Leadership skills in virtual teams are different to leadership skills needed in a co-located team. Leaders of co-located teams need to be able to inspire and direct a team they see around them every day, they can lead by example and by modelling in ways that all of their team members can see visually each day. They develop their communication skills to be effective in face to face environments and in casual discussions around the office, their external communication skills are typically honed around dealing with suppliers, subcontractors and clients.

Virtual team leadership skills however are more complex, the leader of a virtual team must be able to inspire and lead their team without meeting them, without seeing them each and every day and without being able to model appropriate and desirable behaviour in a physically visible way.

The effective leader of a virtual team must also be able to deal with higher levels of ambiguity, understand and lead across cultural boundaries and lead a distributed team of personnel who, themselves, may never meet and relay on communicating using electronic media. In short, the skills required to effectively lead a virtual team are all those of a leader of co-located personnel with many additional skills added on.

Leaders, Not Managers, Needed

The first thing leaders of virtual teams must do is see themselves as leaders as well as managers. Managers roles involve ensuring the business aspects of the team’s work are undertaken correctly, that timesheets and documentation are delivered correctly and on time and to ensure the right skills are made available to the project at the right times. All of these activities still need to be undertaken, and often are done or overseen by the leader, but to be an effective leader you also need to see yourself as a leader and take responsibility for setting the culture, tone and pace of your team.

Your team will look to you for guidance and leadership more than they will look to you for management and, you need to make sure you do not disappoint them. So, just what are the key leadership skills a virtual team looks for?

Leadership Skills Wanted

* Be consistent – nobody enjoys working for a leader who is constantly changing their mind on things or behaves unpredictably. Personnel find themselves on edge, always second guessing an unpredictable leader, as they struggle to deliver what they think the leader wants. The answer is to be predictable, to set clear and well understood processes, practices and behaviour and to both model them and look for them in the rest of the team. These practices also need to be culturally and regionally sensitive when working across cultural boundaries, meaning that the leader of a broadly distributed virtual team also needs to be seen differently by different parts of the team. This need to have several subtly different cultural “personalities” can be challenging for many, but fundamentally these different personalities all need to be honest facets the leaders natural personality.

* Be supportive – an effective leader of a virtual team must be supportive of their personnel regardless of their location and role. The leader must neither actually or by perception be seen as having favorites and must support their entire team. This can often mean giving different support to different parts of a team dependent on their local needs and pressures, so the leader needs to fully understand the differing needs of their team at all times.

* Be prepared to lead from behind – it is often natural for leaders to want to lead from the front, to be seen heading a task force or a new initiative within their project or business unit. While this is completely appropriate in many situations and cultural settings, the effective leader of a virtual team also needs to be able to lead from behind when appropriat...