Brake, Terence Leading Global Virtual Teams
“Terence Brake is President of Transnational Management Associates-USA, a leading executive development consultancy focused on managing the human challenges of globalization. He travels across the globe designing, developing, and delivering global business workshops for clients in the Americas, Asia, and Europe. His previous books include Doing Business Internationally: The Guide to Cross-Cultural Success and co-writer of DK's Successful Manager's Handbook.”
Leading is a very big part of management. According to Rue and Byers, management is “A process of deciding the best way to use an organizations resources to produce goods or provide services.” (Pg. 3) Management contains planning, organizing, directing, controlling and staffing. This paper will focus on the concept of directing. Rue and Byers says that Directing is “the ability to influence people to willingly follow ones guidance or adhere to ones decisions.”
This article focuses on the leading of virtual teams and leading teams in general. Virtual leading is leading a group from a distance having to do with web meetings, videoconferencing, teleconferencing, instant messaging, application sharing and email. (Brake pg. 117) Virtual teaming is a new collaborative workplace that is evolving both global and virtual. A virtual team is a distributed group of people working together across distances to achieve a common purpose via technology. (Brake pg. 116) In this article, Terence Brake gives us a few guidelines on what a virtual leader should follow and these same rules apply to how any person should direct his group.
The first step to leading is to be proactive. When being proactive, think about the team as a system of interlocking parts that needs to work together using technologies, goals and objectives. You also have to identify areas of potential disconnect, different technology platforms, global versus local needs, competing priorities among...