In our FlashbackFriday this week I am taking us back to the 20 Activities for your Virtual and Remote Team. Next month, in March, we’ll be focusing on team development activities throughout the month. You can never have too many.
If you didn’t catch the 20 Activities for Your Virtual and Remote Teams series late last year, I covered 20 different activities – from:
·         Time Management and Prioritizing
·         Matrix Management. Check out Teams365 #1421 around Matrix Management.
·         Work-life
·         Intercultural skills and knowledge
·         Project Management
·         Emotional Intelligence
 
Given that this past month at the Teams365 blog and in the Teams365 Leadership Lab we have been looking at Emotional Intelligence I thought it would be appropriate to zero into the Emotional Intelligence as core skill:

Here's what I wrote in Teams365 #1435:
In the virtual space, helping team members become more proficient at Emotional Intelligence (EI) skills, which not only help with getting things done, but it helps people in self-management (managing triggers, and enablers), and in building effective working relationships.

Under the umbrella of EI we can have more than a dozen skill sets – from optimism, to conflict management, to developing others. It can be useful to have the team take stock of where they are at in each of the four domains of Emotional Intelligence. You may want to dedicate time throughout the year to this topic – perhaps addressing each one of the four areas every quarter.

 “The research shows that for jobs of all kinds, emotional intelligence is twice as important an ingredient of outstanding performance as ability and technical skill combined. The higher you go in the organization, the more important these qualities are for success. When it comes to leadership, they are almost everything.”
 - Daniel Goleman


The four components of Emotional Intelligence are critical for virtual teams. Today we are going to explore the first two – Self Awareness and Social Awareness:

Self-awareness: Knowing ourselves:
Under self-awareness, skills such as self-confidence, and accurate self-awareness exist. You may want to read Primal Leadership by Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee for more on this.
How do we develop these skills in our teams, and ourselves as leaders? As a quarterly activity you may want to undertake an assessment so that the team learns more about themselves and their natural style. Some of us are big picture thinkers while others small picture thinkers. In learning more about ourselves we can understand:
Our enablers – what helps us do our work
Our derailers – things that may get in the way of our work
Our triggers – things that may hit our buttons to either super-charge us to set us back
Our natural styles – where we go to in times of stress or pressure.
 
Social Awareness
The second I wanted to touch on in this posts is that of social awareness. It’s about being aware of, and knowing the emotions of those around you. Three skills exist in this area and as outlined in Primal Leadership are:

• Empathy: understanding the other person’s emotions, needs and concerns.
• Organizational Awareness: the ability to understand the politics within an organization and how these affect the people working in them.
• Service: the ability to understand and meet the needs of clients and customers.  (page225, Primal Leadership)

There are many places we can explore here. Facilitating discussion around understanding our impact on others, or what your team member,  clients and customers need is one way to help team members to build more capacity in this area.

Questions to consider:
What's important about Emotional Intelligence for you and your team?
What learning would you like to do in this area?
What opportunities do you  have to build more capacity in your team in these areas?

​Which I followed up with Teams365 #1436:
Area 3 is about Self-Management.
Our ability to manage our emotions and motivate ourselves is critical for virtual teams. Helping team members understand why we get triggered or other is important
Self-management is about building onto what we know about ourselves and being able to manage accordingly based on our awareness.

Our ability to follow through, motivate ourselves and adapt to change is part of this skill set.

Skills which reside in this area, according to Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee, are :
Self-control
Transparency
Adaptability
Achievement
Initiative
and Optimism

Activities to help teams with self-management usually involve helping team members identify what are their triggers, and what are their habits. It usually involves enhancing their self-awareness as well.

Here's a quick activity to build self-management:
Get team members to reflect on the following questions, and potentially write them down:
1. What are the top 3 activities that provide you with the opportunity to achieve? What are the habits (or things you do consistently) that help you be successful in this area?
2. Think of a time recently when you had to adapt tin order to be successful? What was the situation? What did you do to adapt? What did you learn from this experience?
3. Think of a time recently when you had to self-manage? What triggered you? What did you do to react? how did this reaction influence the situation? What can you do in the future to aim for a successful outcome next time you are triggered?
4. What are two or three areas you can demonstrate more initiative in, in the new year? What would it look like? What impact would that have?

The arena of optimism is another area you might want to explore with team members. There is a continuously growing body of knowledge and practice around optimism.  To explore these question you may want to look at:
What is your mindset around optimism? Are you a glass half full, or half empty individual?
What impact does your mindset have on results?

