Leadership in virtual teams

Virtual teams consist of people working remotely from colleagues, team members, managers, partners, resources and clients, they associate and co-operate with each other electronically. Such type of team organization is significant for 21st century and many specialists define it as a future form of work collaboration. It is driven by modern technologies and it becomes more and more efficient, because computer and telecommunication technologies are progressing rapidly. Method and philosophy of virtual team collaboration becomes essential and sufficient for new economic branches every day. Today many working people and organizations across many economic sectors from all over the world wish to benefit from organizing virtual teams. But to be successful in remote, virtual collaboration it is necessary to master new knowledge, technologies, skills and practices. It requires new leadership skills as well.

Leading management specialists made research of virtual teams phenomena and they have reached the following key conclusions for leadership in virtual teams:

• Virtual teams work successfully - Most of studied virtual teams achieved their goals successfully, if some issues appeared they were not related to the fact that the team was a virtual team.
• People can be trusted in a virtual environment - The studied virtual team members worked with the same effectiveness as if they worked face-to-face.
• Team can be 100% virtual - Team can be 100% virtual, however face-to-face meetings are useful for team building.
• Virtual team's life-cycle is the very similar to life-cycle of "real" team , they show the same dynamics

According to management specialists' opinion the following leadership rules are important for managers and coordinators of virtual teams:

However virtual team management requires clear tasks planning and reporting system, where each team member can easily see and report his/her tasks, where managers can easily track project performance and keep everyone informed. VIP Task Manager is a groupware that allows multiple users to access the common database via Internet and plan, edit and report tasks in real-time regime. VIP Task Manager allows team coordinators to schedule tasks, to plan tasks by dates, time, priorities and many various attributes, to make each virtual team member immediately informed about jobs they have to do. VIP Task Manager allows employees to easily share their performance, results, documents, etc. and quickly notify virtual team head about progress or issues they have. To establish VIP Task Manager's server it is enough to have one Windows PC or Windows Server with static IP-address and to make quick and easy software installation on server and on client computers. After this multiple users from any place of the world will be able to access the common database via Internet and collaborate efficiently.