One of the benefits of virtual collaboration is that team members and leaders have a number of ways they can complete tasks, interact, and communicate. In this posting, I want to highlight this range of possibilities and draw from my own experience to demonstrate the broad range of leadership roles that can be accomplished virtually. I have a coaching and consulting practice, and much of my contact with clients is virtual. I have often used technology to help me be more effective in my coaching and consulting practice. In essence, I play the role of a virtual team leader when working with clients. My experience is relevant not only to coaches and consultants, but to many of today’s multi-tiered virtual teams (for example, there are many software development team consisting of both a manager and a team lead; in such cases, the manager acts as a coach for the team lead who is working directly with the software developers).

Let’s start by considering the nature of the work I’ve done with clients where I acted as a virtual team leader. Much of the consulting I do with clients consists of developing a work process of interest or concern to the client. The first step is to create a vision. Then we must create a concrete plan to implement the vision with the client’s work group. The last step deals with developing a system to monitor or assess how well the newly implemented vision is working. These three tasks vary along a few key dimensions such as the ambiguity or concreteness of the task, the number of people I’m actively engaging or the number of people who have input into the “task”, and the kind or scope of thinking skills needed to work through the task. Many types of tasks can be successfully accomplished virtually, as I’ll recount from my experiences.

Developing a vision virtually is a fairly ambiguous task, requiring global thinking and creativity. In most cases I have dealt with one individual in this step (an organizational decision maker), but team vision creation is also possible. The client’s vision may be simple or larger than life. I often find they have a “general” vision, but it may lack specifics. First, I prepare for our first meeting by getting a series of questions ready that will help lead clients to specific outcomes they would like to achieve in the future. The technologies I use are PowerPoint, Word, or some other format that can be easily shared. I often discuss this with the client over the phone, or in a virtual meeting (I use GoToMeeting or WebEx). Bear in mind that you MUST turn up your own emotions when leading virtually. Do not expect to get the same level of engagement you get in a face to face meeting over the phone without being in a peak emotional state. To start things in a positive mindset, I often start a meeting asking the client to share all of the positive things going for them lately. It’s a real challenge to express in a phone call or web meeting what would normally be communicated nonverbally with body language. I personally prefer standing up and pacing as I speak. Remember, you must turn your voice up a notch when you don’t have the benefit of a face to face meeting.

Next, I ask the client to use paper and pen to write down answers to the set of questions regarding vision development in the document I have shared with him/her. Again, getting the client involved physically as well as mentally and emotionally is needed when leading virtually. Asking them to write instead of just using a computer is one way of drawing people in. Now I go back and review the questions and start to put the vision statement together in software we are sharing via the Internet while on the phone. The key thing during the “vision creation” task, which is ambiguous and requires holistic and creative thinking, is that I try to incorporate several communication channels and work media and pay special attention to communicating emotion.

The second task is to implement the vision, which requires teamwork but is a more concrete and focused task than vision creation. Implementation begins with disseminating the plan to the work group, and there are currently lots of options for this. I suggest my clients deliver the vision/message in a PowerPoint document. This can be shared with the work group virtually in several ways:

• Using a virtual meeting platform like WebEx or Go to Meeting to deliver a live PowerPoint presentation over the Internet to as many as a thousand people at a time worldwide.
• The PowerPoint presentation can be linked with audio and watched like a movie and distributed anywhere in the world via e-mail.
• A client can be recorded delivering his/her vision presentation and the recording can be posted to a website and be available anywhere in the word, 24 hours a day.

Once the vision is disseminated, implementation needs to be a group effort. The first question that arises from the client’s work group is “how?” How do we get there, how do we change what we are currently doing, how will this affect me? An effective leader will help followers find the answers to these questions. I, as a virtual team leader, help clients get their work group in alignment by:

• Creating process maps using diagrams while interviewing the client’s work group over the phone. New employees can then post these diagrams in their work area as a reference to help them complete their tasks.
• Video recordings can be made of someone successfully completing the task and then be available to followers on a website.

One key challenge for this task is coordination. While vision creation is more ambiguous, this step might also require strong thinking skills in order to translate vision into feasible everyday work processes. Ultimately, accomplishing this task has a lot to do with team building and getting work group members to buy into the new processes being established. Lastly, the work group needs to develop a system of assessing whether the newly implemented vision is working. This task tends to be the most concrete, and often requires participation more than teamwork – this step is primarily about measuring activity. Clients need to follow up to make sure the tasks are being performed correctly and in a timely manner. I connect with the client via the phone and the internet for web conferencing, this time with the client playing the role of presenter so I can see their task assignment process on the PC screen. I have helped clients use various software applications to delegate and track tasks such as:

• Helping clients learn to assign tasks virtually through any of several software applications like Microsoft Outlook. Once a task is assigned the client can monitor when their staff indicates they have completed the task through the software. If the task is not completed by the assigned deadline the client can follow up with a phone call or an e-mail. This technology may help address timeliness but what about accuracy?
• If a client wants to monitor followers virtually in real time to provide feedback there are a couple of ways. Having the staff person use a webcam may help a leader observe the worker but not necessarily the task he/she is performing. Another choice is to create a shared workspace with the staff person on their PC using Microsoft Office Groove. Any documents being worked on in a shared Groove workspace are observable by everyone who has access to the workspace in real time.

I hope this blog post has demonstrated how virtual teamwork (even in a multi-tiered hierarchy) can be successfully accomplished for many types of tasks. The key is knowing how to implement technologies (particularly in effective combinations) and to communicate in a way that is appropriate for each type of task. My experience as a coach and consultant shows that virtual team leadership can be effective for ambiguous or concrete tasks, large or small teams, and broad or focused thinking.

Note: The technologies that I have described in this article come primarily from Microsoft. They are not necessarily the only technologies available to achieve the stated goals. They were chosen simply because I have experience with them.