The fourth area of Emotional Intelligence is that of Relationship Management – Being able to navigate relationships and work effectively with others.
Building relationships virtually is a key priority for virtual team members, perhaps to an even greater extent. In the in person realm, people are very close in proximity and spending time with peers and other co-workers is an every day occurrence. In the virtual space we need to be more intentional in building relationships. Business still occurs through relationships, whether you are virtual, work remote or work beside someone else.

 
You can check out the post which highlights all 20 of them here at Teams365 # 1443.

​This month we've been exploring Emotional Intelligence for Leaders at the Teams365 Leadership Lab. Later this week my second call of the month will focus on building Emotional Intelligence in your Teams. If you are a team leader, or aspiring team leader, I hope you will consider joining us for this annual learning and coaching group which meets twice a month throughout the year. Each month has a different focus.

With best wishes,
​Jennifer

 With the rise of virtual and remote teams, skill bases are changing. No longer do team leaders only need skills, all team members can benefit from enhanced skill sets in influence, decision making, prioritization etc. Given that team members in a virtual and remote team are usually more self-directed in daily operations, supporting team members with these three skills can be very important.

Prioritization – In a business context where it’s feasible to work 24/7 if you are connected into a global network, learning to prioritize means the difference between thriving or surviving. Does everyone on the team know what the priorities are – for you? For the team? For additional stakeholders they work with? For different matrix leaders and teams they interface with? One of the more common frameworks many of us return to time and time again is that of Steven Covey’s urgent/important matrix. Read about it here in this Business Insider article , or Teams365 #121 (https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams-365-121-what-is-your-priority-this-month)  for a very abridged version.

Relationship management – In my book, Effective Virtual Conversations, I remind people that “no person is an island”. The skills of relationship management and networking take on an even greater importance in the virtual space as work still continues to be done through others. What is the state of your virtual networks? Who do you connect with regularly? Who could you benefit from building more relationships with?

Going hand in hand with relationship management is the skill set of influence. When working remote and/or virtually we are constantly working through others we can only influence and likely have no line responsibility with. Check out Teams365 #495 about Emotional Intelligence and the skill of influence. Read it here: https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams365-498-emotional-intelligence-influence

Systematization and automation – learning to systematize and/or automate can also help in navigating the uncertainty and variability of today’s work place. Systematization involves developing systems which help you with efficiency and productivity. For example, if you work remote, what systems do you have in place to allow you to:

• Easily access main files and information you use. This could entail having files in the cloud, on a VPN or via an Intranet
• Seamlessly update file versions and editions you are working on
• Easily access your contact details – phone numbers and email addresses – which synch across appropriate devices

 
Automation can mean many different things to team members including:

• Distributing and updating meeting requests, agendas and notes
• Filing receipts
  

On a personal level, Livewire notes these 10 areas professionals can benefit from getting automated in. Read their July 2017 article here. What could use a tweak in your world?

As you consider your team focus in the upcoming year, what do you know about the skills which will be required?

Have a great Wednesday.
Jennifer

Back on September 20th I started a series of posts that took us through the fall - 20 Focus Areas for Virtual and Remote Teams, and activities you might consider using with your teams.

From vision work, to developing a team charter, building relationships and EI, to making matrix management work, I shared different activities you might bring into your next team meeting, as well as questions which might frame your next team conversation.

Over the last three months I've covered activities in these areas:

• ​Who are we as a team? Check out Teams #1359: Who are we as a team?
  
• Getting to know each other - team individuals
• What's our vision?
• Creating a team charter or team agreements
  
• Team Roles
  
• Goals - immediate work planning for the next month/quarter. Check out Teams365 #1380 on Goals.
  
• Identifying Strategic Goals. Check out Teams365 #1386 around working with strategic goals.
  
• Knowing our strengths (i.e. StrengthsFinder)
• Knowing our styles (DiSC ) - this can impact communication, decision making
• Difficult Conversations. Check out Teams365 #1394:
  
• Conflict Management
• Providing Feedback to Each Other
  
• Other performance management issues
  
• Time Management and Prioritizing
• Matrix Management. Check out Teams365 #1421 around Matrix Management.
  
• Work-life
• Intercultural skills and knowledge
• Project Management
• Emotional Intelligence
  
• Relationship Building
  

Check out all of the 20 Virtual and Remote Team Activities here.

As a former team leader myself I know that many times we are left with the task of developing our team members, and the 2016 Culture Wizard Survey found, only 22% of virtual teams receive any development support. Read their survey here. Are you one of those 22%?

Mid-summer my new book, Effective Virtual Conversations, was released and it's started making its way into the hands of team leaders all over the world. Chapter 7 is dedicated to different activities you can use with teams. Please check those out.

