Author's note
This article is the edited and updated text of an interview with John Gundry that was conducted by RMR plc and presented (text and video) in their "Communicate 2000" virtual conference in October 2000.

Biography

Dr. John Gundry leads Knowledge Ability Ltd, a niche UK education and consulting firm that offers international services in virtual teaming and virtual work. Knowledge Ability was formed in 1993 and today works with household-name clients, although John was first involved with building remote work groups in the late 1980s. He recently co-authored "Agile Networking" (Prentice Hall, 1998), a book that demonstrates how Internet-based communication processes (including virtual teaming) yield competitive advantage. John is also Founder Co-Chair of the newly-formed Virtual Teaming Association.

Abstract

This is an interview with Dr John Gundry on the subject of virtual teaming. Over the past five years, the availability of Internet-based communication tools has made geography irrelevant to teamwork. Managers can lead teams spanning cities, countries and continents, with members working together apart as closely as they used to work together together. But all is not nirvana. Successful virtual team managers have learned that regardless of all the technology, the people factors in teaming and collaboration haven't gone away. Managing successfully through the Internet is much more than life as usual plus a bit more email.

Interview

"Dr Gundry, what do you mean by 'managing through the Internet'?"

I'm referring here to what's become known as 'virtual teaming'. This is a relatively new way of organising work and people so that people work in teams, but geographically apart from each other. Their need for communication is met either directly by the Internet, or by carriers and tools based on Internet protocols. So one way to talk about managing a virtual team is to talk about 'managing through the Internet'.

"Where did virtual teams come from?"

In the mid 1980's, managers in high-technology companies realised that it was possible to manage out of the line of sight: to produce products and co-ordinate operations using resources at a number of separate sites. So we saw communication strategies and management practices for what were then called 'distributed groups'.

The term virtual teaming was coined in the early 1990s to describe a team, that is, people who collaborate closely, whose members are not in the same location. The term was probably coined in Digital Equipment Corporation. My colleague there, Dr George Metes, wrote a book for Digital in 1992 about virtual teaming whose subtitle was "working together apart". "Working together apart" distinguishes virtual teams from traditional teams, whose members work together together.

In the past five years we've seen a rapid increase in organisations adopting this way of working. The principal enabler is of course Internet-based communications technology. This has made it possible for more people to communicate relatively easily across cities, countries and continents. Virtual teaming isn't restricted to large corporations with their own internal network - the necessary technology is now readily available anywhere. Also, people now more readily accept communicating electronically.

"So why are companies re-organising around virtual teams? What are the benefits?"

Virtual teaming makes geography irrelevant for integrating and co-ordinating operations. I'll describe three key benefits of this.

First, in today's highly-competitive market-place, you need to create the very best products and services that you can. You can no longer afford to rely on only the skills and resources that are local to you. If a group of people on the other side of the world are the best designers you have, then virtual teaming allows you to engage their expertise for your product. Indeed, you can reach out to specialist resources that are outside your company.

Second, many companies are re-organising around functions rather than geographies, and in the process making their operations slimmer and better integrated. Someone can find that their boss isn't in the next office, but in a neighbouring country. If you imagine a map of the world overlaid with company organisation charts, it's criss-crossed by millions upon millions of reporting lines. Virtual teaming makes these new arrangements feasible.

Finally, virtual teaming is the internal response that companies need to E-commerce at the customer interface. E-commerce promises customers integrated products and services delivered in "Internet time" - that is, very rapidly. To fulfil that customer requirement internally, the company needs to integrate and co-ordinate its operations also on "Internet time", and virtual teaming is the best model for doing this. I tell people that a complete E-business solution involves E-commerce plus virtual teaming … or as I sometimes call it … E-teaming.

"This all sounds wonderful - but what problems do people have in moving to virtual teaming?"

The biggest problem is not recognising that they need new processes and new skills. I'll talk about this in the context of managers or leaders of virtual teams, because they are the key people who need to recognise the need for new approaches. Unfortunately too many think that managing through the Internet is just like managing face to face, but using the phone and email a bit more. It's not. To manage or lead a successful, high-performing virtual team means dealing in a new context with tasks, technology, and teams, and I'll say a little about each of these.

