I am not a great reader of manuals and operating procedures. Nor am I a great fan of pseudo-psychology or simple models, even though the world of L&D is littered with them. My personality leads me more to the “suck it and see” approach which, technically, is known as heuristic – finding out for myself, learning by discovery.
Down the years I have formed many teams, companies and communities of practice. One popular model since the 1960s has revealed itself to be consistent in accurately predicting the behaviour of those groups. It has influenced my way of working and affected my responses when things did not happen quite as planned. I am referring to Tuckman’s model – Forming, Norming, Storming, Performing.
This came to mind again very recently. I often find myself defending the idea of devoting time online to setting up a code of behaviour and simply getting people to know one another a little. Once rapport and mutual interests have been established then it is time to roll up sleeves and tackle the “serious business” of working and learning together online.
Some organisations with a focus on tasks or results, often ban people from spending time on this type of activity. In communities of practice, virtual action learning sets and cohorts of learners for example, the simple courtesy of introducing oneself as a human person is seen as unimportant and trivial. I don’t think it is. When people interact online at a level beyond just a cog in the organisational machine, they always perform better and achieve faster and better results with maximum levels of peer support and contribution.
As these thoughts ran through my head, I looked for some more recent authority than Tuckman. I wandered into the realms of virtual teams and discovered the book “Virtual Teams” by Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps (1997). Here are some of the nuggets I found:
Etiquette of behaviour – team charter
“To work smarter virtual teams need to build explicit models with common categories and the right relationships”. page 190
“Creating Time together” I believe that you clearly expedite team processes by investing in beginnings – you will recoup time many times over” page 145
So here is my parting thought for those who believe virtual workgroups need nothing more than a work-based agenda to discuss:
Why do people commonly exchange photos online, if they will never ever meet face-to-face?
Finally, I found this article to be well worth reading: http://ezinearticles.com/?does-team-building-actually-achieve-anything?&id=1862658
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Here is another telling piece of evidence from page 147:
“The people at Buckman Labs found, as have many other companies, that a very active online conversation can be fast-paced enough to seem almost real-time. Buckman’s early chat rooms allowed people who had never met (and might never meet) to have “screen” conversations where people talked about their families and hobbies. The major advantage of these sessions is that they quickly build a modicum of trust and usually cause affection to develop among the participants as they glimpse one another’s private lives.
Sun Microsystems uses integrated digital environments that bring together features of chat with shared computer screens and the telephone.
Intel is pioneering the uses of desktop video conferencing for virtual teams.
Technologies that work well for small face to face groups and capitalise on the peculiar strength of the digital era are driving the explosive growth of teams and team capabilities. Intranets combine all the digital media into “digital” campgrounds. These “virtual watercoolers” – reminiscent of the Kung gathering around Kalahari watering holes – offer entirely new new options for shaping meaningful aggregation in virtual teams while supporting their dispersion.
Some things, of course, are a simple mix of intuition, experience and commonsense. But that is my final word now on this topic now – dialogue is so much more fun than monologue, so I’ll wait and see what you think!
Thanks, Phil, for picking out material from “Virtual Teams.” Great blog on an ever-more important topic. One interesting tip we picked up in later research that we published with two business school profs in Harvard Business Review: virtual teams tend to storm to form. Lots of discord at the beginning turns out to be a good thing – and the very stuff that causes the distant co-workers to bond.
Thanks for that Jessica – it is a very interesting and important finding, and we shall keep it in mind as we develop our practices with groups online. I am in no doubt that some of our own experiences with organisations bear out this view.
OK – maybe not the absolute last word from me: here are links to a couple of relevant papers that shed more light on this issue:
http://www.knowab.co.uk/wbwtrust.html
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/panteli/
Also you may have noted a very helpful contribution from Jessica Lipnack who is one of the authors of the book to which I referred above.