Book Club - Virtual Teams #1: Challenges, The Curse of Knowledge & Lies

When was the last time you had the pleasure to read for professional development? With our busy lifestyle, it is tricky to find time to read a good book and have an insightful discussion on key learnings. Thanks to the #MathWorks Marketing Book Club organised by @LopaDhal, there are many opportunities to enjoy a range of interesting books and share thoughts and experiences with the enthusiastic team of readers.

The book we are discussing this time is "Virtual Teams, Mastering Communication and Collaboration in the Digital Age" by @TerriKurtzberg. With such a disruptive year we had in 2020, virtual communications have become a new "norm". Indeed, the book topic will be relevant for many years ahead. I found it insightful and educational to understand the implications of virtual communications for productivity, business culture and individual professional experience.

So here are some highlights and learnings from the Introduction and Chapter #1 of the book.

Are you Tyler, Beth or Paul?

To start the conversation, it is very tempting to refer to one of the well-known Tripp & Tyler videos. It is easy to relate to the characters featured in the series and recognise yourself in any of them depending on your role and the nature of virtual communications.

What we established during the first session of the Book Club is that Tyler (the one with connectivity challenges) and Paul (the one with a sound issue) are the most common scenario for many as we are still regularly facing technical challenges during virtual meetings. While enriching the scope and flexibility of communications, technology can let us down and stays in the way of virtual communications productivity.

Is it about the Content, Relationships or Schedule?

In her book, Terri Kurtzberg defines three key categories of challenges faced by her research respondents in their virtual communications:

Coordinating the Content

Coordinating the Relationships

Coordinating the Schedules

Coordinating the Content had the majority of votes during our Book Club session as the most impactful challenge. Among the discussed issues are those related to duplicating work, difficulties in the transition from brainstorming to assigning tasks, sharing content, managing document versions and a lack of collaborative dynamic.

It has come as a surprise that the content-related challenge has taken a priority over the relationships one. It seems to me that the latter would be most impacted by virtual communications while it is especially difficult to cultivate relationships, build trust and emotional bonding virtually.

On the other hand, connecting while working from home presents opportunities for interruptions which can be a conversation ice breaker: from pets and children to noisy neighbours doing DIY in the middle of your important presentation. They bring a "personal" element into our professional lives with people becoming more understanding and accepting.

Emotions, the Curse of Knowledge and Negativity

In Chapter #1 of the book, the author primarily focuses on email as a common mean of computer-mediated text-based communications. While considering its pros and cons, a reader discovers less-known aspects of email communications that involve the need for emotional intelligence, message crafting and character transformation while talking online.

Emotions

Virtual communications open up a completely different world of expressing and "reading" emotions. This is something that probably many of us are aware of and appreciate. However, it is still easy to fall into the trap of getting emotionally involved in an email exchange. One of the tips from the book is related to the interpretation of emotions.

#Tip "Remember that emotion is often interpreted more negatively than intended: positive messages are read as neutral, neutral ones as negative, and slightly negative ones as very negative. Re-read your own text before sending with this in mind." - Terri Kurtzberg

On the other hand, the advantage that email communications offer is the opportunity to take a pause and approach the conversation with a "cool head." A face-to-face discussion might not allow time for appropriate reflection.

The Curse of Knowledge - Write for an "intelligent idiot"

This is my favourite part of Chapter #1 as it is relevant to all types of communications. What is the Curse of Knowledge? This is when something you know very well that seems to be obvious to you is not the case for those with whom you are communicating. In practice, this means that when you write a communication, don't make assumptions regarding the level of the recipient's knowledge on the subject: be explicit, clear and make it easy for the reader to understand. This reminded me of the advice given to my older son by his English language tutor: "Always treat your reader as an intelligent idiot".

Negativity

Did you know that virtual communications (i.e. email) are associated with an unintentionally negative attitude? Terry Kurtzberg discusses this issue in great depth with examples of cheating, lying and insulting while communicating online. This was a complete revelation for me. According to the author, psychologists describe it with the term "disinhibition" which is defined as "a lack of restraint... when people give themselves permission to act in ways that impulsive without regard for rules or risks." If you read this book, you will find multiple examples and analysis of specific situations of such a negative attitude.

On a good note, let's hope that organisations' values and business culture appreciated and advocated by employees can be a powerful tool to defeat such behaviours.

To be continued...

We are still at the very start of the book. However, it is already clear that to succeed in virtual teams we have a lot to learn and develop additional skills which perhaps are not required for face-to-face communications. I look forward to our forthcoming sessions to share with you more findings.

Join the conversation!

What are your tips, observations, experiences of virtual communications?

#virtualcommunications #virtualteams #terrikurtzberg #mathworks #marketing #bookclub #learning #upskilling #professionaldevelopment #greatplacetowork

* The images in this article is used under the www.pixabay.com Licence “Free for commercial use, No attribution required.”