Virtual line management: The competitive advantage

By Bente Thomassen and Henrik Villumsen, Leadership Consultants at Mannaz, Copenhagen.

Virtual: the word of the millennium
Whether communicating with the person in the next office or across several time zones, virtual working is becoming the norm of the 21st century. Off shoring and strategic alliances across the world accelerate distributed working, and thus distributed leading.

It has been said that leading across time zones place new and unique demands on managers and their direct reports.

In this article as well as two forthcoming articles we are going to examine

• What is truly new about virtual leadership
  
• How virtual leadership differs from face-to-face leadership
  
• Which challenges arise when virtual leadership is becoming the norm, and no longer limited to projects limited in duration
  
• How organisations deal with these challenges, and what their leaders do
  
• What role technology plays
  

In this first article we will look at the social infrastructure leaders need to create in order to manage successful teams. In one of the forthcoming articles we will explore the technological infrastructure and conclude the series of articles by sharing Best Practices and learnings from global organisations on virtual leadership.

Virtual line management – the competitive advantage
Most organisations of today have extensive experience with virtual projects and most organisations run cross-organisational, cross-functional projects, with project management and members scattered over different time zones, on different continents and maybe even in different hemispheres.

However, many organisations are struggling with virtual teams on a more permanent basis – and many still have limited experience. What is increasingly the case in the organisations we are working with is that virtual line management is becoming the imperative. Leading virtual permanent teams, not only temporary project teams, is progressively important, and being a multi-site manager and multi-site leader seems to becoming the norm of the 21st century. This is definitely not an easy task: you can no longer “pop over and see how it is going”. And as Patrick Dixon, one of Europe's leading futurists has pointed out: the old team management model "if in doubt, travel to sort it out" is inefficient and highly expensive in a rapidly growing global organisation. According to Patrick Dixon, senior executives today are travelling twice as much now as they were two years ago, and are struggling with travel costs, as well as coping with flight delays and jet lag.

So the need to create effective permanent teams across geographical and cultural boundaries makes additional demands on the leader: his and her leadership skills. Virtual leadership that can bridge the distance gap will win a clear competitive advantage.

Leading across time zones: A new challenge?
Managing a permanent organisation across times zones is not a new undertaking. You may recall the Roman Emperor Augustus, who ran the Roman Empire, an enterprise of remarkable size at times when communication means were not as well developed as they are today and definitely not real-time.

“I extended the borders of all the provinces of the Roman people which neighboured nations not subject to our rule. I restored peace to the provinces of Gaul and Spain, likewise Germany, which includes the ocean from Cadiz to the mouth of the river Elbe. I brought peace to the Alps from the region which is near the Adriatic Sea to the Tuscan (…) I sailed my ships on the ocean from the mouth of the Rhine to the east region up to the borders of the Cimbri, where no Roman had gone before that time by land or sea”.

Augustus was successful in running the empire, by means of skilful distribution of power, a high degree of empowerment and clear goals for each governor of the provinces. No news from the provinces was good news, and as long as Rome received its supplies of gold and riches governors could carry on the way they wanted.

Of course the major differences between the Roman Empire and our time is a much more democratic leadership style in most of the modern world and much more sophisticated communication tools. But we are still left with the challenge of “translating” distant management into modern civilisation and modern communication technologies.

The crucial element: Atmosphere
In principle there is no difference between traditional face-to-face line management as we know it, where manager and direct reports are located in the same building or area geographically, and virtual leadership or distant management. If that is the case then one might ask: what is it about distant management that causes so much trouble for managers?

To the best of our knowledge it is the lack of access to the atmosphere, the tone in the workplace that bothers both managers and direct reports. In our experience managers underestimate the significance of ongoing and often unconscious attention any manager pays to the atmosphere or tone in the workplace. We are talking about crucial information that a manager uses at all times to decide whether she is going to address something in the way the group or individuals work, or whether she should interfere or not, or how strong she should react etc.

It is this kind of informal snippets of information on which the manager builds her ongoing execution of her management or leadership to make sure the department meets its targets.

