how to lead virtual teams

Just finished an interesting webcast by Lee Johnson on eleading: maximizing the power of global virtual teams. While I'm not currently leading a virtual team myself I have spent the last 10 months developing training for a virtual workforce. A big take home point is that all management whether face to face or virtual begins with good management skills. Amen to that!
Lee has targeted the most difficult obstacles as building trust and positive relationships with the team and the complications that come from the use of electronic communication. The good news is that these can be overcome and when they are, there is a big reward in terms of productivity.
So if you set and clarify goals of the team and the inviduals while fostering a sense of trust by building relationships your team members one-on-one you can be successful.

Linked In Groups

Currently I'm the only instructional designer on my training team at Ascend One. I am not not new to this. In fact I've spent most of my career on teams where I was the only one with my knowledge set. So I have begun the search for networking opportunities with other instructional designers again. In the past I've reviewed blogs via my RSS reader and posted questions but that usually didn't have a fast enough response time to be helpful at the very moment that I needed. I recently experimented with the groups in Linked In and have been extremely happy with the results. I joined the Adobe Connect User Group as well as several other user groups and find that I normally get a response within a few hours of posting a question. It truely has been a great experience. If you haven't tried them out, you should!