During November I was able to draft the manuscript of another new book, this one which will be for virtual and remote team leaders, addressing the topic of skills, competencies and practices. It will also include 20 different tools for team leaders and their teams. Keep your eyes open for this new book from me in mid to late 2018!

I've highlighted a number of the activity posts here and hope that you will check out the posts, to build your baseline. Enjoy and let us know which ones you have tried.

Best wishes,
Jennifer

After weeks of focus on different activities you might want to incorporate with your virtual and remote teams, we are finally arriving at #20 i our series. Today's activity relates to the important topic of relationship building. Relationships (internally and externally) are critical for any team member's success in the remote and virtual space.

Last week we explored the topic of Emotional Intelligence, of which relationship management is one important component.

Building relationships virtually is a key priority for virtual team members, perhaps to an even greater extent. In the in person realm, people are very close in proximity and spending time with peers and other co-workers is an every day occurrence. In the virtual space we need to be more intentional in building relationships. Business still occurs through relationships, whether you are virtual, work remote or work beside someone else.

What can we do to support the ongoing development of relationships? Here are two ideas for your virtual team.

#1 -  Relationship Mapping (Individual)

When people start their role, help  them map out the different contact people they may work with. With a map in hand (global for global teams, regional for smaller remote teams) walk people through who some of their main contacts will be. In a face-to-face environment we may distinguish between internal and external stakeholders. In the virtual space we want to do that as well, although building relationships with people you are in contact with internally and externally may feel somewhat the same due to lack of proximity. Virtual team leaders will want to help team members map out key relationships they will want to foster.

#2 - Relationship Mapping (Team)
On a team level you can map out key relationships (internally and externally). Have discussion around what you notice about what is important about these relationships. Also flag issues which need attention. Having a visual map can be useful to contextualize your work, as well as provide an overview for the team, and key conversations you are having.

Enjoy your mapping!

Best wishes,
Jennifer

In the virtual space, helping team members become more proficient at Emotional Intelligence (EI) skills, which not only help with getting things done, but it helps people in self-management (managing triggers, and enablers), and in building effective working relationships.

Under the umbrella of EI we can have more than a dozen skill sets – from optimism, to conflict management, to developing others. It can be useful to have the team take stock of where they are at in each of the four domains of Emotional Intelligence. You may want to dedicate time throughout the year to this topic – perhaps addressing each one of the four areas every quarter.

 “The research shows that for jobs of all kinds, emotional intelligence is twice as important an ingredient of outstanding performance as ability and technical skill combined. The higher you go in the organization, the more important these qualities are for success. When it comes to leadership, they are almost everything.”
 - Daniel Goleman


The four components of Emotional Intelligence are critical for virtual teams. Today we are going to explore the first two – Self Awareness and Social Awareness:

Self-awareness: Knowing ourselves:
Under self-awareness, skills such as self-confidence, and accurate self-awareness exist. You may want to read Primal Leadership by Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee for more on this.
How do we develop these skills in our teams, and ourselves as leaders? As a quarterly activity you may want to undertake an assessment so that the team learns more about themselves and their natural style. Some of us are big picture thinkers while others small picture thinkers. In learning more about ourselves we can understand:
Our enablers – what helps us do our work
Our derailers – things that may get in the way of our work
Our triggers – things that may hit our buttons to either super-charge us to set us back
Our natural styles – where we go to in times of stress or pressure.
 
Social Awareness
The second I wanted to touch on in this posts is that of social awareness. It’s about being aware of, and knowing the emotions of those around you. Three skills exist in this area and as outlined in Primal Leadership are:

• Empathy: understanding the other person’s emotions, needs and concerns.
• Organizational Awareness: the ability to understand the politics within an organization and how these affect the people working in them.
• Service: the ability to understand and meet the needs of clients and customers.  (page225, Primal Leadership)

There are many places we can explore here. Facilitating discussion around understanding our impact on others, or what your team member,  clients and customers need is one way to help team members to build more capacity in this area.

Questions to consider:
What's important about Emotional Intelligence for you and your team?
What learning would you like to do in this area?
What opportunities do you  have to build more capacity in your team in these areas?

Have a  great Tuesday,
Jennifer

For many years my work was as a Program Director. We often say that program management is like project management on steroids, where programs may be the culmination of a number of smaller discrete projects. Consider a program such as a post- natural disaster rehabilitation  (or in other words, what many countries are going through now after the hurricanes of this season). As a Program Manager and Director I was very aware of how important project management skills were not only to me, but my entire team, which was spread across multiple countries. As a virtual team having a shared set of skills, practices and processes, helped us to be effectively, reduce duplication, and achieve results. Our 18th focus area in the 20 Areas for Remote and Virtual Team Activities is therefore Project Management.

