5 Tips for Virtual Collaboration – Forbes
January 9, 2013 by The Anywhere Office
In this excellent Forbes article powerhouse body language expert and leadership communication coach Carol Kinsey Goman shares some expert advice about virtual collaboration.
Virtual collaboration holds amazing promise. When successful, it enables talented peers to work together regardless of location and organizations to mine the collective wisdom of a widely dispersed employee population. In order to tap into this potential, enterprises are increasingly using geographically distributed teams as a key part of their business strategy.
But virtual collaboration comes with its own unique challenges — especially for leaders whose previous experience has been mainly with collocated teams. Various studies have shown that it is more difficult to get virtual teams to bond, harder for informal leaders to emerge, tougher to create genuine dialogue, and easier for misunderstandings to escalate.
As an Institute for Management Studies faculty member, I present a seminar on “The Power of Collaborative Leadership.” From that program, here are five tips for virtual collaboration:
