A
NEWSLETTER FROM HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING
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REPRINT NO. C0012F |
Creating
Successful Virtual Organizations
The
three essential communication skills every company needs
today
In Many Ways, the world of work today is utterly different
from even a decade ago. You work with teams of people
you never see - and may have never met except in the virtual
sense. If you do have a place of work, the people in it
come and go at all hours, in various states of dress ranging
from the traditional to the bafflingly outré. It
is not improbable that you work out of your home, at least
some of the time.
Moreover, people come and go from employment in your
company with astonishing rapidity. Some work for other
firms that are temporarily connected with you in joint
alliances. Some work for subcontractors that have long-term
relationships with your company, and some simply work
for themselves, having given up on corporate employment
altogether.
All of this complexity adds up to one certain issue:
good communication has become more difficult than ever.
How do you ensure that it happens successfully, and often
enough to get the job done? What are the new ground rules
of communication in the virtual age?
At its heart, virtual communication puts stress on three
competencies that have always been important: accountability,
trust, and adaptability. Following is a survey of expert
insight into the new communications rules of the road
in these three essential areas.
Ensure
accountability
Psychologist
Tom McDonald stresses the need for accountability in an
article in Successful Meetings. "Ironic as
it may seem, virtual teamwork starts with a high emphasis
on individual responsibility, rather than on group thinking."
McDonald argues, "Team members are very clear about
what their individual jobs are, and, frankly, want to
be left alone to do them. Achievement is uppermost in
their minds. They take their jobs seriously and expect
each team member to do the same."
McDonald
cautions, however, that "at times this individualism
can be overdone. When you have a group of these powerful
individuals hell-bent on doing their own thing, you've
got a real coordination challenge on your hands. The best
way to approach it is to give team members a lot of room,
and rest secure that they'll do the job well, even if
it's done in their own way."
There
are pitfalls to the focused approach of the virtual team.
McDonald admits, "Being so task-focused," McDonald
notes, "team members can easily miss the subtleties
of tricky interpersonal dynamics." To counteract
this potential problem, give your teams practical training
in how to listen and other communications skills. But
keep it practical - these virtual workhorses don't want
their time wasted.
Build
trust
For
Dennis S. Reinu and Michelle L. Reina, principals in an
organizational development research and consulting firm
and authors of Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace:
Building Effective Relationships in Your Organization,
the basic issue is the establishment of a solid trusting
relationship. Without that, virtual work is impossible.
They identify three kinds of trust that employers must
address to be successful: contractual, communication,
and competence trust.
Contractual
trust is, fundamentally, doing what you say you will
do. You need to manage expectations, establish clear boundaries,
delegate appropriately, honor your agreements, and above
all, be consistent in your words and actions. This kind
of trust is especially frail in today's workplaces because
of the legacy of layoffs, downsizing, and reorganization
that reengineering and economic problems have brought
to the modern corporation.
You
simply cannot keep the trust of your workers if you exhort
them to work hard on behalf of the corporation, on the
one hand, and lay hundreds or thousands of them off on
the other. No matter how sincere your intentions, your
employees will see inconsistency and indeed hypocrisy
in those two sets of behaviors - and judge you accordingly.
The result will be a workplace that focuses more on internal
politics than on getting the job done.
Communication
trust is, at its heart, a question of honesty and
disclosure. You have to be willing to share difficult
truths with your employees, admit your mistakes, give
honest feedback, and at the same time maintain confidentiality.
That's a tricky path to negotiate, and one on which many
an executive has stumbled while trying to find the right
balance between openness and company confidentiality.
The
third kind is competence trust - respecting your
teammates' abilities and skills, as well as your own,
and helping others learn new skills. It means involving
other rather than trying to do it all yourself.
Learn
to adapt
Finally,
William E. Fulmer, author of Shaping the Adaptive Organization,
holds adaptability to be at the core of the new communication
style needed in today's workplace. At the heart of Fulmer's
argument is the idea that corporations today will succeed
or fail depending on how well they can constantly take
in data about their changing business landscape and then
communicate that understanding throughout their organizations.
Business
leaders must scan the terrain with attention and insight
as never before, because the terrain is changing so fast
and because it is so important to business success in
a consumer-driven marketplace. But that's only half the
story. Companies then must build their organizational
communications - indeed their very organizations - around
this understanding of the terrain. Once the terrain is
understood, the business leader must articulate a clear
sense of direction forward, without becoming locked into
one path and one way of doing things. Every employee needs
to know precisely what the company's business is every
day in order to be empowered to realize opportunities
and correct mistakes at ground level.
Fulmer
writes, "The leaders at several large organizations
I have examined have been especially successful at articulating
a clear direction for their employees." The secret
to making things clear? Keep it simple, communicate your
goals to everyone, and incorporate your values in everything
that you do. Further, Fulmer offers strategies for bringing
this clarity to your everyday practice: encourage individual
learning and then share it, promote responsible risk-taking,
create an atmosphere of openness, treat employees as owners
- and continually "listen" to what's going on
out there in the business terrain you inhabit, committing
yourself to the painful job of being willing to change
direction precisely when things seem to be going well,
and there is every reason to take success for granted.
As
Andy Grove, the famously paranoid chairman of Intel Corporation
says, "You have no choice but to operate in a world
shaped by globalization and the information revolution.
There are two options: Adapt or die. You need to plan
the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate
fires, so it has to shape a flexible organization that
is capable of responding to unpredictable events."
Copyright
© 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
All rights reserved.
