Sometimes all you need is a little patience and a lot of empathy

When working with a team and different clients, we may find people with divergent opinions, ideas and experiences.  In these situations, it might be hard to get to an agreement, specially when we relly exclusively on virtual communication as telephone, email and chats. So, when it seems we are going nowhere, we need to take [...]

It’s not about saying no, just not right now

In self-organizing teams, it might be a challenge to individuals to say 'no' to some activities, but what needs to be understood is that it should not be a problem if the 'no' is followed by negotiation. One project member alone won't be able to do all the work of several projects for yesterday and [...]

Self organization on virtual teams

When working on a virtual team, project members can be assigned to more then a project. Therefore, requests can be received everywhere, from emails to chats, and a project manager won't  coordinate with other project manager to organize individuals tasks. For this reason, self organization is a requirement for virtual team members and it can [...]

The importance of feedback 

I've already read tons of articles about the importance of feedback, still, why are we not using it? Feedback is not about sending a thank you note to all the team at the end of the project, it's about pointing out what is good and what can be improved. No one is perfect, it's essencial [...]

Innovation in virtual teams

Innovation requires collaboration, so how to ensure virtual work is not killing it? First of all, virtual teams need a place to share, it can be a wiki, a box or a social network. It's important that the team members are brought together at least weekly thru phone or virtual conferences to discuss the challenges [...]

Shared leadership in virtual teams

I just read an interesting article about how to be a leader when you are not the boss (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-leader-when-youre-boss-ilya-pozin?trk=v-feed) and one of the points mentioned was about the difference of helping people or hold them back. It made me think about the importance of a shared leadership for virtual teams and presencial ones too. Sometimes [...]

Can virtual teams be agile?

I believe this is a common question when facing global project teams and organization demands for agility. The good news for project managers and team leaders is that the answer is: Yes, virtual teams can be agile and they need to! Some of the challenges faced by virtual teams as communication and decision making problems [...]