Trina Hoefling Untethered

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Are you noticing that tightening belts and financial meltdown is fast creating community and connection? Maybe I’m just an idealist…. I had a friend in the 80’s who used to say that I found the good in everyone and everybody. Her example was that I would introduce people by saying something like, “Meet Joe (NOT the plumber). He’s an ax murderer, but he has the singing voice of an angel!”

I’m not promoting ax murder, but I do look for the noble and the good as much as I can.

I, like everyone else, am impacted and challenged by the current financial market in my work - Can you say Bye Bye budget?. My home - how bad could my timing be to sell my home for lots of reasons that are not just financially driven? My bank balances. My story isn’t unusal - or even very important.

What matters is how much authenticity, transparency, and honesty I’m experiencing in my conversations with strangers and friends.

A successful entrepreneur, friend, and colleague admitted she would be in trouble in 2009 if things didn’t shift. One of my personal service providers admitted she’s living in a motel because it was cheaper than her rent while waiting for a family member to clear out space for the family to move in. I sold my second car and am reclaiming my ancestry as garage sale queen.

You might ask, Is that a pony? Sure doesn’t sound like it.

And I say, YES! You know why? We’re not complaining. We’re not even mad. Worry is present, but most of the people in my life are focusing on friends, family, and community-building. I’ve advocated collaboration, community, and sharing whenever I can. Nothing like the financial unknown and not knowing if we’re on the edge of an abyss to make more inroads toward working together collaboratively!

If that’s part of what comes out of this mess (and hopefully a return to more balance, less greed, and waking to how much most all of us were unintentionally participating in an unsustainable system), I hope we can come together as a community, a country, a people, and make progress toward becoming better global citizens.

That works for me! Make it a good week, everyone.

Do you know what is the number one moving part that helps or hurts virtual teams?

The manager.

Research sponsored by Microsoft and major universities shows that virtual managers (even if only partially virtual) must be better at 3 things:

- communicating

- managing by results

- trusting employees to manage their own work habits.

Managing remotely requires a proactive and engaged approach to expand the emotional bandwidth in the team and across teams. Poor people skills are the 1^st and 2^nd reasons many C-Level Executives fail in the first two years. How well we work with people matters. If virtual, it matters even more. Collaborative software and technology have finally pretty much caught up to the promise, and with good strategy and training, technology is truly enabling virtual work. Nearly all parts of an organization engage electronically with their customers.

But people are still the key.

We are entering the third wave of virtual work and virtual collaboration, yet we still find ourselves spending more time traveling than we might. When any of us work in groups, people are part of the mix, and many are still more comfortable meeting face to face.

Thanks to increased energy prices, budget constrictions, better technology, and increasing desire to collaborate across distance, more of us find ourselves needing to spend less time traveling to manage our virtual teams and clients than we have in the past. Travel time and expenses are making traditional methods of relationship and project management ineffective.

Virtual management is a core competency in modern business culture. Everyone who wants to stick around will join the third wave of virtual collaboration armed with confidence and competence.

Without the usual face time to get to know one another, trust and work flow is built and supported differently virtually, as are communications, workflow, decision making, tracking results, and team development. The leader’s job is to build a wide path for trust to build, to proactively manage work and people as much as to manage production.

Over the years I have helped thousands of people and dozens of companies find ways to maximize success by effectively integrating virtual work into their customer and employee engagement processes. Telework programs have

-           built call centers without walls,

-           retained quality employees without geographic barriers

-           reduced real estate, travel and other hard & soft business costs.

In truth, virtual work is here to stay. According to The Conference Board, recent research for American Business Collaboration (ABC) found that more than 80 percent of workers today are working at a distance from colleagues, and this number is growing.

Want advice, help, or training to improve your ability to work and collaborate effectively, whether F2F, Virtual, or a hybrid of both? Call or email me! GroupONE Solutions now has a solid team of virtual experts in

- telework installations / expansions

- online facilitation

- collaborative software

- organization development and change management in global organizations and cross-organizational collaboration.

If you’d rather Do It Yourself, our OCTOBER-NOVEMBER SPECIAL is a $50 discount on our Virtual Team Tool Box, filled with over 80 tools, assessments, case studies, templates, tips and guidelines, and management / leadership resources.

The full tool box includes Working Virtually and The Handbook of High Performance Virtual Teams for only $249 through November 2008.

The tool box alone is available for only $123 and is fully downloadable.

Also consider University of Wisconsin’s new 2-day course, Working Virtually, November 12 – 14 in Milwaukee. It won’t be offered again until spring, 2009! “Working Virtually” is a must for anyone in a virtual work / collaborative environment regardless of your organization’s size. Leave with templates, guidelines and tools to manage an effective virtual/distance team. Course fee includes morning and afternoon refreshment breaks, lunches, instructional material and tuition. I and my design team designed and developed the course, and I will be the trainer.

Register or learn more at

www.sce-mgmt.uwm.edu

If you want to bring training to you, contact me!

You can also work with  GroupONE Solutions virtual experts directly. Whether you want a speaker, executive briefing, JIT coaching advice (by the hour or by the project), active assistance, or training, we can help. Stay tuned for announcements regarding JIT online training modules coming in 2009 as well.

Other News: Colleague, co-author of The Handbook, and GO-S Virtual Expert, Janet Salmons releases The Handbook of Research on Electronic Collaboration and Organizational Synergy next month. For more information, go to www.info-sci-ref.com, and tell Janet Trina sent you!

If you want to learn a little more about the people part of virtual work, I talked to Rob McNealy of Start-Up Radio about The Handbook of High Performance Virtual Teams recently.   http://www.startupstoryradio.com/working-virtually-with-trina-hoefling/

Thanks for your continued interest, and know I am interested in what YOU want to hear about and need as well. What do you want to hear more about? I’d love to know!

This is a short, quick, and honest post…. I’ve been buried with commitments and distracted by politics and history-making news. Taking way too much time reading, watching, and researching to better educate myself as an “informed citizen.”

The good news for the blogosphere is I went out of town Wednesday morning and was completely unplugged until Monday morning - was in the glorious Rocky Mountains at a gathering with 15 years of friends. I came back and slammed myself into DVR’ed news shows and emails and catching up with the world. Not that I learned good news, but fundamentally, things were about as I expected.

Moral of the story? I’m clear on what I need to do as a citizen and need to relax about being hyper vigilant, and am antsy to get back to my professional blogging and writing. You’ll hear more from me soon with some news and more strategy-based and business-focused postings ….

Though tonight I have a debate to watch. Catch you on the rebound! Trina