Who Can Help Your Virtual Team?

Advocacy is something that's formally forgotten about when we talk about team leadership. In virtual teams, it might be more difficult to advocate for your team and to have access to a wide network that can help you. Here's a short exercise to help you map out your team's network, to access in the future when you need help or to gain visibility in the organisation.

As a manager or team leader, you’re probably in a position to advocate for your team within your organisation. You’re likely to have built some kind of relationship with decision makers and other managers.

Virtual teams might lack visibility in an organisation. Not being physically together with other people within the organisation means there are no spontaneous encounters in the lift, kitchen, canteen, even toilets. Building a social network (and I don’t mean Facebook, but a collection of individuals who you know and who know you too) can be hard if you’re not sharing the same physical space.

Deliberate Networking

As with much of our virtual practice, we need to be deliberate and strategic about how we make connections throughout the organisation. This unit suggests a way of doing this as a team, but you can also take the exercise and apply it to building your own network.

Different team members might have access to different kinds of networks, especially if they’re located in different company locations. They might have exchanges (maybe of a virtual nature) with different people within the company. It might be that they’re connected on LinkedIn. It might be that every now and then they contact them or are contacted by them via email.

If your company uses an enterprise social network like Yammer, your team members might have joined groups where they interact with all sorts of people across the organisation.

Having a look at how you and your team members are connected to the rest of the organisation and other stakeholders is a useful way of creating a strategy to make sure your team is not isolated from the organisation. It can also strengthen team identity: in deciding how to tap into your networks as a team, you continue to define your own identity.

Activity

Think of this exercise as creating a networking strategy for your team. As always, while in a work environment where you are physically close to other people in your organisation, finding your way to people who can help you do your job better will happen on an ad-hoc basis. This might be particularly useful for teams with members located in different company locations – there might well be someone in your building who could be of help to someone across the globe, you just haven’t made the connection yet.

It’s easier to contact someone for help or for a favour if you’ve met them before. When most of your interactions are virtual, it’s more difficult to meet people. That’s why it’s worth identifying how to build and nurture a useful network before you need to tap into.

Mapping Out Your Network

Here’s an exercise you might find helpful.

As you go through it on your own or within your team, you will identify how connected or not you are to the rest of the organisation. This in itself is a valuable exercise that can help you determine whether you need more visibility or whether you just need to make sure you stay up to date with what else is going on.

You’ll need to collate your contact names and thoughts somewhere. You can use a tool (like Linoit, in this video) or you can just use a spreadsheet.

It might help to group your Contacts under three headings.

Getting Help

Who has information we need to access regularly or occasionally?

Who’s been helpful in the past?

Who have we been helpful to?

Expanding the Network and Advocating for the Team

Who likes us?

Who has influence in areas relevant to us?

Who can introduce us to others?

Who else should we be meeting?

Project Development

Who could help us move the project forwards?

Who’s got resources or access to resources we might need?

Who’s done something similar before?

There might be other questions that could help you in your particular situation, so it’s worth thinking about whether there are any questions of your own you can add (or whether some of the ones I suggest are completely irrelevant).

Once you’ve laid out your questions in some shape or form (again, you don’t need to use a tool, really, you could also just use a spreadsheet) each team member will need to contribute to it.

When setting up this exercise, you should make clear that some people will find it easier than others to come up with names, depending on their responsibilities. Some of you will struggle to think of anyone outside of your team who is related to your work, if most of your work can be easily done without interacting with others.

In that case, it’s also worth asking yourself: "What kind of help or information that I don’t have now could come in handy?"
You never know, someone might know someone in the organisation or outside of it, who’s able to help.

Once everyone has contributed to the lists by adding a name and when possible, how they’re relevant, you’ll need an action plan.

Action Plan

Few Names Come to Mind

If your list is really small, you might need to plan how you’re going to increase it, to gain visibility within the organisation, to lay down the network for when you need help and to give an opportunity to team members to grow through their interactions with others – when you are in touch with someone outside the team, your horizons broaden.

If you’re going to embark on a network expansion search, keep it small, maybe commit to adding one name per person. Then decide how you will record this and by when you’ll have the list ready.

If you’re using a tool like Yammer in your organisation, this might be a good place to start looking for people your team should connect with. .

Once you’ve identified people who you want to connect with, think whether there is anyone in your team's network who will be able to introduce you to them. If not, have a strategy for getting in touch with them (for “reaching out”) or put them away to be contacted when you actually need something from them. (Sometimes people will be happier to be contacted when they can be of help straightaway, than just out of the blue for a coffee.)

Using Your Network Map

Use the map to find out a bit more about the individuals that other team members know, to see whether you think they might be useful to you at some point.

How will you strengthen relationships with your current network?

How will you update this information?

Your Thoughts

Your thoughts on this post and the activity are more welcome than ever. I'm not sure if the concept is clear, or if the activity works or whether anyone thinks they'll find the time to do this with your team. Any thoughts spring to mind immediately? Please share them with us.

P.S. Thanks to Curtis James for sharing the live version of the Networking Map with me and to Lisette Sutherland for introducing me to LinoIt.