Todays teams do not need yesterdays managers
Stumble It!A research report by Henley Management College in the UK on remote and flexible working, Managing Tomorrow’s Worker (MTW) concludes that leaders who successfully manage distributed teams pay attention to some things "traditional team" managers often neglect.
The research was carried out by the Future Work Forum at Henley Management College between February 2004 and March 2005 (full report - 136 pages - available for download)
The research set out to investigate the hypothesis that:
“Managers of flexible workers manage in a different way than traditionally and they therefore have a different competence profile.”
Research Conclusions
After face-to-face interviews with eleven HR directors, structured telephone interviews with 35 team managers and 109 questionnaires completed by managers and team members the research team found that:
- Work will continue to become more remote and flexible and that good managers will adapt to this
- Organisations will need good management processes and competent managers in order to succeed in this new working environment
- Weak management is more likely to have a negative impact and may be less likely to be detected
- The process and competences needed to manage remote teams are not radically different from managing co-located teams
- Communications are critical and organisations should review how their managers are communicating with employees and identify areas for improvement
- The less tangible aspects of communications, such as social contact, make a major contribution towards good teamwork and motivation and must also be addressed
These conclusions squarely point to the competence and commitment of team managers as being what makes the difference between success and failure in virtual, distributed and flexible working
Tags: virtual teams
Digg | 
del.icio.us | 
Reddit | 
Yahoo! | 
Add to my favourites
Bioteams Books Reviews
Mobile business applications framework
In a just published book Work Goes Mobile by Michael Lattanzi, Antti Korhonen and Vishy Gopalakrishnan, authors of Nokia’s mobility master plan, propose a very useful application profiling scheme to establish the degree to which a business could exploit mobile technologies in their broadest sense. This approach would also be very useful for establishing the support requirements for virtually networked teams.
Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK
Related Team Leadership Development Articles
Organizational Intelligence is key to workplace collaboration
Harvard Professor, David Perkins, in his latest book, King Arthur's Round Table, discusses the importance of "organisational Intelligence" and how its absence leads to coblaboration rather than collaboration.
The cost of driven team leadership styles
In Leadership Run Amok: The Destructive potential of Overachievers in the July 2006 Harvard Business Review the authors argue that by only focusing on tasks and goals, a leader can actually damage performance.
Leading teams without authority
Lateral leadership skills are what you need to get the job done when you are not the boss of the team
Leave a comment