How Your Virtual Team Can “Crush It”

I’ve been working remotely with clients in faraway places for going on four years. Just lately I’ve been in discussions with a large nonprofit org about a work opportunity, and am mulling over what I’ve learned about working with and managing geographically decentralized teams. Hunting around for how others have put together best-practices guidelines, I found this deck from Kyra Cavanaugh, “fearless leader” of Chicagoland consultancy LifeMeetsWork — it’s really good, and contains not a word I haven’t found to be true in my experience:

Wi SHRM Managing Virtual Teams Handouts

View more presentations from Kyra Cavanaugh.

Any problems I’ve had in teleworking — as both manager and manage-ee — have boiled down to process/systems failure, in establishing expectations, measuring performance, and inadequate communication. (Gee, that sounds pretty much like a list of what can go wrong in an onsite team….) Kyra puts great emphasis on how important it is to be deliberate about establishing clear protocol in all these areas:

create a team operating agreement (I like the idea of borrowing some tricks from scrum and scrum-ban project-management frameworks, from the agile development world. scrum guidelines) and review/revise regularly;
commit to setting goals and tracking performance (daily progress check-ins are, in my experience, often really helpful);
adopt communications routines that establish a new sense of place — a “team culture,” shared online, so that all team members, whether on-site or off-, feel truly connected. Also, routines that will uncover and address frustrations — she includes a quote I love, “Don’t spend more than 30 seconds being angry without telling someone.”
pick a handful of web-based tools — project management, bugtracker, conferencing, whiteboard, “watercooler” (she mentions CampFire; I like Yammer a lot); wiki (for KM/documentation of process), etc. — and get the entirety of the team’s workflow onto these systems, without fail.

Lots more good stuff in her presentation. And what comes across is something I can only underscore (in heavy Sharpie, about three times): the only real difference between a smooth-running, kick-ass virtual team and a smooth-running, kick-ass on-site team is that, with the former, setting up and adhering to such principles and protocols has extra urgency. Whatever energy it takes to get the team off to a good start, get buy-in from every team member, and arrive at a point where you’ve got a close-knit group of people that trust one another and bear each other up, it’s worth it — because without that bond among the team, things can go south really fast and can be harder to fix than when team members are literally face-to-face with each other every day.

At the peak of his basketball stardom at Princeton, Bill Bradley was asked how he did the things he did — the eyes-in-the-back-of-his-head passes to teammates, the miracle shots — and he answered “You develop a sense of where you are.” You want each member of a virtual team to feel this way, too — set the bar there and do what you can to get there fast if you want a happy, engaged, productive virtual team.

September 1, 2010 | Filed Under enterprise 2.0, management, productivity | View Comments

“IP Influence”: What matters is the quality, not quantity, of online ties

So: via @BethKanter I learn of this MIT tech blog’s report on some new findings from a team of HP researchers:

Their algorithm turns out to be far better at predicting how far a link will travel than counting followers, and is even better than the PageRank algorithm that powers the search results delivered by Google.

It’s called IP-Influence, and its predictive power reveals two facts important to anyone who wants to spread their message on Twitter:

1. The overwhelming majority of people on Twitter are passive – that is, they rarely if ever retweet anything.

2. The best predictor of how far a tweet or link will travel on Twitter is how much power its originator has to motivate the most passive of his or her followers to retweet it.

Confirms what’s always seemed like common sense to me, re social web ties. And very important for your networked nonprofit: this is why cultivating social media adoption and use by as large a percentage of staff as possible is critical not only to building influence — e.g. earning the actual *attention* of followers — but also to building a *sustainable* organizational presence on the social web, regardless of how the tech winds blow, which platforms rise and fall, etc. A small comm/marketing team doing all the work can’t possibly build and maintain quality relationships as followers scale, and won’t create ties to people that are strong enough to migrate to offline activity or to whatever the next dominant platform turns out to be.

[Side note: being extremely good at building online ties with others can certainly results in gobs of followers — 351K twitter pals now, Beth? Holy smokes! :)]

August 6, 2010 | Filed Under the social web | View Comments

Leveraging location-based services for good

This Mashable post is a bit slight, but I’m down with its premise. Weaving foursquare and the like into collective action on behalf of a cause is in my opinion the most compelling nptech development around at the moment. (Along with microvolunteering of time/talent — the kind of thing The Extraordinaries facilitate.)

Anyway, here’s the protein:

With tech evangelists and small businesses exploring the potential power of Foursquare and other location enabled services, it was only a matter of time before change makers in the non-profit and social enterprise ecosystem “checked-in” and began finding innovative methods to rally support for their causes.

