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Source:

The 13 principles on the next slide derive from these sources.

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The 13 principles of succesful distance leadership come in two clusters. We

will adress them in the sequence shown.

We have prepared som ”tools”, which are meant as advice for each principle.

These are our suggestions, and you might have other/better familiar tools in

your own company.

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A: Definition: Dispersed teams + distance leadership

Following Cascio and Shurygailo (2003) we define “dispersed teams” as teams

that are separated by some degree of time and distance, and we

conceptualize “distanced leadership” as leadership in those contexts. In our

work, we found it critical to conceive of distanced leadership as being a

function of both physical distance and perceived access to the leader. Leaders

who successfully shape the perception that they are accessible can overcome

many the challenges of distanced leadership.

We also recognize that there are varying degrees of virtuality (Zigurs, 2003)

and various types of virtual teams (Cascio & Shurygailo, 2003). In this chapter,

we examine global virtual teams in which a designated team leader is located

in the United States and team members are scattered across the globe. Thus,

although we believe there are similarities among leadership in various types of

virtual teams. We acknowledge that our chapter looks specifically at leadership

in remote teams. To do so, we first present some background on our topic and

examine some of the leadership challenges in dispersed contexts. Next, we

explain the methods used to conduct the study. Then, we offer 13 propositions

based on our research.

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Use this as an opening exercise.

Discuss in pairs, collect input from the group, and write it on a flipover.

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Use the points that you wrote on the flipover. We take much of this for

granted – and it is easy to obtain when you are allocated at the same

site. But in order to obtain it when you are situated in different locations,

you have to work hard and adhere to some basic principles.

B: the advantages of physically proximate offices.

The challenges inherent in distanced leadership become apparent when we

acknowledge the advantages of physically proximate offices. Traditional office

settings provide more opportunities for organizational members to

communicate frequently and spontaneously with each other, the potential to

interact immediately for troubleshooting, a forum in which to directly access

information, and the chance to develop and maintain relationships (Davenport

& Pearlson, 1998). The immediacy of others can foster a sense of

connectedness among people and between members and their organization.

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From the studies conducted about leading from afar – these are the most

predominant challenges.

Use the challenges to create recognizability from the participants: ”Can you

recognize any of these challenges?”.

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The most predominant feeling for the distance employee is isolation. You are

dispersed from the main organization, your colleagues, any influence, news,

etc.

Give examples from your everyday life.

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Bring this in – and ask for more challenges.

C: Challenges in dispersed teams

When individuals are scattered across the globe, fewer opportunities to incorporate informalcommunication exist. Instead of feeling connected to their organization and leader, distancedemployees often feel isolated from their leaders and from events that take place at the central organization. As a result, distanced leaders often must cope with their geographicallydispersed employees’ feelings of isolation from other organizational members, from theirleadership, and from “their organization”. Although face-to-face (F2F) teams can experiencethese same challenges, these issues are more pronounced in dispersed teams for tworeasons. First, geographic dispersion greatly enhances the complexity of establishing effectiveinteractions for meeting leadership challenges. We uncovered that the major challenges of distanced leadership revolve around issues of isolation and trust that in turn challengemembers’ sense of identification with the organization and with the leader. On a global level, we also found that these issues are further complicated by cross-cultural communicationdifferences. The second reason these challenges are more pronounced in dispersed teams is that virtual teams today are more likely to be formed for a limited time and then disbandedwhen tasks are completed. This is a leadership challenge, because the dynamics that helpteams become effective require time to develop. An empirical study of virtual teams in an international educational setting found that the leaders rated as “effective” by their membersdemonstrated a “mentoring” quality characterized by understanding, empathy, and concern for team members. In other words, effective distanced leaders are adept at building and maintaining relationships with those they lead from afar. It is concluded that a primarydifference between leading virtual teams and colocated ones is limited opportunities for virtual team leaders to project these qualities to their members. In this chapter, we offer somesuggestions to virtual team leaders who seek to exhibit these qualities over time and space.