Regardless of what project framework you are using - Agile, traditional or other, rojects need to come in on scope – on time, on budget and scope. As virtual teams it is important to be tracking projects on a regular basis as it is likely that one task not completed by one team member may have an impact on another part of the team. Getting into the regular practice of sharing project updates before your project status meetings, using a Red, Yellow, Green task chart, can be valuable in helping team members visually see what needs attention, before you come together for discussion. With the prior knowledge of what needs attention you can spend your time on the project status meeting working around actions and solutions on issues which have been flagged. This saves a lot of time rather than having people check in and go-round.
 
Tool – Project Status Reports
Time – Step 1 – Submit Red, Yellow and Green light reports prior to meeting. Pre-submission of project status reports to cut down on report back time.  Status meeting may run for 20 – 60 min or more, depending on how efficient the team is.
Questions to use:
Taking a look at the project status reports:
What needs attention as it has been flagged yellow – needing attention?
What needs urgent attention as it has been flagged red – needing attention urgently?
What could this red flag derail or get in the way of?
What needs to happen in order to shift this to yellow or green?
What exact steps are needed?
Who is going to be responsible for this?

Have a great Wednesday,
Jennifer

We are back to the 20 different activities for virtual and remote teams and have finally made our way to Intercultural skills and knowledge. This is an area which can help teams excel in terms of their understanding of each other, and it can also be a major source of misunderstanding and conflict.

Intercultural challenges are some of the greatest challenges for virtual teams. Without stereotyping team members it can be very important to recognize what team member’s natural working style may be, and how their home office (country of residence) may place emphasis on how things are communicated (direct/indirect), value of hierarchy  (hierarchical versus participatory ), as well as how much is done independently versus in a group. What often emerges in virtual teams is creating a team culture which may not necessarily be the synthesis of all of the team members. As part of your team development process, consider who you are as a team and what you value. As you read through the upcoming culture scales, where do you reside along the continuum?

Keeping in mind the work of Geert Hofestede where we have cultural variances across:
Individualism-collectivism;
Uncertainty avoidance;
Power distance (strength of social hierarchy)
and masculinity-femininity (task orientation versus person-orientation).
Long-term Orientation
He also added Indulgence vs Restraint
View his six areas here. Culture scales also often include Direct and Indirect – consider how direct your communication may be.
 
Another framework you may want to explore is that of Erin Meyer author of The Culture Map. She distinguishes between 8 different culture scales

• Communicating: explicit vs. implicit
• Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs. indirect negative feedback
• Persuading: deductive vs. inductive
  
• Leading: egalitarian vs. hierarchical
• Deciding: consensual vs. top down
• Trusting: task vs. relationship
• Disagreeing: confrontational vs. avoid confrontation

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-culture-map-8-scales-for-work-2015-1
 
As a team it can be very useful to have dialogue and even map yourself along these cultural continua, one at a time, having dialogue around where you naturally fall. This activity could take upwards of one entire team meeting of an hour.

As you look at each of the culture scales (Hofstede, Meyer or other), have discussion around these question:

1. What does activity under this culture scale look like?
2.  Where is your home business context along this scale?
3. Where are you  as an individual professional along this scale? (Pause to have the team note what’s similar/different/interesting along this continuua)
4. Where are we as a team? (Pause to have the team come to consensus or agreement around where you are on this continuum and what that looks like behaviorally).

What is the culture of our team?
What are the five or six adjectives we use the describe our team?

As a wrap up ask the team to share what is important about each of those areas.

Helping the team understand who they are as a collective, helps to create clarity around their own culture, “behavioral norms” and how things are done here. This provides consistency and more alignment across the team.

What are the conversations which are important to have in this area for you as a team?

With best wishes
Jennifer

Our Wednesday post brings us to the 16th in the series of the 20 different activities for remote and virtual teams. Today's posts brings us to work-life issues, a topic near and dear to many remote worker's heart. With timezones stretching across teams, and the potential for working very long hours, having dialogue around what is the balance between work and life is critical. Focusing on creating systems to track and support team members with enhanced boundaries is key. A starting point is to figure out what, and how, each person is working on the team.

Work-life issues for virtual teams can be very important, especially when your team is global and the potential to be working round the clock is real. We are increasingly hearing more about the business case for rest and renewal, and sadly over the course of the last decade since the annual vacation deprivation study began.

Here’s what I wrote back in 2006 based on the new annual Workplace Vacation Study: (link to http://biztoolkit.blogspot.ca/search?q=vacation+deprivation) :
Every year Expedia undertakes an International Vacation Deprivation (TM) Survey, looking at vacation habits of employed workers in the US, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, France and Australia.

