The reality is that the composition of my teams in the past 8 years of my work at Accenture has increasingly become more virtual. I know there have been times I’ve struggled to adapt to the\u00a0differences in being a part of, and managing, these teams that are not all located together. Further challenging the situation is the frequency with which the teams change, and the typically aggressive schedule for completing the work. Unfortunately, the training and mentorship I’ve received from Accenture to date on managing virtual\u00a0teams amounted to little more than cross-cultural awareness and how-tos for\u00a0the\u00a0collaboration tools available.<\/p>\n
Yesterday I attended a great lunchtime learning webinar hosted by the Emerging Leaders Network (ELN)<\/a> on “Real Leadership in Today’s Virtual World”. \u00a0Finally, some strategic and tactical tools to learn! The lecturer was\u00a0Kris Wadia, Founder and CEO of Humanized Leadership<\/a>, a global Executive Coaching and Performance Diagnostics firm. He is also a former Senior Executive at Accenture, which further piqued my interest.<\/p>\n The session had a great structure to it: general overview and context of why real leadership matters particularly with virtual teams, business impact of challenges of virtual teams, how to identify challenges before they arise, and techniques and tools to apply.\u00a0The whole hour was highly engaging and informative, and had an effective use of chat windows to pose questions during the session. (If they open up the webinar replay I will post an update with the link)<\/p>\n I won’t rehash the entire presentation, and several items I already use, but there were several strategies and tactical tools that really resonated with me to keep in mind going forward:<\/p>\n I’ll be using these points going forward. I’d love to hear any other tools and strategies that work well for you too.<\/p>\n On a slightly different note, one of the things\u00a0Kris Wadia has in his repertoire of offerings within his firm\u00a0Humanized Leadership <\/a>is a methodology for assessing the effectiveness of virtual teams with a score. Teams can then be reevaluated after a certain time to see whether their effectiveness has improved or declined, in tandem with training and mentorship of team members.<\/p>\n I find it fascinating that he’s figured out a way to put an objective score on this facet of leadership often described as a “soft skill” that does not lend itself well to objective measurement. A soft skill that is often demonstrated at high degrees by women. This opens up the door for being able to include the leadership effectiveness score as an objective data point in performance reviews, as opposed to anecdotal inputs that currently outline this area. Taking it another step further,\u00a0organizations will suddenly have to sit up and take notice of these quiet leaders who have been making their organizations work better without them realizing it.<\/p>\n I’m going to take a wild stab and predict\u00a0that the recognition of women’s contributions, and their salaries to follow, would\u00a0start to rise. Now…who do we have to put this in front of to start implementing it at our workplace??<\/p>\n ~Jen<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The reality is that the composition of my teams in the past 8 years of my work at Accenture has increasingly become more virtual. I know there have been times I’ve struggled to adapt to the\u00a0differences in being a part of, and managing, these teams that are not all located together. Further challenging the situation … Continue reading Leadership of Virtual teams: Strategies and Tactical tools<\/span> \n
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