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.

The 11th Mind

I recently came across the work of Fred Keeton who is Vice President for External Affairs and Chief Diversity Officer, Harrah's. Harrah's is the world's largest gaming company.

While Mr. Keeton ensures there is diverse representation of identity groups in the business, he also has another intent - cognitive diversity. His goal is to 'yield-manage' diversity to generate views radically different from the norm, and generate solutions to customer needs in new and compelling ways. He says in one interview, "The performance potential of any team depends upon the number and relevance of diverse cognitive tools it possesses".

The approach to collaboration at Harrah's can be summed up in the phrase - Diversity by Design. The term 'design' points to the fact that to yield-manage diversity a structured approach is needed, rather than simply putting a diverse team of people together and saying, "OK, show me the magic." The approach consists of the following steps:

1. Have a clearly defined business goal
2. Put together a diverse team with relevant dimensions of diversity considering the business goal
3. Create a safe environment - no fear of repercussion
4. Ensure all team member ideas are heard. The best idea wins
5. Ensure a formal structure and process to both synthesize and distill from the many ideas an actionable, scalable and sustainable solution

What struck me most was not so much the process, but an image (which, perhaps, tells you something about my own cognitive processing style). It is the image of the 11th mind.

Suppose you have a team of 10 diverse people, what the collaboration should produce is a collectively generated team member - the 11th member resulting from the active collaboration. A mind smarter than the other ten; the mind holding the best business solution.

To end with more words from Fred Keeton - "Rather than simply counting heads, our approach ensures that we make heads count."

Digital Leadership

In February 2009,at the Training Magazine Conference, I will be running a session on "Successful Leadership in a Global Virtual Workplace." As economic conditions worsen, businesses must seek opportunities to further leverage global talent to develop new sources of competitive advantage.

Evolving digital information and communication technologies are making possible the creation of virtual workspaces (what I call WorkWebs or WoWs). What are the questions that digital team leaders need to be asking to create the most productive environments for their teams?

You can read my thoughts on the emerging world of digital leadership in a recent article in Training Magazine. You can access the brief article here.

The Training Magazine Conference will be held in Atlanta, GA - February 9-11.

Leading Virtual Teams

Several years ago, I gave a presentation to ASTD on guiding principles for leading virtual teams. This morning, a participant in a virtual class reminded me of the principles, and I thought it might be useful to post them here:

1. Be proactive
2. Focus on relationships before tasks
3. Seek clarity and focus early on
4. Create a sense of order and predictability
5. Be a cool-headed, objective problem solver
6. Develop shared operating agreements
7. Give team members personal attention
8. Respect the challenges of the virtual environment
9. Recognize the limits of available technologies
10. Stay people-focused

Read more about them here!