Tagged with: Collaboration • diversity • group identity • harvard business review • jeff stamps • jessica lipnack • remote teams • role project manager • virtual-teams
How to use social media successfully in projects, is described in the Harvard Business Review article: “Can Absence Make A Team Grow Stronger”. The article is from 2004, and they are not mentioning “social media”, they discuss “virtual workspaces”. But the two concepts are strikingly similar.
The article describes three rules to create successful virtual teams:
Rule 1: Exploit Diversity
Rule 2: Use Technology to Simulate Reality
Rule 3: Hold The Team Together
In this final post I will discuss rule number three.
Hold The Team Together
Rule number three is concerned with the Project Manager or team leader. It is about your job. It is about your task.
Image by CarbonNYC.
Make it work!
It’s your job to communicate with the team to make it work.
You have to identify commonalities between the group members that strengthen the group. Use this to emphasize a group identity. Adopt common language that sets the team apart from other teams. Turn your project into a Pirate Ship so your diverse group of people has a sense of oneness.
It’s important to have the rules of engagement established at the beginning of the project. How do we interact? How are our meetings structured? As a group leader you are working your butt off to stimulate the use of these rules. Not by punishing people. But by looking after them. If someone is falling silent, reach out. Make sure people communicate.
And how do you do all this?
Communicate!
It’s event management!
This sounds like a job for a junior secretary.
Funny you mention this. I always thought working with Excel, MS Project and typing documents is better left doing by junior secretaries. They are cheaper and better at it.
(This is actually not in the HBR article)
Anyway, rule number 3 says that YOU, dear PM, have to make it work!
If the scheduling tool (MS Project) should be left to junior secretaries, it’s no wonder I’m seeing so many PMs questioning the value of using a project schedule. Scheduling is not clerical work any more than project management is, although I know several secretaries who are better equipped to be PMs than some who claim the title.
Hi Deb, I agree with you that scheduling as an activity should be done by a PM. But I am trying to indicate that PMs should spent more time in the field talking to “their people” instead of bunkering down behind a tool.
Thanks for the feedback, appreciated.
Great post, I liked the “Pirate Ship” idea.