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