What Color(s) Describe Your Virtual Team?

Anyone who has read my book 'Where in the World is My Team?' knows that I identified six key performance zones for successful global teamwork

• Cooperation


• Convergence


• Coordination


• Capability


• Communication and


• Cultural Intelligence

While effective virtual and face-to-face operational performance is critical, I've been thinking lately of the underlying emotions that support or hinder levels of performance in these zones. Can a team be given insights into its emotional profile as well as its operational profile? The two are surely related.

Obviously, there isn't one positive and one negative emotion that impacts performance in each zone, but rather a range of positive and negative emotions that impact performance across the zones. The negative emotion of fear, for example, will degrade performance in all six zones.

People often associate emotions with colors, and although I am partially colorblind, I've decided that color (and associated emotions) might be a useful way to visualize a team's emotional profile.

And so, if we take four basic colours - Red, Yellow, Blue, and Green - we can categorize positive and negative emotions associated with each one. In general, the four basic colors would be associated with these high level emotions:

Red: Desire
Yellow: Energy
Blue: Confidence
Green: Well being

Positive emotions would be signified by a light shade of each color, and negative emotions by a darker shade. If we take the color Red, a positive emotion would be excitement, while a negative emotion would be aggression. With Yellow, a positive emotion would be happiness, while a negative emotion would be frustration. For Blue, a positive emotion would be calmness, and a negative emotion would be anxiety. A positive Green emotion would be growth, and a negative emotion would be stagnation.

By identifying the type and weight of positive and negative emotions on the team, we can go deeper into the underlying dynamics of what makes the team effective or ineffective in relation to the Six Cs.

I'll continue thinking such thoughts, and will update in later posts.

Get The Picture

I just found an interesting press release issued on Dec. 10 2008 by Gartner Inc. (OK, for some it's ancient history). The release highlights the findings of a Gartner Report called "Video Killed the Document Czar". To summarize:

About 73 percent of the Internet audience watch a video online at least monthly

The popularity of online video with consumers will trigger a similar interest in video within enterprises

Software for the management of images and video is the fastest segment of the content management market - 44 percent of enterprises having such products today, but 22 percent intending to install it in 2009

Users will find the ability to incorporate video into other document types to be compelling, so that by 2013 more than 25 percent of content that workers see in a day will be dominated by pictures, video, or audio

Some might be shocked and horrified at the prospect of all this visual and auditory information transfer (another nail in the coffin of 'The Word'). Others might be concerned that this will lead to employees at all levels becoming star-struck, concerned more with performing and posturing rather than efficiency and effectiveness. As always, the problems won't be with the tools, but with how we use them and for what purpose.

Some years ago, my late father-in-law built a wonderful grandfather clock for my wife's older sister. When she picked it up in Virginia - in pieces - he gave her a video of how to put it together when she got home to New York. My father-in-law was too ill to travel at this time, and what he was able to do in the video was to show not just tell. He was able to communicate more of his tacit knowledge than if he had just tried writing down instructions. Sine that time, we have seen an explosion in short instructional videos on sites like VideoJug and YouTube. Imagine the power of that learning medium in virtual teams; imagine the possibilities for knowledge transfer and skill development.

Are there challenges to be overcome, and likely downsides? Of course! But for now, imagine the possibilities!