Balance Innovation and Expediency for a Supercharged Team

How many emails can I write while “participating” in a weekly review meeting? Which ideas can I repurpose so I don’t have think of new ones? How many calls can I avoid by blasting a group IM? How many minutes can I save by outsourcing dinner prep to the local pizza joint? Yup, for many […]

Balance Innovation and Expediency for a Supercharged Team Read More »

Untangle your Virtual Team with 10 Most-Needed Norms

Precious few virtual teams have explicit team norms, even for aspects of teamwork where the absence of shared norms can really trip a team up. Excuses include: “When would we have time to talk this through?” “Everyone pretty much knows how we need to work.” “We’re too busy.” And my favorite: “It’s too late to

Untangle your Virtual Team with 10 Most-Needed Norms Read More »

Rewarding, Recognizing and Celebrating Achievements from Afar

How do you celebrate a major milestone? Maybe you call the troops together to share a pizza, or bring in a jug of coffee and a platter of decadent donuts. Better yet, you might treat your hard-working team to lunch or dinner. And if it’s a moment worthy of a special celebration, you might throw

Rewarding, Recognizing and Celebrating Achievements from Afar Read More »

From Bland and Boring to Captivating and Compelling

  Even the most experienced team leaders can make us weep with boredom. They torture us with their monotone narrations of 10-Mb slide decks. They regale us with irrelevant minutiae, while sidestepping the really important stuff. Their meetings are more like monologues, with everyone else listening from the sidelines. And for the most part, they

From Bland and Boring to Captivating and Compelling Read More »

When Workloads Are Seriously Out of Whack – 11 Leadership Tips

Say you’re the leader of a team of hard-working professionals who work in different locations. It’s crunch time, and pretty much everyone realizes they need to put aside their personal lives for the next few days (or maybe a tad longer) to meet a critical deadline. Trouble is, you discover that while some people are

When Workloads Are Seriously Out of Whack – 11 Leadership Tips Read More »

Tapping the Quiet Power of Introverts in a Virtual World

Think about it: There’s zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas. And yet, according to Susan Cain, author of the groundbreaking book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, our society is overwhelmingly biased toward extroverts. This bias is glaringly obvious in our workplace, where

Tapping the Quiet Power of Introverts in a Virtual World Read More »

8 Great Year-Round (Free!) Gifts Everyone on Your Team is Guaranteed to Love

Give a gift every day for 29 days straight? Yeah, right – as if I have the time (and money), with everything I’m already juggling! But that’s what a colleague just invited her friends to do. When she explained that such gifts can be as simple as starting a conversation with a downtrodden stranger, making

8 Great Year-Round (Free!) Gifts Everyone on Your Team is Guaranteed to Love Read More »

Draw Lines in the Sand to Jumpstart Virtual Team

Virtual teams are hard to see. That’s why the boundaries that define the scope, accountabilities, roles, reporting relationships, tasks and deliverables can be pretty tough to grasp. That is, if they exist at all. Why? Some teams simply assume that everyone has a shared understanding of the big picture. If that’s true, the thinking goes,

Draw Lines in the Sand to Jumpstart Virtual Team Read More »

SUBSCRIBE TO COMMUNIQUÉ – FREE EZINE

Sign Up Today to Get Free Tips for Creating a Level Playing Field Across Your Virtual, Hybrid Team