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Challenges for the distance employee – in themes.

Run them through quickly – pick a few to “double click” on – and bring in a few

examples from your own experience.

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Challenges for the distance employee – in themes.

Run them through quickly – pick a few to “double click” on – and bring in a few

examples from your own experience.

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Everybody identifies with somebody/something all the time.

We identify with a football team, a family, people that look like us, sex,

ethnicity, interests, etc.

So, if you don’t work hard as a distance leader in order to make your

employees identify with you, they will create an identification somewhere else.

And then you loose.

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Create identification for “free”.

Here are a few “quick gains” too create identification.

Symbols Matter and create value

Because people in remote sites often have little everyday communication with leaders, the symbols the leader uses matter even more. Do employees always visit the leader, or does the leader make it a point to visit them? What is on the walls of the offices at the headquarters and on those at a distance? Are distanced membersincluded in pictures that are hanging on the walls at headquarters and vice versa?

In one organization, the manager of a globally dispersed team keeps flags of eachnation represented on the team in his office. Another company, a Korean organizationwith a large presence in the United States, understood the symbolic value to Koreanemployees working in the United States of ensuring that cafeterias in U.S. locations served both American and Korean food. In contrast to these positive symbolic moves, a U.S.-based software company had major complaints from distanced employees thatalthough the organization claims to be international, all “family” or “social” events happened only on the headquarters’ campus. Or, contrast those positive examples to an energy services company that refuses to offer financial support for employees whorequest language training for the country they will be working in. The key thing aboutthese examples is not the specific behaviors or policies. It is the positive (or negative) symbolic value that these actions communicate to employees.

Many interviewees felt that one of the most important tactical and symbolic steps leaders can take is to make regular personal visits to the remote sites.

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The studies concludes unanimously that what really matters in terms of

identification and motivation is availability.

Ask the participants how it is to sit next to your leader on the same location –

and he/she is never present?

So the point is that you have to find out what availability means in your area of

responsibilty and how this feeling can be achieved in order to limit the feeling

of isolation and create identification.

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The overall point in leading from afar is that whatever you do you have to

consider this: ”Am I creating isolation or identification?”. There is no such thing

as neutral – either you do or you don’t.

Draw the central figure on a flipover and use this for showig this main point.

Keep it on the wall and relate to it during the entire session.

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The first thing we will adress is the management part of the leadership role.

Management is pointed out in the studies as more important on the distance

than in a traditional office setting. What is most important related to this is the

ability to adhere to the agreement made. If you don’t adhere to them (forget to

do it, prioritize differently, etc.), the consequence is multiplied whith the

distance to the employee. The farther away you are from the employee, the

stronger the symbolic effect. The employee will feel the isolation and it will be

hard to trust you again (identify with you).

Therefore, discipline and consistency are the key words. Make good

agreements and stick to them.

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One way of making agreements is to make a distance management “Charter”.

This slide shows the focus areas where studies show that if you adress these

areas and make the agreements, you adress the most important areas in a

leader/employee professional relation.

We will examine these areas and give you tools and/or advice.

We will start with looking at objectives and objective setting.

It is important that you have agreed on how to set up goals so that it makes

the same sense to you and the distance employee.

The next step is to create a line of sight. This mean that when you have

agreed on the objectives, you have also agreed on which efforts has to be

implemented to get there (and together consider barriers).

Thirdly, you have to adress the competences needed to do the effort.

If both leader and employee have this slide on their screen, you can together

run an objective break down process from a distance.

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The next issue of importance is to prioritize.

For the next step use the ship as a metaphor. The ship is loosing power – what

will you decouple first? Bring the metaphor to the next slide.

If you don’t give or agree on how to prioritize, the employee will make his/her

own list. It is difficult for the leader to follow up on a daily basis, or it is difficult

for the employee to ask you and get a quick answer. Because of that, you

have to agree on the efforts to be made beforehand. It will give the employee a

mandate to operate within.

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Exercise

Sum up by asking if they are sure their employees know how they prioritize

already?

