Leading Effectively: What is your Global Management Style?

February 25, 2009

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Tips on alleviating communication problems

Include face-to-face time if at all possible.

Have an initial meeting for the team members to get together, meet each other, and socialize. Meet face-to-face periodically throughout the life of the project. These meetings will help to establish ties and relationships among team members. It’s especially important in creating an effective working environment where the team members are interdependent.

Give team members a sense of how the overall project is going.

Send team members copies of the updated project schedule or provide an electronic view of the project schedule on line using the Internet. Project management schedule charts can be published on the Internet using the team’s Web site. The primary idea here is to improve the quality and type of communications with all team members. They need to know where they fit in the big picture.

Establish a code of conduct to avoid delays.

The code could include a principle of acknowledging a request for information within 24 or 48 hours. A complete response to a request might require more time, but at least the person requesting the information would know that the request will be addressed. No one likes to feel that his or her request has dropped off the edge of the earth.

Don’t let team members vanish.

Use the Internet or workgroup calendaring software to store team members’ calendars. While this could be difficult to maintain on a daily basis, it should not be difficult to keep up with scheduled out-of-town absences such as vacations or business travel. Another approach is to agree that team members will let everyone know when they’ll be going out of town. Electronic mail with a distribution list is both an effective and efficient way to avoid MIAs.

Augment text-only communication.

The Internet is a good place to store charts, pictures, or diagrams so everyone can have a look. The fax machine, once a modern marvel but now surprisingly old-fashioned, can help here too.

Develop trust.

Charles Handy, an author and management consultant, addresses this issue quite clearly. “If we are to enjoy the efficiencies and other benefits of the virtual organization, we will have to rediscover how to run organizations based more on trust than on control. Virtuality requires trust to make it work: Technology on its own is not enough

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