This year's (2006) results included:

• 33% of employed adults in the US usually don't take all their vacation, with the average worker surveyed giving back an average of 4 days to their employer. This translates to 574 Million Vacation days/year worth, $75.72 Billion.
• 24% of employed adults in Canada usually don't take all their vacation, with the average employed person giving back an average of 2 vacation days to their employer. This translates to $5.1 Billion dollars per year.

The results of the whole 2006 Expedia survey can be found at www.vacationdeprivation.com.
I was interviewed last week by Kavita Gosyne of the Metro News here in Toronto. She was looking at the importance of vacation for all Canadian workers, and particularly for young professionals. As I mention in her article, vacations are important for workers of all ages. As I stated, "Not only is vacation time good for the employee, but it is good for the company. "A lot of it comes down to the difference between working and working productively. Are they(the employees) working at optimal productivity? Work-life balance impacts company productivity and profitability. It makes (good) business sense.".
What is the state of work-life balance for you? For your company? Are you fully recharged and working at optimal productivity levels? If you would like more information and resources I would invite you to visit my sister blog, Your Balanced Life!

Here’s a quick activity you can undertake as a virtual team – Time Tracker
Time needed 1 week plus 10 -15 minutes:
Materials needed: Pen and paper

Have team members track where their time is going over the course of a week. They may choose to do this by noting their day in 15-minute blocks. It might include: Start of day, projects (take a look at my own mapping from a few days).
Once the team has completed this, come back together and share your insights around key components like:
Meetings
Collaboration with others
Project Focus
Administrative tasks – report
Reading
Personal Development – Training/Coaching/Mentoring
 
It may also be interesting to share your individual and group start and end times.
What does work-life look like for each of you? What does it mean? Depending on your own team this may be a very eye-opening conversation as it may also point to some significant differences in the team – i.e. who embraces a work-to-life mindset (i.e. I work so that I can have money to meet my needs and do what I want) or a live-to-work mindset (I work because of the joy, and benefits of work).
As you have these discussions and undertake this work, what do you notice? What changes if any are needed?

Enjoy your Wednesday,
Jennifer

Matrix management is one of the many challenging elements of being part of a virtual team. In matrix management we are part of several teams, reporting to different bosses and leaders. Challenges arise when there is a lack of clarity with what you need to report on, when and how.
Today’s activity gets you working with your team to map out the different elements of their own matrix management relationships.

Time needed – 10 min plus discussion time (which may occur after the team activity with each matrix relationship)
Materials needed – Pen and piece of paper. Or screen and file

Instructions:
Have people think about the different reporting relationships or teams that they are part of. On their piece of paper have them sketch out who those teams are – names of leader, team members and what the team or entity is called (i.e. Local level team and Hq)
Once each person has laid it out, then have team members write in the top priorities for each team the are part of.
Following from this there may be a series of instructions followed by a pause so people can write things down. Questions/instructions could include

1. Write down the top 5 priorities for this team (this quarter, this year, this month)
2. Think about the leader of this team. What are the issues you need to report on? When do these need to be reported? To what level of detail do issues need to be communicated? What structures are there to support you around this?

Thinking now to the team level:

• How often does this team meet?
• What ways do you connect with the team?
• What type of conversations are important to have with members of each team?
• What are the specific conversations you need to have? With whom?
• What feedback would you like to ask from each team member?
• What feedback do you want to provide to others?
• What else is important to note?

Have a great conversation,
Jennifer

Yesterday we explored part one of time management and personal productivity - prioritization using the urgent/important matrix which Covey made famous. Today we are exploring another popular framework which can help virtual teams focus in on what's important to them. As we know virtual teams today are buffeted by pushes and pulls for everything to be important and done now.

Tool #2 – Pareto Principle
Helping team members focus into what’s important as what gives them the greatest impact is another conversation which can be important to have. In order to explore this, take a look at the Pareto Principle. Here’s what I also wrote in that same Teams365 #941 post:
The Pareto principle, most commonly known as the 80/20 rule is also another useful framework to have in mind when you are considering prioritization. The 80/20 rule asserts that we get 80% of our results from 20% of our activities. 

Teams can benefit from undertaking some analysis of where they are getting the bulk of their impact (whether it is sales, key relationships, customer service etc). Getting clear on these will help us to prioritize them in the larger scheme of things.
 
Questions to have the team consider are:
What are the activities they are spending 80% of their time on?
What are the activities the activities that are giving them most of the results?
What amount of time are they spending on these?
What do they want their 80/20 to look like?
What activities are going to give them the best focus?

Have a great week,
Jennifer