Let’s say you have team leader you acquired a Mexican team into your already virtual group. You are in the tech industry and currently, your team contains people from Canada, US and now you’ve added Mexico. You have been a leader for couples of year and now you’ve decided to shift to managing remote teams.

Recently, you’re conducting a leadership workshop and you told your team that you’re facing difficulties regarding shades of culture, emerging dynamic culture in the team and making everybody in the group motivated. In this workshop, you shared 3 ways of becoming successful in managing a virtual team. The following is what you shared;

Familiarize yourself with your team 

Take your time to know each member of team one by one through meeting them especially when your team is newly established or even new member has recently joined the group. Once you had one on one meeting with them, arrange your team meeting and introduce them to one another.

If you have a team virtual meeting with the icebreaker that it will join everyone together on the goals and vision for the team. The biggest challenge of leading the remote teams is keeping intact and avoiding an ‘out of mind’ and out of state pattern. Schedule one by one meeting to debate on how it is going and remain connected. You can as well use massaging texts to quick encouragement notes.

Use the easiest technology that encourage bonding

Apply the easier techniques encourage the collaboration between the teams, for instance, groupware like Google Docs. This is a tremendous means for everyone to access and be able to operate with the live document rather that email tap for emailing document around the team. Encourage your group to bond with each other via video calls such as Webex or Skype.

Enhance your emotional knowledge

Increase your emotional intelligence that relates to leading different generation and cultures. For instance, remember when a Mexican team was added to your group, you had to adapt your leadership skills. Your leadership style was to be leading in that you will find Spanish language culture is much of the empathetic style since they refer taking about life and family before they get into work discussion. Definitely, through this, you learned to take your time and ask about the prior life and family so as to get into a work discussion.

Another means of staying connected with your group all the time is by using services like Skype or the internal system and keep it on always during working days so that your team can see whenever you available and online. In case you want to avoid any possible interruption, just switch the ‘away’ indicator on.