A theme within this course is the development of skills and techniques that are useful to team members as individuals, as team leaders and as team managers. Many of these skills are useful in other contexts, and you may have studied them as part of management or other professional development courses. In this section we consider two aspects of working in successful teams – decision making and trust – and how these can be more complicated in a virtual environment. By way of motivation, in Coar’s (2003) article ‘The sun never sets on distributed development’, he notes that one of the consequences of relying on email or other asynchronous communication media is the difficulty of coming to conclusions or reaching a consensus.
Revisit a recent decision you, or a team you are working in, has made. Look back on it as though you were once again in the position of having to make the decision. Write down some brief answers to the following questions.
While the answers to these questions will depend on the example that you chose, it is common to look back and recognise where there was insufficient or incomplete information at the time a decision was made. If this was not the case perhaps explicit steps were taken to ensure appropriate information was available.
Electronic communication can add an additional level of complexity to decision making. To ensure that all steps are complete in a virtual environment it is necessary to:
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