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The next step is ”organization”.

The overall rule or principle is ”transparency” about organizational issues to prevent

potential role/ressource conflict. You must make it easy for the employee to create an

identification with you and reduce dilemmas. Surveys show that handling of dilemmas

in everyday worklife is one of the most important factors in how the distance

employee perceive his/her worklife. Every time the employee faces a dilemma, there

is a posibility that the employee will create an identification somewhere else than with

her/his base organisation.

If there is a ”local” manager at the distance location, you have to make sure that you

and the ”local” manager have mechanisms to coordinate. You have to create a clear

governance about when, how, how much, etc. the local manager can use the

ressource the distance employee is. It prevents the distance employee from

considering where to put his/her loyalty.

Professional interaction: If you work with sales and the rest of the local office is

working with eg. IT, where do you get your professional sparring from on a daily

basis. That is also one of the major challenges the distance employee faces. On the

other hand, if you as a distance leader provide the employee with professional

sparring by arranging that locally or from a distance, it doubles up on the identification

with you as a distance leader.

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The next step is to give a mandate.

The benefit of a mandate is to empower the employee and remove the ”grey

zones” that lead to isolation.

Find out how much mandate you can give without getting the ”loss of control”

feeling? And how much your employee needs to work and make the right

decisions.

Agree on that, document that agreement, and distribute it.

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Effective distanced leadership: Media Choices and Equal Access Matter

Communication is the essence of distanced teamwork. Although F2F communication is unimportant. distance leaders often must by definition use technological media (e.g. e-mail, video conferencing, or computer-assisted meetings) to communicate with distancedemployees. Which media are used as well as access to equal media are critical to effective distanced teamwork.

One part of the challenge is to use the appropriate media for each message. When leaders opt for inappropriate media choices, theychallenge teamwork. Given the increasing assortment of media, which are then appropriate under what conditions for leading from afar?

Work on media richness and social presence reveals that some media are better than others for certain kinds of messages. Media richness theory posts that media vary in the number of cues available. F2F communication is considered the “richest” medium, because it allows for immediate feedback and engages multiple information-processing cues. Slightly less rich is the telephone, because communicators are unable to pick up on visual cues. The media richness hypothesis supports that managers ought to userich media to communicate highly equivocal information and lean media for less equivocal information, as leaner media, such as written messages or e-mail, do not allow for immediate feedback.

For instance, it would be more appropriate, rather than traveling across time zones to handle a crisis, that the leader opts to send an e-mail. Appraisal, conflicts, and even recognitions are best done F2F for three reasons. First, F2F communication represents the richest media with the most cues. The probability of misunderstanding is lowest with F2F exchanges according to our respondents. Second, F2F communication permits rich interactions. If a person does not understand something, he or she can ask right away. Third, there is a symbolic dimension to the communication media one chooses to use. A senior boss who flies across the Atlantic to congratulate a team for a successful quarter is doing something symbolically far more important than the same leader who sends an e-mail with congratulations.

In addition, there are a number of new communication skills distanced team members need to learn. Some seem simple (e.g. whendoing a telephone meeting, head nods do not communicate because people at a distance cannot see the nods); other skills are more complex (e.g., juggling, as one large company does, instant messenger chats while negotiating with other companies using tele-conference).

Distanced team members often suffer from distinctly different levels of access to communication technologies: Some locations willhave highly sophisticated media (e.g. video conferencing or high-speed broadband access), while other locations will have unitedequipment (e.g. telephone and 56K baud modem connections). The consequences of this disparity are enormous. The “sophisticated” team members communicate in very different ways than the “poor” members. The ”poor” team members are, de facto, excluded and, as one person said, “ghettoized” by their limited access to communication technologies. A consistent finding in our research is the importance of team members having equally sophisticated technology for communication.

So the point is to analyze and agree on which media is best suited for what message? What to use for what?

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Choose the media that is suitable for the purpose.

