ComCorp's Human Resources executives indicated that the credibility of the T&D team with ComCorp's CEO steadily grew during the year covered by this case study. Tangible evidence included the fact that, over the course of that year, the CEO and his executive team sponsored all the major corporate T&D projects, resourced the implementation of these projects, and regularly reviewed results with the T&D team.

Dynamics in a Global Virtual Team

As summarized in Figure 1, our observations of ComCorp's virtual T&D team indicate that several powerful centrifugal forces act to pull apart a global virtual team. Pressure to pursue local priorities is perhaps the most powerful force encouraging team members to subordinate corporate objectives to the more immediate needs of colleagues in the same business unit and physical location. Casual, face-to-face contact occurs with local colleagues rather than with team members, encouraging the pursuit of local priorities rather than team objectives. This focus on meeting local needs is further reinforced by cultural differences that justify attention to local priorities and by time differences that reduce the opportunities for the team leader and team members to discuss team goals. In a virtual environment, these centrifugal forces tend not to diminish over the life of the team. They remain permanent, disintegrating forces pulling the team apart and must be counteracted on an ongoing basis.

While advanced information and communication technologies are crucial to overcoming these centrifugal forces, such technology is largely an enabler that allows the leader and the team to create counteracting, centripetal forces that bring the team together. First, in order to build a high performing virtual team, members need a compelling business challenge that is personally relevant and energizes them to overcome the difficulties associated with spatial distance, technological mediation, and a lack of direct interpersonal interaction. Second, a compelling challenge becomes that much more energizing when each team member is charged with determining how to achieve it. Therefore, it is critical that all virtual team members jointly define the team's identity, goals, and processes. Third, virtual team leaders need to pay close attention to performance management, not by seeking tight management control, but rather by defining a clear context within which team members are free to make important decisions by taking into consideration local business unit and cultural needs. Performance management in virtual teams is facilitated when team leaders are able to (1) create a clear team identity, (2) maximize information flow, (3) develop strong interpersonal relationships among team members, and (4) utilize online team discussions and document archives. Fourth, the complex and challenging tasks faced by a virtual team require critical attention to team communication. While a lack of clarity around goals, tasks and procedures can hinder any team, such ambiguity is heightened in virtual teams. A primary activity of virtual team leaders is to establish, develop, and sustain lavish information flow among all team members despite their geographic distance and virtual presence. Finally, the effort needed by a team leader to build and maintain cohesiveness and trust in a virtual team may be greater than that required for collocated teams. This reality may place an additional burden on the virtual team leader's commitment to and accountability for the team and its outcomes. Demonstrating high levels of personal commitment, which may be among the most challenging and most highly leveraged methods for achieving virtual collaboration, sends a clear message to team members about the trustworthiness and sincerity of the team leader.

Recommendations for Leading Global Virtual Teams

The distributed nature of global virtual teams creates unique challenges for team leaders. Virtual teams experience a number of disintegrating forces that continually pull them apart, including time zone differences, local pressures, cultural differences, and a lack of face-to-face contact. Virtual team leaders must overcome these forces on an ongoing basis. Communication technology, including Web conferencing, instant messaging, and online collaboration tools, is a critical enabler for intensifying the integrating forces that enhance virtual team effectiveness. At the same time, what is communicated via technology remains the most critical factor. Based on the present case study, it appears that virtual collaboration is encouraged and ultimately emerges — even without face-to-face interaction — when a team and its leader:

• Work together on an important business challenge that team members find personally compelling;
• Jointly define and commit to the team's identity, goals and processes;
• Implement a focused performance management process that is embedded in team routines;
• Create lavish information flow by using familiar as well as new communication technologies to overcome distance and time; and
• Tie these efforts together through the personal commitment and dedication of the team leader.

Footnote

¹ Adapted from K. W. Kerber & A. F. Buono, "Intervening in Virtual Teams: Lessons from Practice," in A.F. Buono (Ed.), Creative Consulting: Innovative Perspectives on Management Consulting (Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2004).

References

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