By Felix C. Veroya
“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” – Jack Welch
In this current time, leaders are aware that leading virtual teams, composed of geographically dispersed individuals can be extremely challenging. It is more difficult to build trust and strong relationships, guide, and hold employees responsible when in a virtual setting. It is a must for organizations to adapt to a modern way of working as virtual leadership plays a more critical role in driving the overall effectiveness and performance of an organization moving into digital and/or virtual transformation.
Becoming a leader is an intricate job. Failure of your team members reflects your capability to manage. However, although this might sound intimidating to new leaders, they have to keep in mind that no one is born as a leader – becoming a leader can be learned by anyone.
As a virtual team leader, there are necessary skills that serve as key enablers in successfully managing a virtual team.
Given below are skills that a virtual team leader must acquire and practice.
- Know how to use technology to its full potential. As you are running a virtual team, you must know how to use different forms of technology that will help you communicate and collaborate with all the team members remotely. This comes in the use of different communication channels and programs that are most convenient for everyone such as email, texts, file sharing, etc. There are cloud-based programs that allow virtual team members to share files in real-time. Being familiar with the related technologies used in managing virtual teams offers a great way to stay in touch whenever they need to.
- Recognize member’s achievements. A lot of times, the contributions of virtual team members are usually overlooked as compared to contributions in a traditional team set up. Though tapping at the back or shoulder will not be a possibility for virtual teams, there are other ways on how to show recognition for a job well done. Praising the team member during on-call meetings, sending an email containing the team member’s notable contribution, and/or even texting or calling the team member to express your appreciation of the work done beyond expectation are some great ways to practice as a form of recognition. As a virtual leader, you must be able to find other means to recognize your team members’ efforts and more importantly, the results delivered.
- Be hands-on about keeping in contact with the dispersed team. Carrying this out may come in different forms like setting up a weekly group or individual virtual meetings. Regardless of your means of communication, it is essential to become proactive when it comes to staying in contact with the whole team and staying up to date with what they are currently working on, what is in the progress of the work, what are their challenges, and what help is needed from you that will help them finish the tasks, jobs and/or projects successfully.
- Have functional communication skills. One of the problems of communicating online is the misunderstanding between people as they cannot see each other’s facial expressions. Body language plays a big part in deciphering what the other person is trying to convey. As a leader, communication is an art you need to master – it does not matter whether it is virtual or personal. Learn different tones when writing an email, do not be afraid to use emojis in instant messaging – things like these would be extremely helpful. Setting a tone that promotes openness can help team members be more open to you as their virtual leader.
- Know how to motivate employees. A virtual team must involve strong relationships between members, and this starts with the leader. You must know how to express your trust to your team members. Motivating them is another thing you need to be good at. They work best when they know that their leader trusts them and believes in them. Virtual team motivation comes in different forms like sharing some good quotations you read from a book or news article to videos you watched from online streaming websites or even personal stories that can uplift their spirit to work on their full potential.
- Set and track goals. Unlike a typical team that can be led and tracked by the leader throughout the entire process, a virtual team’s overall performance is assessed by the results they deliver. However, you can still monitor measures that will ensure your employees are on the right track. Give them specific deadlines and check on them from time to time on how they are progressing about the target. What you want to avoid, however, is putting pressure on them. You do not have to check with them every step of the way – you do not have to tell them to report to you every day. As mentioned earlier, you need to trust them. Your goal is to make sure they are doing their job, but at the same time, make them feel that you know that they know what they are doing, and they are doing it well.
- Have realistic expectations. This still has to do with putting pressure on your team members. You have to keep in mind that a lot of these virtual workers choose to work online because they love the flexibility of working on their terms when they are comfortable. You do not have to expect them to be online every waking moment you want to talk to them. If you send them a message, do not expect they should get back to you immediately. Being a leader does not mean that it is okay to demand – learn how to ask properly.
- Empowerment. While it is important not to put so much pressure on your team members, it does not mean you need to be lenient. As a leader, it is still important to exercise authority to make sure that the team member can complete their assigned responsibilities within the set time. There might be quick decisions to be made and you have to empower your virtual teams to integrally deal with these. As a leader, you must let your team members make decisions and support the decisions they made.
As virtual teams become the new normal in terms of work set up, concentration on effective virtual leadership is also growing. As a leader shifts from managing traditional teams to virtual teams, most of the skill requirements will take a shift as well. It is important to check how the physical distance between leaders and team members will lead to these adjustments to the style of leadership required. The better the leaders are at leading their virtual teams, the more organizations can take advantage of the essential and critical benefits the team can deliver.