High Performance Virtual Teams must beware the limitations and challenges presented by a good understanding of soft skills.
Limitations of Soft Skills
- Control issues: Leaders exhibit ownership and control over work issues. Trusting team members to be empowered to make decisions and seek solutions to problems in work issues may be limited based on superior managers subverting the team decisions.
- Role Identity: Shared leadership carries the potential to cloud the specificity of roles. Ambiguity ensues, and the tasks necessary to coordinate between the co-workers become unclear. Resistance to team development may come from this lack of clarity.
- Education and Learning: Shared leadership requires a re-education from the top-down hierarchical models of traditional business. In participation on teams the members must learn to work together. Some will have the natural integrative personality and talent aptitudes necessary to build cohesiveness and unity. Others whom have a strong individualistic and introvert personalities may struggle. The limitations on how much the team members are able to overcome their natural tendencies against shared leadership, will dictate the success of the team.
- Credit and Reward: Co-leaders must learn to soft-skill of how to handle the division of credit and share the rewards of task completion. The complementary element is limited by the success of the work being done. If some team members do not contribute as significantly as others, the discrepancy can cause team divisions. The sharing of credit must, then, have some rubric for assigning credit to those whom achieve, and discipline those who do not. In giving credit, the managing of egos becomes paramount. Can one leader step back and let the other one take the bow? Shared leadership must find ways to limit the self-aggrandizement and self-promotion that some want to take for themselves at the expense of others on the team. Failure in managing credit and reward will limit the growth and development of team unity and motivation.
Challenges to the Communication Process in the Shared Leadership Model
There are barriers to the communication process influencing the performance of teams.
- Intellectual Barriers: Team members must be clear about what is needed by whom and when. They must be able to keep people up to date. Monitoring and feedback must exist in order to ensure that communication system is functioning properly.
- Psychological Barriers: This communication barrier arises out of personality or emotional conflicts. The threat posed by these barriers will disrupt the flow of the team communication if not dealt with.
- Political Barriers: The team members attempt to make themselves look at the expense of their teammates. Cliques form and there is a breakdown of communication.
