Improving Your Own IT Performance
Articles by Nancy Settle-Murphy
When Workloads Are Seriously Out of Whack: 11 Leadership Tips
Until now, your team has no explicit norms about addressing workload imbalance. Clearly, it's time to create some before people leap across the virtual table in frustration. Where should a virtual leader (or any leader, for that matter) begin?
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From Bland and Boring to Captivating and Compelling: What Virtual Leaders Must Know
Even the most experienced team leaders can make us weep with boredom. They torture us with their monotone narrations of 10-Mb slide decks. They regale us with irrelevant minutiae, while sidestepping the really important stuff. Their meetings are more like monologues, with everyone else listening from the sidelines. And for the most part, they probably imagine they're pretty interesting people!
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You'd Be a Great (Virtual) Communicator If Only You Could Just Be Quiet
Quick: What's the number one skill successful virtual leaders must have, which is usually hardest for them to cultivate? If you said "listening," you'd be right. Why it's so important is pretty obvious. Virtual leaders must learn to listen for and interpret an enormous amount of information, within seconds, without benefit of body language or eye contact. And we're not just listening for the words that are (or are not) spoken, but also the tone, pauses, inflections, cadence, lilt, laughter, throat-clearing and perhaps the toughest of all, silence.
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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, including the essential work of guiding their teams? One way is to find ways to enable their employees to become more self-sufficient and resilient. Virtual managers have a different set of challenges, given that they can't be present (either in person or even virtually) every time a staff member has a question or problem.
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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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When Your Team Is About To Implode, Watch for Signs and Act Fast!
This wasn't just any collapse. This was a whirling vortex, downward spiral, free-fall-at-a-thousand-miles-an-hour. The kind that you never want to open if you're a Boston Red Sox fan. Yes, baseball is only a game and the Red Sox are just an overpaid, underperforming group of players who ceaselessly inflict pain on their sports fans, 2004 and 2007 notwithstanding. Notice, that I did not refer to the 2011 Red Sox as a team. They were a collection of individuals who each seemed to play by his own set of rules and work toward his own goals. In trying to salvage something positive about my home team's shocking demise,
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Talk Trumps Text for Harnessing Hidden Know-How
Coauthored with Kate Pugh
Let's say your team, which is scattered across several locations, has to produce a complex, time-consuming proposal, with little time to spare. The team scours the web for relevant content, and they discover that others in your organization have tackled similar proposals. How can they mine this hidden know-how, when they are running out of time, and don't know exactly what to ask, of whom, or how?
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Overcoming Time and Distance to Stay Connected, Engaged, and Energized
In a world where what was blindly fast is now excruciatingly slow, what was private is now all-too-public, and where meaningful discussions have given way to a stream of 140-character exchanges, a feeling of disconnection has become rampant across the workplace.
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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, depending on the challenges she is helping clients to solve. She acts as meeting facilitator, virtual collaboration coach, change management leader, workshop designer, cross-cultural trainer, communications strategist and organizational development consultant.
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