Leadership and Change

Thank you for your insight. I enjoyed watching both of those videos and reading a bit more into Paul Hawken's book, Blessed Unrest.

I have some experience working in virtual teams. My team works locally but often virtually amongst each other or with other teams. I also have worked occasionally with support staff from various hardware and software vendors across the globe.

I'll speak to my experience on your questions: "How do leaders maintain authenticity in a virtual world?" By setting expectations, setting the example, providing deadlines, supporting my team, etc.. I'd like to work full time from home but it's generally easier to meet with other teams in person than to have to type everything or talk on a phone. We don't really work much differently at home than we would in the office, except we are saving a lot of drive time and we can look less than professional. Beyond that, our work is still expected to get done and we still need to meet deadlines. We easily can respond to immediate needs. In fact, recently my director commented that he no longer is worried about having my staff in the office as he's seen that we can and do accomplish all tasks from home. To date, we don't work full time from home, but perhaps I should ask if my team wants to increase virtual office time.

On body language, a few things come to mind... It depends on the situation and with whom we are speaking to. We have tools to talk in real time, such as internet chat or make a phone call, or close to real time such as email. I am comfortable enough with my team and they me that they can comment back and forth with some joking... "oh, it looks like it's going to be a long night, hooray I didn't need any sleep!", we can throw in the typical emoticons, :-( after to designate we're bummed about this.. or the lol (laughing out loud) comment on things we may find humor in. We can even type out sighhhh..... to simulate our body language on a particular subject. I think this is the same with any virtual community like facebook or myspace, the communicators easily find a way to have "body language" within the community through words, images, sound, etc. Truthfully, if someone wants to roll their eyes or yell out without anyone knowing, they can! :)

Last comment, just like a car breaking down, the internet, hardware or software can cause grief at the wrong time. The nice thing about having a team with virtual capability is that you can call on other staff and see if they can help out in this situation. Because staff are prepared to work from home, are given the tools to do so and help each other out, our team has built a good reputation for our work.