Improving Your Own IT Performance
Articles by Nancy Settle-Murphy
Speaking the Truth Is Not Always Easy in a Virtual World
Authentic communication, where we bravely seek and speak the truth, is hard enough when we sit across the table, looking into each other's eyes. In a world where we have no such visual cues to go by, it's far harder to decode what's really being said, what's not being said, and what's behind the words, or silence.
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Nine Hidden Assumptions that Kill Virtual Collaboration
Why do companies like Best Buy and Yahoo invest so much in creating a flexible work environment in the first place, if they're so willing to discard it later? Bottom line: Many senior leaders just don't trust the concept enough to regard a virtual workplace as an essential component of running their business. And when the virtual workplace concept is seen as expendable, it becomes much easier to dismantle when times get tough.
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A Line in the Sand Jumpstarts a Virtual Team
with David Kershaw
Virtual teams are hard to see. That's why the boundaries that define the scope, accountabilities, roles, reporting relationships, tasks and deliverables can be pretty tough to grasp. That is, if they exist at all. Why? Some teams simply assume that everyone has a shared understanding of the big picture. If that's true, the thinking goes, then no need to waste time discussing something that goes without saying.
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A Simple Storyboard Commands Attention and Get Results (Virtually)
with Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts
You're in the process of designing your presentation and creating your meeting agenda. Since you will be leading the meeting from a conference room with several of the senior leaders, with others participating from various locations, you know that a critical success factor will be keeping everyone absorbed, engaged and enthusiastically participating in a productive dialogue. Following are practical approaches for presenting important recommendations that grab and keep peoples' attention, wherever they are.
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Building Trust Calls for Different Approaches Across Different Cultures
with Caroline Beery and Manuel Heidegger
Celia, Ben's new team leader in Milan, seemed completely committed to delivering a crucial marketing plan on time when they spoke earlier this week. Trouble is, she hasn't. So far, Ben has sent two "friendly" emails, and just now he sent Celia an IM "just to see where we are." Celia's tone has become increasingly cool. Ben is at a loss. He knows that cultures regard punctuality differently and he's aware that Celia may regard him as a micromanager. Still, that marketing plan must be on his VP's desk tomorrow, or his team may lose all of the needed funding.
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Great Year-Round (Free!) Gifts Everyone on Your Team is Guaranteed to Love
Give a gift every day for 29 days straight? Yeah, right—as if I have the time (and money), with everything I'm already juggling! But that's what a colleague just invited her friends to do. When she explained that such gifts can be as simple as starting a conversation with a downtrodden stranger, making an extra container of soup for a sick neighbor, or even just giving someone your undivided attention for more than five minutes, I was hooked. After all, I wouldn't have to buy anything, and didn't need to put aside much extra time.
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Tapping the Quiet Power of Introverts in a Virtual World
Think about it: There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas. And yet, according to Susan Cain, author of the groundbreaking book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, our society is overwhelmingly biased toward extroverts. In a world that correlates the strength of an organization’s teamwork to its overall success, the real value of introverts often gets overlooked.
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Far-flung Teams Deserve Fabulous Fanfare
Coauthored with Beverly Winkler
How do you celebrate a major milestone? Maybe you call the troops together to share a pizza, or bring in a jug of coffee and a platter of decadent donuts. But, what if the team is geographically dispersed? When asked how they honor their team's achievements, many virtual team leaders come up empty. Sure, they may send a few congratulatory emails or team IMs. But when it comes to planning a true team-wide celebration, few virtual leaders do this well, if at all.
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Untangle your Virtual Team with the 10 Most-Needed Norms
Precious few virtual teams have explicit team norms, even for aspects of teamwork where the absence of shared norms can really trip a team up. Excuses include: "When would we have time to talk this through?" "Everyone pretty much knows how we need to work." "We're too busy." And my favorite: "It's too late to go backwards." In this article, I provide 10 "best practices" norms that can do the most to save time, reduce frustration and boost productivity of virtual teams. These examples include specific actions that can support each one. For this piece, I touch on virtual meetings, decision-making, the use of email, shared documents and scheduling, areas for which a lack of explicit norms can cause especially thorny problems for virtual teams.
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How Virtual Leaders Can Help Others Thrive in a World of Complexity
According to Yves Morieux of the Boston Consulting Group, author of a recent Harvard Business Review article, "Smart Rules: Six Ways to Get People to Solve Problems Without You," the number of procedures, layers, interface structures, and coordination bodies have ballooned to 50-350% over the past 15 years, in a recent study of 100 U.S. and European companies. So with all of this analysis, tracking, reporting and coordinating, how do leaders ever focus on the "real work" that needs to get done.
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Balance Innovation and Expediency for a Supercharged Team
What's getting lost in our single-minded quest for uber-efficiency is the relative luxury of idle thought, where we take the time to line our gray matter with the seeds of half-formed ideas which, with a little bit of nurturing, can spawn big innovations. To sustain competitive advantage, organizations have to innovate constantly. Easier said than done. That's because thinking creatively takes time and focus, two commodities that are in short supply.
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About the Author
Nancy Settle-Murphy, Guided Insights founder and principal consultant, draws on an eclectic and varied combination of skills and expertise. She wears many hats—meeting facilitator, virtual collaboration coach, change management leader, workshop designer, cross-cultural trainer, communications strategist and organizational development consultant.
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