A well-performing virtual team makes effective use of a wide range of collaboration tools. After the various forms of communication discussed in my last post, any self-respecting virtual project team must have access to a decent desktop sharing tool. In the past few years, the options and quality available here have grown significantly. To work well for a virtual team, your desktop sharing tool should have most (ideally, all) of these key features: Continue reading
I was just reading an article offering tips to telecommuters. One suggestion was to stay on your boss’s and coworkers’ good sides. It’s easy to write something that someone takes the wrong way, the article said, and because you don’t see them you don’t know them very well.
Have you ever done affinity diagramming? That’s the brainstorming exercise in which each participant in a conference room is given a pad of sticky notes and asked to write as many ideas as possible about an issue or solutions to a problem on them, one idea per sheet. After a few minutes, the meeting facilitator invites participants to arrange their notes on a board or a wall, placing similar ideas together. After a few minutes of elbowing and toe stomping and dropped bits of paper, the stickies end up clumped together and some major answers emerge. It’s a very powerful technique for thinking as a team. Continue reading
One of the most useful things I have learned leading teams is that pictures are a very effective way to help people understand complex ideas. I am sure you have all heard that there are auditory learners and visual learners, but in my experience, a good visual is much better than audio for most people. I have been in countless meetings where a discussion goes on and on with no apparent conclusion or convergence toward an answer until someone goes up to the board and draws a picture of the ‘situation’. The dynamics in the meeting immediately transform. Understanding increases, more people are engaged to help draw the picture, and things get moving again. People need a way to form a mental image of complex problems, to connect abstract ideas with things they already understand. This is why drawing even a simple flow or relationship diagram can help people understand the most difficult concepts. Continue reading