First, tasks. When managing a virtual team through the Internet, managers have to put a lot more emphasis on creating and communicating very clear plans and milestones. Confusion is poison to virtual teams, because when we're working together apart, rather than working together together, it's much more difficult to sort out misunderstandings. So plans need to be very clear and continually reinforced, especially when they change.

Second, technology. This sounds like the easy part of virtual teaming, but many managers simply don't understand what tools are available and what each tool does. Often to hide their own lack of skill they fall back on the phone and email which we know are not the right tools for managing virtual teams. Even if they do adopt team tools such as audio conferencing and online conferencing, most of the time they and their team members don't know how to use them. In my training and consulting I really press people to reveal how well they know these tools, and 9 times out of 10 they're not fully competent. If you can get people to admit this - which is difficult - I find they're very grateful for any guidance. Then they become, and more importantly, feel, competent in using these new tools.

Finally, teams, which here I'm using as a short-hand for all the factors to do with people and their relationships with each other. When you ask people in virtual teams to list the benefits and drawbacks, an interesting pattern emerges. The benefits people spontaneously describe are those I've talked about: reach and speed and, in many cases, avoiding travel. (Not every member of today's virtual teams is a young unmarried person who wouldn't mind a few days away from home at the company's expense.)

But highest on people's list of drawbacks is discomfort and reluctance to work closely with people they don't know and might never meet. Essentially there's a great problem of building and maintaining relationships in virtual teams. And this is a problem that many managers don't recognise, even address. What tends to prevail is a clinical view that work is about tasks and information and budgets and deadlines and that a manager's task is to manage these. But that's not how we, as human beings, operate.

Everyone listening to this interview, or reading this transcript, knows well enough that they need to know and trust others if they are to work closely with them. When we think about a team we've worked in that was a successful and rewarding experience, we think not only about its accomplishments, but also about the people we worked with and how we felt a sense of community, or fellowship, or camaraderie with them. Absolutely right. Years of research has shown that what separates successful teams of any kind, virtual or not, from unsuccessful teams is the quality of relationships amongst their members. As with so many situations in which technology affects our lives, the technology only offers opportunities, and it's the people factors that determine whether those opportunities are realised.

"What's the solution to these 'people problems'?"

There are techniques we can use to help virtual teams to form, that is, for people to have the opportunity to form relationships even though they are apart from each other. These are teamwide virtual processes that people like me run that concentrate on building agreements about how team members will work and interact with each other. They're virtual teaming boot camp: really getting to grips with the new virtual way of working.

The heart of this lies in understanding that the big difference between traditional face to face teams, and virtual teams, is communication. Communicating when we're not face to face, and when we're using tools rather than dropping by people's desks or meeting them at the coffee machine, has to be a much more deliberate act. So everyone needs to work hard on how and how frequently they communicate with each other.

This doesn't mean just communicating about work, it also means social communication, about each other's interests, background, family, etc. Through that communication people get to learn about each other and develop relationships. They get to learn who is at the other end of the email message. The team builds its own social capital that sustains it, and will be called upon when times get tough. So managers need to build the context for, and legitimise, and create opportunities for, their team members to communicate in every sense of that word.

To put it in a nutshell, managing successfully through the Internet means seeing the Internet as being about communication, not just information.

Please cite this paper as:

Gundry, John, "Managing Through The Internet". Article from Knowledge Ability Ltd, Malmesbury UK. Published at www.knowab.co.uk/wbwmanage.html. June 2001.

Comments on this paper are invited. Please contact the author.

About the author

Dr John Gundry is Director of Knowledge Ability Ltd, a UK-based company that provides education and consulting services on virtual teaming and remote working. Co-ordinates are email: gundry@knowab.co.uk phone: +44 1666 826654. See more about Knowledge Ability at www.knowab.co.uk.

This interview is based on Knowledge Ability's courses in Virtual Teaming and Remote Working, see www.knowab.co.uk/wbw2c1.html

Notices

This paper is copyright © Knowledge Ability Limited 2001. All Rights Reserved. Permission is granted to copy and distribute this paper provided that it is copied and distributed unaltered and entire, including this entire Section 'Notices'. No permission is granted to exploit this paper or the information in it for any commercial purpose whatsoever.

Disclaimer: The information in this paper may contain errors. This paper does not constitute an offer or sample. This paper is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.

Version 1.1 June 2001