Page 263 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

242 � mAnAgIng the moBIle workForCe

and then be able to communicate that. “You are forcing people to
work in a different way than they are used to,” says Kit.

have the Confidence to trust your team
“Gone are the butt-in-chair days, where if your butt was in your chair,
your manager was happy that you were working,” says Kit. With a
virtual team, the question is, what are you producing, and are you
producing it on time and under budget? The manager’s role is to be
proactive, to remove roadblocks, and to be strategic about how the
team can contribute to the company. Virtual managers, Kit believes,
have to have the skills and confidence to hire people who are smarter
than they are, surrounding themselves with people who are capable,
and then working to bring out the best in people.

getting started
Doing things right from the start makes a big difference. Just think-
ing about the need to spend time early on getting to know each other
will help leaders realize that different people on your team need dif-
ferent things. For example, some cultures require more relationship
building than others do. “If you’re working in Asia, where you have
a high percentage of Asian team members, you’re going to have to
spend more time with the personal rapport building,” she says. And
it’s not just cultures. Engineers might need less rapport building than
the marketing people or the salespeople. Introverts might need less
than extroverts. “You have to know not only the cultural milieu that
your team is coming from but [also] the personal frame of reference
that they have,” Kit says.

equal Access to technology
Kit told us about an experience she had several years ago when she was
working in the United States with a team in the Philippines. They
had to burn CDs and ship them overnight because the Internet speeds