Gaming The Virus To Win At Virtual Leadership
Gaming The Virus To Win At Virtual Leadership
Gaming The Virus To Win At Virtual Leadership
September 13, 2020
Summary
For many of us still writing emails from our kitchen tables, the term global virtual team or "GVT" no longer conjures up images of techies living the digital nomad lifestyle in Bali.
Neither distributed teams nor virtual collaboration were completely unchartered territory for most office workers, of course.
For many companies, a globally distributed team aligns better with their external environment - helping them to serve clients in foreign markets, work with suppliers in lower-cost manufacturing countries, or cultivate partnerships with a diverse range of global players.
While research studies have shown the innovation potential of virtual teams, bringing the ideas together and managing conflicts within a permanent GVT can be challenging.
Rob Álvarez Bucholska, host of the podcast Professor Game, defines gamification as "The use of game design, game elements, and play for purposes beyond entertainment." Back in 2019, our team at ESMT Berlin designed a game to do just that - remotely educate executive clients in the art of virtual collaboration.
Unlike most classic team building challenges, the game does not grant players the luxury of all looking at the same visual or numerical data.
These tasks demand distributed leadership in which dispersed team members in the "Local offices" are trusted to contribute independently.
In multinational firms the local contexts that team members are working in are often so highly complex and divergent that centralization efforts either lead to an unmanageable degree of complexity or oversimplification.
Managing a distributed team is especially difficult for leaders during these desynchronized phases - when team members are working independently, leaders are also distanced from the task.
This can cause some level of anxiety for those used to having more direct oversight, prompting one of two extremes: unnecessary meddling in the work of local offices or an overly laissez-faire form of leadership with teams working in divergent directions.
Reference
Gaming The Virus To Win At Virtual Leadership. (2020, September 13). Retrieved September 22, 2020, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/esmtberlin/2020/09/13/gaming-the-virus-to-win-at-virtual-leadership/