Virtual Team Dynamics - The Ulfire Podcast

Securing personnel for international or intercultural assignments and postings can be a difficult task. It is generally easier to find candidates with the right technical skills than the right cultural and motivational ones, yet, getting the motivational balance wrong can lead to major issues as the deployment progresses.
This article looks at some of the issues associated with finding those right personnel for your needs.

The post Motivations To Succeed In International Teams Communication appeared first on ULFIRE.

Finding real, genuine leadership role models in the crowded and highly distorted modern world is a major challenge for aspiring leaders. All too often they are left choosing between a media creation on a TV show or in a movie, a politician or a sporting personality, when the people they really need to be emulating are the business leaders, business leaders who are unable to show their true colours because of corporate spin and media control.

The post Who Are Our Leadership Role Models appeared first on ULFIRE.

Building a successful international project team relationship requires a broad span of abilities, these range from whatever the technical needs of the role are to many interpersonal and cross cultural abilities. This article discusses some of the ways an organisation can access and utilise many of these skills, skills that can be either internally or externally sourced.

The post Understanding Your International Project Partners appeared first on ULFIRE.

Selecting personnel for an expat assignment is a critical activity that can have major impacts on the overall outcome of a project. Pick and send the right people and you will have a solid and productive team who will take care of each other and deliver the best project possible, pick poorly and your project outcomes could be very disappointing and personnel will not have a good experience.

The post Selecting Personnel For Expat Roles appeared first on ULFIRE.

This article looks at some of the challenges faced when setting up a new virtual team in establishing and building contact between the locations and the personnel. This first contact can be challenging from a cultural and organisational perspective, with many different barriers blocking what is a vital part of the organisational configuration.

The post Making First Contact In International Projects appeared first on ULFIRE.

Achieving value from your training budget investment is an ongoing challenge for many projects and businesses, securing the budget is sometimes the easy part, with demands from all corners on its use. This article however argues that at least a portion of a training budget should be spent on leadership and communications skills.

The post Training Budgets For Virtual Team Communications appeared first on ULFIRE.

Something as simple as the complexity of language used in teleconferences in virtual teams, particularly those involving personnel for whom English is a second or third language, can lead to confusion and a sense of exclusion. This article argues for the use of a simple project vocabulary to enable all personnel to speak more or less on a level platform.

The post Language Problems In Teleconferences appeared first on ULFIRE.

Understanding how to plan and manage communications across timezones is fundamental to building a stable and reliable virtual team communications plan. As the number of timezones between locations increases, projects find themselves stretching their communications further and further and placing a greater emphasis on written communications over verbal, this in turn leads to a lessening of the quality of communications.

The post Virtual Team Communications Across Time Zones appeared first on ULFIRE.

Embedding communications equality in your projects and businesses is particularly important in virtual team environments. Having a conscious and considered approach to maintaining equality in communications will mean your personnel regardless of their geographic location are all able to contribute to the dialogue in your projects and work toward its success.

The post Communications Equality In Projects appeared first on ULFIRE.

Communication Silos occur in virtually every organisation and project, personnel get so engrossed in their day to day work they forget to share news and information with those outside of their immediate circle. In virtual teams, communication silos can become particularly destructive as the walls of the silos are defined by the distance between the teams and can be impenetrable to any but the most direct efforts.

The post Communication Silos In Virtual Teams appeared first on ULFIRE.