Skills required for virtual meetings

We are in the era of virtual meetings where people do not have to be physically present to participate in a meeting.

This is also the result of the financial woes that many companies face in the recent past. 

While this is a significant improvement, there is also an major setback to it. The traditional skills of management will not help you in a virtual meeting. In fact, it is exactly the opposite that will come in handy. 

Here are a few principals that are different from the traditional ones. 

* Unlike co-located teams which benefit from the leader alone, virtual teams need a manager who provides clearly defined direction and removes all ambiguity from the process. 

When a team works together in the same office, you can have loose job descriptions, possibly even with two people sharing elements of the same role. In virtual teams that just doesn’t work. Team leaders have to formalise roles and responsibilities–starting with their own.

* The most difficult task for leaders of global teams is to recognise that their styles of decision making may be deeply rooted in the cultures that they come from. 

Global teams therefore need very explicit descriptions of how decisions will be made, and the best global team leader is one who is willing to try out different kinds of decision-making processes at different points in a project.

* Trust takes on a whole new meaning in virtual teams. When you meet your workmates by the water cooler or photocopier every day, you know instinctively who you can and cannot trust. In a geographically distributed team, trust is measured almost exclusively in terms of reliability.

Leaders of virtual teams need to concentrate on creating a highly defined process where team members deliver specific results in a repeated sequence. Reliability, aka trust, is thus firmly established after two or three cycles. Because of that, face-to face meetings can be limited to once a year or so.

* Communication plays an key role in virtual meetings.

Managers of global virtual teams who sit rigidly at their desks, glued to Skype or videoconference screens, tend to lose their interpersonal or persuasive edge. Walking around or simply moving your arms is just one of many simple but effective communication tricks that managers can use to improve the sound of their message.

Managers with geographically scattered teams need a much broader skill set than those with traditional, co-located teams. More than that, they need the ability to switch between skill sets, based on the diversity of their team members and the distance between them.

courtesy: www.forbes.com