A renowned expert in the fields of remote collaboration, global teams, and managing wide-scale organizational change, Nancy Settle-Murphy is a popular author of articles, white papers, ezines and booklets. I asked Nancy about one of my struggles:
Joe: One of the struggles I always have is that when I communicate, I probably simplify things and do more of a sound bite than the normal person. I’m not one to write a long paragraph on something. When I do that virtually, sometimes it’s taken out of context, and I have to go back and clarify. No, I didn’t really mean that, I meant that. Do you need to over elaborate in your messages? I mean, can we just Twitterize everything, or do we need to write longer emails when we’re working virtually?
Related Podcast and Transcription: Working Virtually
Nanc Settle-Murphy: That’s a good question. I think it depends first of all what cultures you’re working with. Some cultures and I’ll generalize here, let’s say German, Austrian, Swiss, and oftentimes those of us in the U.S.; we like, and we crave details. So, when writing emails and when speaking, you often need to be more explicit. But putting aside the cultural differences, when you work as a virtual team, whether you’re a team leader or a team participant, you do need to be achingly explicit to make sure I really got what you said, and gee, now that I think about it, I didn’t really understand what Joe said, and I have no avenue for which to ask Joe until maybe our next team meeting, or maybe if I’m lucky enough to get you at your desk if I call, which would be a very rare thing.
So you need to think in advance what information do people need, and if you’re working with a cross-cultural team, how do I make sure that when translated in and out of the local language, the message is clear? How do I give a message in such a way that the chances for misinterpretation or confusion are minimal, you don’t have another chance oftentimes?
The other point I wanted to make based on the example you gave is the power of paraphrasing. A virtual leader needs to be able to very quickly – and this is a skill that takes a lot of time to practice and to really hone – and that is I need to be able to translate what someone said. I don’t mean into another language. I mean to paraphrase to make sure that point that Cindy just said, or Jose just said to make sure that we all understand it in the same way while we’re in a real time conversation. If I believe that either due to an accent or due to someone saying something that really wasn’t quite clear, but I think I understand what they said, it’s up to the virtual team leader, or it could be up to any of the team participants, to say it in a different way and to validate that everyone understood that important point the same way.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Working Virtually
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