Global, distributed teams are the norm in many industries, and most of their interactions are virtual and asynchronous. This does add potentially destructive complications, but since it is a given part of our reality, the question isn’t whether we like it, but rather how do we make virtual teams work well – just as well as local teams, or perhaps even better?
This is a subject to which I devoted some years of my career at Intel, where I co-founded and led a team we called the Virtual Collaboration Research Team (VCRT), whose charter was to develop future collaboration tools and practices for global distributed teams. In my new insight article I share some of my conclusions on how you – as a team leader – should proceed to make this work mode succeed.
World map image courtesy Masakazu Matsumoto, shared on flickr under CC license.