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Example: If six weeks into leading a team, the leader establishes a new rule that says

people must answer their e-mails within 24 hours, everyone on the team knows that the reasonthe leader is creating the rule is because of one person on the team who already gained a reputation of not promptly responding to e-mails.

The reason why rules should be established when a team is created is interesting. Respondents said that if a leader waits to establish rules until some problem has arisen, thenany rule the leader makes will reflect someone’s misbehavior.

Effective distanced leadership: Expectations and Ground Rules about CommunicationNeed to be Established from the Start.

One leader established the ground rules for meetings mentioned on this slide based upon her experiences leading distanced teams.

When employees are geographically separated from their manager or executive, they do not have the day-to-day frequent contact to figure out what makes their leader “tick.” To overcomethis lack of F2F contact, one leader highlighted the importance of articulating his expectations— both for performance and interaction — with distanced individuals up front. A leader’sexpectations for interaction with others, both local and distanced, are rarely articulatedexplicitly. Leaders should consider creating e.g. an “e-mail protocol” that they follow and encourage others to follow. The protocol may state that leaders should try to respond to e-mails within one business day. When a thorough response is impossible in one day, leadersmay then wish to send a brief reply acknowledging receipt of the message. Another e-mail protocol may be to limit the length to less than one page. If e-mails will exceed one page, the sender should be encouraged to send an attachment.

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Effective distanced leadership: Meeting Management is Critical to Distanced Teams.

By e-mailing or faxing agenda items to be discussed, spreadsheets to be reviewed, as well as copies of presentation slides that will be used during the meeting, leaderscan increase the efficiency and productivity of long-distance meetings.

When some or all members of a team work at a distance, however, regularlyscheduled meetings are critical. As more than one of our informants pointed out, if you do not have regular meetings, people are forgotten. And, even when they are not forgotten, they may assume that others “know” things they do not. This seemsespecially true with what might be called semi-dispersed teams, in which somemembers are co-located and others are at a distance. The co-located employees, because of their proximity, are often perceived to be “in the know.” Thus, distancedleaders must establish regular communication patterns with distanced employees. These interactions must be ones that leaders and followers can anticipate. Interviewees report successfully using one-on-one weekly or biweekly phone callswith distanced employees.

One concern with establishing these weekly structured conversations is that there willbe nothing to talk about and both parties will lose valuable business time. But the interviewed leaders said that even if they did not have a pressing issue on the agenda, they still engaged in conversation with employees. They may have talkedabout the weather for a while, but inevitably halfway through the conversation oneoften would raise a business-related issue. If nothing else, these one-on-ones provide frequent opportunities to build relationships.

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Effective distanced leadership: You “Sell” to Distanced Locations, You Do not “Tell” Them

Successful leaders have to entice employees to internalize the overall vision and goals. As severalinterviewees commented, if distanced individuals have not “bought into” an idea or a project, they maynot engage in the desired action. They may drag their feet or they may leave the organization. For thisreason, long-distance leaders’ ability to influence becomes an indicator of their effectiveness. If long-distance employees truly internalize an idea or philosophy, they will be inspired to perform.

Building relationships is also critical:

Influencing from a distance is extremely difficult. It requires a basic relationship with the person beforeyou can begin to influence. For example, what is the person‘s historv in the company; what are theirgoals, hopes, and aspirations; what are the person’s likes and dislikes? This basic relationship must beestablished. As one interviewee indicated, leaders must consider the context of the people they aretrying to influence.

Successful influencers are those who not only build relationships with the person they are attempting to influence, but also with those around the people who hold critical roles in that individual’s professional life.

One interviewee spoke about the reality of the corporate world for remote individuals:

In my experience, even when in a particular role, the likelihood that they (remote individuals) will betaking 100% direction from the US is stated in the extreme. Reality for that person is that his or her long-term success, their personal advancement, their career is not in your hands. It is in the hands of the management team back home [at the remote site], who will place them in their next job, who willdetermine what their raises and pay are, their rewards. And even if you could have a certain amount of control over their salary during the time they report to you, there is no two ways around it, their future is in the hands of the people in the country.