Tone and atmosphere may seem a bit hazy, as so do notions and gut feelings, but you have probably experienced it yourself when coming into an office where everything is at ease. You can feel it, hear it, and almost “smell it”: constructive and productive noise, created by people talking on the phone and with each other. Everybody is calm and relaxed-busy. Think of the opposite, for instance, of a company in trouble where people have been laid off. The tone or atmosphere is different, the noise is different, in a stressful way, and you do not feel relaxed yourself. On the contrary, you feel the tension.

Sociologists have a name for it: the Social Interactional Field, that is the force field created when two, ten or more people interact and work with one another over time. The social interactional field is often invisible to the members within it, and one could compare it to the field of gravity or the magnetic field: we are all immersed in it, and feel its influence.

How to compensate
A difficult question at this stage is how the manager overcomes this lack of direct access to the atmosphere, or the visible and audible field of social interaction. We believe that the crucial element in becoming a good distant manager is to successfully compensate for this lack of online access. One very important element here is to stay in frequent contact with the group of distant direct reports, not only contact around professional issues but also social themes. Many things get a lot easier if this kind of contact is developed and maintained. It will be easier for the manager and his direct reports to address difficult or even personal matters if needed. It will be easier for all parties to engage in face-to-face conversations when they take place if they are used to sharing not only information, but also feelings.

One might say that the more we talk, the more we have to say to each other and the easier it is to address difficult matters for both parties. Trust, care, interest and respect for each other are not only important but crucial in distant management and leadership and will help the manager to overcome this lack of ongoing insight into the atmosphere in the organisation, and create a good working social interactional field in virtual space as well. Let us illustrate this by looking at family life. If we, as parents, have children that live permanently or temporarily away from home and we call them on the phone, they do not have to say much before we as parents are highly aware of how they are, and what mental state they are in. We immediately feel or hear whether they are happy or sad or trying to keep up appearances. The closer a manager can get to the family situation the better, naturally without violating the thin and important line between work relations and private life.

Uncertainty - whose problem is it?
If we only had to pay attention to the social aspects of distant leadership it would be easy! At the end of the day meeting targets is what counts, i.e. to deliver the results that we have agreed to deliver.

The primary problem as a distant manager is that again, we cannot follow up as closely as when people sit down with us and ask questions out of curiosity. Sending a mail to a distant direct report will often be considered as controlling and one of the most common pitfalls for distant managers is in fact micromanagement. As a consequence they tend to spend too much of their own and - what is far worse - too much of their direct reports’ time on following up on everything instead of leaving people alone and letting them work.

The question is: for whom is the manager micromanaging? When asked, the answer is often “for their own sake”. They cannot live with the uncertainty of not knowing what is going on within their area of responsibility at all times.

So here the manager is confronted with the double challenge of being clearer in his target setting for direct reports, and at the same time handling his own uncertainty concerning his people working towards these targets in the right way – if at all! And on top of this, as mentioned above, building strong social relations with his direct reports.

Clear and visible leadership to bridge the distance
To summarise these aspects we think that distant managers compared to face-to-face managers must demonstrate a high degree of what one could call spectrum versatility, that is the ability to use a versatile leadership style and to freely move around on the axes of Leadership (visionary, visible, caring etc) and management (goal setting, result oriented, measuring etc) as well as the axis authoritarian and laissez-faire attitude. This means clarity in vision and expectations, being results driven and taking great interest in his people, being willing to execute orders when necessary in order to send clear messages to the whole virtual organisation, and also leaving people on their own in order to allow them to get the work done in their own way.

A task in principle not different from other managers but the distant manager must be willing to do more of this and to a greater extent. It may be useful to think of this literally: the further away, the clearer, explicit and unambiguous the message.

In other words: the good news is that distant line management is not a new science – so we can use all the tools available in the toolbox. The challenging news is that a manager - in order to be successful - needs to be versatile and use all management and leadership tools available in her toolbox.

Read the series of articles about distant management:

> Virtual line management: The competitive advantage (2005, vol 2)
> Distant management in the midst of Networks and Hierarchies (2005, vol 5)
> Distant management – practical philosophical perspectives (2006, vol 1)