Top three examples here:

Rewarding Volunteer Loyalty. “Restaurants that monitor customer regularity based on Foursquare () data could give free meals to local food banks. Drug stores could issue over the counter medication and toiletries to homeless shelters. Nightclubs that hold open mic nights could allow their mayors to get up on stage and deliver calls to action. Non-profit leaders could hold meetings at local watering holes that track Foursquare usage in exchange for outdoor signage promoting their cause. The possibilities are endless.”
Turn Check-Ins into Dollars. E.g., venues and corporate sponsors could allow individuals to earn “karma points” for check-ins that the user could convert to $ donations to a cause of their choice.
Crowdsourcing Crisis Information. The Ushahidi model — gmaps + user-generated reports to monitor “crime, devastation, and peace and relief efforts” wherever chaos blooms.

That’s just for starters. For example, if the Coakley volunteers doing GOTV work today and tomorrow had an app with maps, voter data, and activity stream, I’d bet they could be shockingly efficient. Loud and energizing, too — it’d be hard to passively sit around and do nothing when tweets are rolling in showing all your friends out there working hard and making it happen.

January 18, 2010 | Filed Under e-advocacy, emerging technologies, mobile tech | View Comments

Tumbleweeds 1.11–1.17

Cranked up my own Tumblr stream last week; really like it as a quick tool for clipping pretty much anything for further processing. Only drawback so far: the app is slower than Steve Balboni was on the basepaths.

Anyway, I think I’ll do a once-a-week index of any Tumblr items I post that seem relevant to the roots.lab purview. Here’s the first.

Nonprofit Salesforce.com Practitioners | Google Groups – Very active community, and a huge archive of accrued wisdom on nonprofit implementations of Salesforce. Cool-io.
Fast Company :: building a corporate alumni network – “There’s a way to keep people working with you even after they stop working for you. Here is a five-point program on how to build a successful alumni network for your company.”
What’s Working for Social Media Marketers? – eMarketer – “A September 2009 MarketingProfs survey of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers found that the marketing tactics most often used on social sites are not necessarily the best ones.”
Avatar Induces the ‘Life Is Elsewhere’ syndrome? – Lots of facile noise on twitter about CNN story about Avatar-goers who were so taken by the world Cameron brought to vivid life that they didn’t want to leave, to point where depression and suicidal ideation have arisen. Okay, funny ha-ha. But I know something about this kind of longing, and am interested in how it works, what conditions have to be present in a fictionalized world for it to seem vividly real enough to linger in indefinitely.
Google’s Approach to Social in 2010 | GigaOm – “If you use Google products, the company already knows who your most important contacts are, what your core interests are, and where your default locations are. [Google engineering director] David Glazer [says that] Everything is better when it knows who I am.“ What does “social” mean to Google? “Who I am, who do I know, what do I do,” said Glazer.
Where to look for blogs on a given topic – Tidbit from a Brogan post on blogger relations: Alltop, Google Blog Search, Twitter Search, Postrank Topics.
How We Use Twitter at Forum One — Jim Cashel, who started the Online Community Report way back in prehistoric times (1996), describes goals and metrics for his firm’s use of twitter.

January 17, 2010 | Filed Under Link Lurve | View Comments

Online advocacy: still in the primordial soup

I’ve barely used this blog for the last couple years, and that’s a shame — it’s been a great way to start articulating ideas and slow build toward a coherent point of view, and it’s served me really well. Parenting two young kids has taken up a lot of the free time I used to give to blogging.

But I miss it. I want to relaunch this professional sandbox. My original intent, back in 05, was to open-source my roughest, rawest nascent thoughts about web strategy for organizations. I want to get back to that.

There are tools around now that help people spit out this kind of stuff — quick journaling/scrapbooking — with minimal hassle. I’m thinking of moving the site over to posterous or tumblr, as people like Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble have done. We’ll see. But, however I do it, here’s the goal: post pretty much every day, maybe several times a day, short/sweet, laser focus on how organizations (especially advocacy groups) can further their mission by leveraging the social web.

To start: with respect to what wired publics can achieve and the tech and tactics they’ll use to do it, we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. Blogging, tweeting — all well and good; it’s part of the capacity/infrastructure groups need to be able to build sustainable, effective wired publics around their mission. But is this stuff the basic catalytic enzyme that creates a wired public around furthering a cause?

No. People want to be able to do something that contributes in a meaningful way to achieving a specific goal. They want to be part of something larger than they are. They want to be part of getting things done. To date, we haven’t given them a whole lot more than sending form emails to politicians/CEOs and donating cash. These options are stale. We need more and better models for facilitating kick-ass collective action.

And we will. I know it. Give it a few years, and present-day online advocacy campaigns will look embryonic by comparison. Grab-bag of ideas rattling round my head coming later.

December 29, 2009 | Filed Under e-advocacy, emerging technologies, the social web | View Comments