Another key part of influencing others over time and space is communicating the big picture. One of the major challenges, leaders report, with some distanced teams is the tendency for employees located at a distance to have a ”job shop” mentality. People at a distance execute demands rather than make them. And, they often do not understand why the demand was made in the first place.

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Effective distanced leadership: Overcome the Challenge of Multiple Leaders

In many cases, the distanced employee will have a variety of managers making assignments. Theseassignments may be contradictory, placing the distanced employee in a difficult position. In oneorganization, for example, a six sigma "master black belt” who was assigned to work in South America reported directly to the country manager but was expected to be responsive to almost 20 other peoplelocated in the United States, who were leading a quality initiative in different parts of the company.

The key to the multiple management challenge is communication among managers. Respondents in ourinterviews were clear that a major task of a team leader is to ensure that the multiple leaders coordinateand offer consistent direction. Someone must be responsible for prioritizing tasks for the emplovee and for claryfying the reporting structure.

The implications of this are many. First, leaders need to select employees who are able and comfortableworking independently from supervision. Some employees need the predictability and discipline of beingphysically proximate to managers. For those individuals, if the boss is not around, work does not happen. Other individuals perform flawlessly without day-to-day supervision. They are, as one manager said, “self-starters. They seek projects and accomplishments with little or no supervision. Optimally, these arethe individuals who should be working from afar.

Second, trust is critical, and it is a two-way street. While most of the work on distance talks about the roleof the subordinate’s trust in their boss and the organization, the opposite is just as important: the boss and organization must deeply trust their distanced employees. O’Hara-Devereaux and Johansen (1994) go so far as to contend that only trust can prevent a geographic distance from becoming a psychologicaldistance. In practical terms, leaders of geographically distanced others need to “trust” that others intendto get the job done and that they have the expertise to accomplish specific objectives and vice versa.

Third, the distanced leader must deal with the emergence of informal leaders at different locations. Work on this reveals that often times individuals on a team emerge as leaders without any official pronouncement. These people emerge because of their task or social skills. In many teams, the informalleader has more influence on team members than the formal leader. In distanced settings, informalleaders are to be expected. The issue is how the formal, assigned leader handles this emergence. Smart distanced leaders celebrate informal leaders, understanding that these individuals can aid them in getting tasks accomplished. They are going to arise, so why not use them.

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Effective distanced leadership: There are Two Stages to Long-Distance leadership

In the interviews with seasoned distanced leaders, it became clear that there are twostages to leading a team from afar. The initial stage happens when a team is firstcreated or when a new leader is announced for an existing team. Successful leadersunderstand that this is the stage where F2F communication is essential, as during thistime people are building trust and coming to know one another. Trust is of paramountimportance in creating and maintaining effective relationships over a distance (Lipnack & Starnps, 1997; Nilles, 1998). Trusting relationships promote open, substantive, and influential information exchange (Early, 1986) as well as reducetransaction costs (Cummings & Bromiley, 1996; Handy, 1995). Trust is the glue of the global workspace (O’Hara-Devereaux & Johansen, 1994). The second stage, whichwe call the “maintenance stage”, occurs after a trusting relationship between manager and subordinate is established.

This is not to suggest that leaders should forget about using F2F communication afterestablishing a relationship, however, in the maintenance stag,e F2F communication is still critical for some issues, but the leaders can successfully manage the day-to-dayissues of their teams from afar, mostly by using technologies such as telephone, e-mail, and video. The problem is that if a leader does not engage inF2F exchangesduring the initial phase, it becomes difficult for that leader to successfully manageduring the maintenance phase. When employees have spent time with the manager, misunderstandings are far less likely to occur and negatively impact the relationship.

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Effective distanced leadership: Cultural Nuances Matter

Different cultures have different holidays, members work at different times, and

they have different beliefs about what is, and what is not, ethical. We found

that it is critical for leaders to stay tuned to these cultural matters.

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