|
Executive Interviews: Interview with Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps on Building High Performance Teams
May 2009
-
By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary
It’s almost five years since you
(along with your co-authors) wrote
that wonderful piece in Harvard
Business Review, "Can Absence
Make a Team Grow Stronger?" (May
2004, HBR). Any updates on this?
Yes, because of the dramatic increases
in technology capacity and changes in
the economy around the world, “farflung”
teams, as they’re called in the
article, have gone from being optional
to being mandatory. This means that
organizations are scrambling to figure
out how to make such teams
successful, usually without the “new
ways of working” that they need.
Companies continue to throw
different kinds of technology at their
organizations without thinking
through the behavioral aspects.
Result? People are confused and not
as effective as they could be. Meanwhile, outside the corporate
walls, employees are adept with
social networking tools that
organizations tend to resist. So for the
first time, with Web 2.0 – like blogs,
wikis, Twitter, and Facebook – we see
the public as way ahead of big
enterprises when it comes to good
use of the tremendous
communication tools at our disposal.
Finally, video conferencing, which
our teams didn’t use, is now
becoming a viable option. It is
becoming widely used, but not yet
there. We still have some way to go
before video’s really good and
affordable – and it will always be
limited by the size of screens for larger
teams and such but it’s somuch more
useful than it was in 2002 when we
did the original research.
-
Can you elaborate on the
background research for this article?
What was the trigger point for this
research?
We were asked to participate by
Professor Ann Marjchzak, who was
working with her colleague, Arvind
Malhotra. They had done a detailed
study of a highly successful Boeing-
Rocketdyne project that had been conducted virtually, which led them
to secure sponsorship from the
Society for Information Management
for a more in-depth study with a
larger sample. They were having
trouble getting enough respondents.
Because we had written a number of
books and consulted extensively
about this topic, we had a large
database of interested people. And,
indeed, when we wrote to our folks,
they responded immediately and
enthusiastically about participating. -
What are virtual teams? What are
their unique characters and
distinguishing strengths?
We use a broad definition: A virtual
team is a small group with a common
purpose interacting interdependently
on agreed tasks across boundaries of
space, time, and organization,
supported by technology. Unique
virtual characteristics are the
boundary-crossing nature, which
demands strict adherence to good
operating agreements and
collaborative behavior, and the
extensive use of technology.
Distinguishing strengths include:
reduced costs (for example, less
travel); shortened cycle time (due to
improved work processes); increased
innovation (due in large measure to
the ability to recruit diverse experts
with specific expertise regardless of
location); and direct leveraged
learning (due to work being done
online in real-time, as opposed to
captured later in a “knowledge
management” system or in a postproject
review). -
What do you think are the critical
success factors for virtual teams really
pulling it off?
Four principal success factors apply:
- clarity of purpose across the team
and with stakeholders;
- independent and interdependent
people among whom leadership
shifts, depending on the task at hand;
- multiple links creating high-trust
environments using simple
technologies and supported by explicit and easy-to-comply-with
operating agreements; and
- mindfulness of time as people
operate on different “clocks” and the
team develops through its life cycle.
|
