TMA World Viewpoint Global Virtual Teams

Global Virtual Teams
Closing the importance-
performance gap

TMA World
Viewpoint


Closing the importance/performance gap

• A revolution is going on in the workplace due to the
intense driving forces of globalization and technology
- new technologies including web, video and audio
conferencing, blogs and social media (such as
Facebook and Linkedin).

• Globalization has shaped the competitive landscape
for many businesses, and determined the fitness
requirements for success:
 The urgency to innovate continuously
 The need to dramatically increase speed from
concept to market
 The necessity of developing responsiveness to
diverse customers
 The profound need for agility
in organizing work and
leveraging worldwide resources.


Closing the importance/performance gap

• Technology is the enabler, and the outcome
has been more and more responsibility
being placed on virtual teams and remote
employees for getting work done.


Anyone who has led or worked on these teams knows that if they are to be
really successful they require:
More attention
Greater discipline
More effort

Unfortunately, there is often a gap between what we need and current reality.
PERFORMANCE
In a recent TMA World webinar (titled ‘Can global virtual teams ever work?’),
I asked the 98 participants to rate the Importance of global virtual teams
to their organization’s competitiveness, as well as the Performance of
their current teams.


The results were:

IMPORTANCE PERFORMANCE

Extremely Important 71 percent Outstanding 6 percent
Very Important 26 Very Good 12
Important 3 Moderate 67
Somewhat Important - Poor 15
Not Very Important - Very Poor -

Ninety seven percent of respondents said global virtual teams were extremely
or very important to their organization's competitiveness

But 82 percent said the current performance of those teams was only
moderate or poor.


Working on or with global virtual

teams for the past 15 years, I have found many

lack a guidance system. They don’t have a clear

sense of what is important for their success.
Terence Brake
This is the main reason I developed the six Cs President TMA-Americas
tbrake@tmaworld.com
of global collaboration. The six Cs can act as a

performance guidance system; a framework

and set of measures for focusing team

attention, and a means for developing discipline

and guiding effort.


As part of the webinar, I asked participants to use the six C framework to
identify the top three developmental challenges for their existing teams, and
here are their results:
percent
Cooperation Developing trust across distances 47

Convergence Developing alignment around purpose, priorities, etc. 29

Coordination Having a smooth flow of work between team members 29

Capability Leveraging all the talent on the team 24

Communication Having shared understandings on the team 50

Cultural Intelligence Developing an inclusive team culture 50


It’s interesting that the most significantly challenging areas are clearly in soft

skill areas: Cooperation, Communication, and Cultural Intelligence.

In the new workspace, one of the temptations is to see success as dependent

on integrating the best new technology, having the most efficient processes,

or using the most powerful collaboration tools.

They are important, of course, but the true

global virtual performance enablers are

person-centered not technology-centered.

The real challenge is human connectivity not bandwidth.

To learn more about how TMA World can
help your organization, please contact us at
enquiries@tmaworld.com
or visit
www.tmaworld.com/our_solutions.cfm

TMA World Viewpoint Global Virtual Teams

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TMA World Viewpoint Global Virtual Teams