Managing an A-Team of Far-flung Experts Requires Special Leadership Tactics
et’s say you could assemble an A-Team to tackle a business problem. Go around the world, plucking the top experts, the most talented people in their field. They could come from different cultures and different organizations. Self-starters all, renowned in their fields. A team of superstars.
And none of them wanted to travel.
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How would you get them to work together, efficiently and productively?
Arvind Malhotra, the Thomas V. and Janet R. Lewis Scholar and associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, has studied such virtual teams for nearly 15 years, ever since businesses grudgingly acknowledged that business travel involves a noticeable loss of productive time. Companies began using business travel more judiciously.
“The bad economy was the final momentum-builder,” Malhotra said. “Virtual teams are here to stay.”
Virtual teams, also called far-flung teams, are composed of top talent, often from different corporations, who are geographically distributed. Rather than meeting physically in a conference room to share ideas and feedback, they stay in their separate geographic locations and meet virtually.
“Global companies have problems that need universal solutions, which can be developed by leveraging global expertise,” Malhotra said. “Those solutions can only come about by taking a global perspective. That requires a new leadership philosophy, one that manages democratic processes with very few traditional cues.”
While having all that brainpower and creativity focused on a problem has the potential for astounding results, the reality is that, lacking the hierarchical structure of traditional organizations, the team is only as strong as its leadership.
“A virtual team is the flattest form of organization,” Malhotra said, “because it’s a group of experts, and it’s very democratic. But democratic processes are inherently hard to manage. They have a chaotic nature to them.”
Managing a virtual team requires a different form of leadership than the command-and-control method can be used people working in a shared location. Leaders of virtual teams need to use a connect-to-collaborate style in which they connect the globally distributed expertise in a way that spurs creativity. Rather than being an information gateway or hub, far-flung leaders have to create platforms and mechanisms that allow the diverse expertise and information to connect directly.
Team members often are world-class experts. They’re intrinsically motivated and are willing to put up with the difficulties of being on a virtual team because they want to learn from their peers, other experts of their own caliber.
“You can’t just command them into doing what they have to do,” Malhotra said. “How you motivate them is not with ‘I’ll give you a million bucks.’ There is a different level of motivation at play.”
Cognitive diversity enriches any collaboration. Some members are more visual, others express ideas better in writing; some are inspired by interacting with co-workers, others work better in solitude.
On top of a variety of cognitive styles, people from different parts of the world, and even from different corporations, bring behavioral diversity -- different work styles and processes to the team. The leader of a virtual team must come up with a universal process for sharing ideas, giving feedback, documenting contributions, selecting the best ideas to build on, and then moving forward to the next challenge.
Malhotra’s research revealed that successful leaders of virtual teams strive to identify potential team members with the best T-shaped knowledge. Each team member has the depth of expertise in a certain area (the stem of the T), as well as a broad understanding of the organizational process from start to finish (the bar of the T). Team members can see how their expertise fits into the whole process and can contribute their insights into other aspects of the process to help create a better product.
"With T-shaped knowledge, you’ll be able to preserve diversity, as well as understand other people’s perspective,” Malhotra said.
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