What: Chief Learning Officer article on leading in the digital age.
Posts to which it is related: Controls in Virtual Teams: The Case of Boeing, Culture Matters in Virtual Teams, Building Trust in Virtual Teams, Improving Virtual Team Leadership Using Technology
Bottom line: The article reports results from a survey of 247 executives conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL). The survey, which focused on virtual team leadership, led to several conclusions. First, a communication strategy focusing on frequency of communication and how to communicate clearly and concisely is central to virtual team leadership. Part of this strategy includes creating a central database to store team’s documents and knowledge and using collaborative technologies. Leaders should stay in touch with remote workers via regular phone meetings and email updates of corporate news. Second, leaders must have collaboration and project management skills. Unless there is evidence that remote workers are not being productive, leaders should let go of excessive controls. According to Michael Kossler, lead senior enterprise associate at CCL, ” … the worst thing a virtual leader can do is try and micromanage from afar, especially if there are different cultures involved.” LeadingVirtually.com’s take on the last point is that a virtual team’s leader should take into account the culture of team members while deciding how much control and what type of control to exercise. See the following posts in which we have discussed controls and culture: Controls in Virtual Teams: The Case of Boeing, Culture Matters in Virtual Teams.

What: Wall Street Journal article on the challenges that Boeing’s CEO Jim McNerney is facing.
Post to which it is related: Controls in Virtual Teams: The Case of Boeing
Bottom line: One of the challenges that this article talks about is the delays faced by the 787 Dreamliner. We had analyzed Boeing’s problems as arising partly due to the lack of behavior controls in outsourcing arrangements. In this article, we see signs that Boeing is focusing more on such controls. According to this article, “Mr. McNerney gets almost daily briefings on the plane’s progress. He has insisted that Boeing managers take a more aggressive role in sticking their noses into suppliers’ operations, including stationing Boeing employees in every major supplier’s factory.”

What: New York Times article on self control.
Post to which it is related: Controls in Virtual Teams: The Case of Boeing, Building Trust in Virtual Teams, Overcoming Virtual Team Challenges: After Action Review
Bottom line: The article indicates that we have a limited amount of willpower and that we should use it judiciously for things that matter. The article reports an interesting study in which one set of people were asked to eat radishes while another set was asked to eat freshly baked chocolate chip cookies before solving an impossible puzzle. The radish-eaters gave up on solving the puzzle sooner than cookie-eaters or those who were excused from eating radishes. We have a limited store of willpower; radish-eaters depleted a significantly greater amount of their limited store of willpower than the cookie-eaters before starting to work on the problem. Therefore, the radish-eaters ran out of their willpower and abandoned the puzzle sooner than the cookie-eaters. What does this mean for leading virtually? As indicated by the Chief Learning Officer article and by some of our earlier posts (see the links to these posts at the top of this item), leading virtually requires discipline and diligence. It may be counterproductive for you as a virtual team leader to work towards multiple things at the same time if all those things demand discipline and diligence. You should focus on succeeding on a single “to do” (or a few “to do’s”) that requires discipline and diligence. With success and frequent practice, willpower becomes stronger over time. Another tip implied by this article: since the exercise of willpower reduces your ability to exercise future self-control in the short-term by depleting your blood sugar, boosting your blood sugar in between actions that require willpower (by drinking a glass of lemonade, for example) can boost your willpower for the subsequent action. Now that’s a tasty suggestion!

What: Scientific American podcast article on when the virtual self changes the real you.
Post to which it is related: The Future of Virtual Teams: Collaboration in 3D Web
Bottom line: This is a relatively older article but one that our team came across recently. It reports a study at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. In this study, subjects did one of three things: they watched their avatar (i.e., their digital representation of themselves) running on a treadmill, they watched their avatar doing nothing, or they watched another person jogging. Those who watched their avatar jogging spent an hour more exercising within a 24-hour period compared to subjects in the other two conditions! The rationale: we are influenced more by those who are similar to us in looks, values, and education. Who is a better model to persuade us than our own self? What this means is that we may be able to use virtual worlds to train people on how to collaborate to make them collaborate more in the physical world. In fact, one may be able to think of all kinds of training activities in virtual worlds in order to change behavior of individuals in physical worlds. Of course, it will be useful to find out the boundaries of this effect before we follow it unquestioningly.