In life, as in business, a strong personal network is critically important to a person’s effectiveness.  This need is amplified when the person is working in a distributed or virtual team.  In these teams, an individuals’ network needs to extend beyond the bounds of their home office and society into the locations and offices where their virtual colleagues work.

They need to have sufficiently strong and robust relationships with colleagues in each location, these relationships enable them to openly discuss any issue that may arise, regardless of its personal or business implications. Strong relationships also mean that issues that may threaten the work at hand, but which may be awkward of difficult to raise, have a better chance of being discussed in a dispassionate and regional way.

Why Build A Personal Network

Building a strong personal network in a virtual team is a long term undertaking.  You need to spend days, weeks, months and years cultivating trust and understanding with colleagues in other offices.  You need to spend time with your virtual colleagues in real face to face meetings and in social settings where you get to know each other.  These relationships need to extend beyond any veneer of business only into a relationship that has an appropriate personal and social depth.

For many, particularly in some cultures, business networks and personal networks are considered to be separate to the point of isolation.  A business relationship is exactly that, all about business, while a personal one is something that typically happens predominantly outside of the business environment.  The concept of a personal network inside of the business that includes both the working and social sides is what is needed for effective virtual team work.  Your network needs to be both business and personal to get the breadth and depth of insight needed to work effectively.

Getting The Most From Personal Networks

A robust, broad and inclusive personal network in a distributed team should provide the members with a great deal of benefits.  Principal among these are: –

* Better cultural understanding – If a relationship is purely based on business interaction, all of those involved will miss out on the opportunity to build a stronger overall cross cultural understanding.  Looking beyond purely dealing with business, with the details, facts and figures of the organisation, to the subtle and fluid world of cross cultural understanding will give everyone a greater insight into how their colleagues think, how they approach decisions and discussions and what motivates them and their colleagues on a day to day basis.  This cross cultural insight will enable you to be more effective in your day to day work, to better understand not just your virtual team partners, but also your clients and customers.

* Better business insights – Building and expanding your personal networks to be more balanced, more social, less business focussed, you will be able to establish deeper relationships and understandings with all of your contacts.  This in turn will let you better understand the business drivers prevalent in each culture, to see what motivates customers and business partners in different cultures and to understand how you need to tailor your approach to each.  Without this broader, more nuanced network it is too easy to assume that everyone sees the world the same as you, that what motivates you motivates them.  This blinkered and closed perspective is usually wrong, leading to many failed virtual teams and business ventures.

* Increased organisational productivity – The better you understand your virtual team colleagues, whether there be cultural differences between you or not, the better you can all work together toward the organisational goals.  This can mean understanding the cultural differences as they impact communication styles, views on time,