Leadership for Virtual Teams on a Personal Level

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While for a long time, key words such as "command" and "control" played an important role in leadership style, the type of leadership has now increasingly developed in the direction of humanity and authenticity. This means that leadership is now increasingly viewed against the background of personal attitudes, one's own values ​​and the associated behaviors.

But how exactly can good leadership be built on these pillars?

The answer to this is anchored in various approaches. On the one hand, every engineering email list leader must grapple with the questions: "How do I want to be?" and "How do I want to be perceived?" These are the basic ideas on which every leadership style should be based. On the other hand, it is ultimately about adapting one's own actions to these very attitudes.

It is important to find a certain balance, because good leadership is now understood as a mix of “old” and “new” values ​​and should be in harmony with each other (as shown in Figure 1).


Fig. 1: Mission statement of a manager, Source: Lindner (2020)
In addition, the managers interviewed for my book also emphasized the following recommendations for successful leadership:

• 1. Team building: Real meetings for forming virtual teams

• 2. Concrete goals: goal management as a control aid

• 3. Clear allocation of roles: Working according to the pull principle to relieve the manager

• 4. Trust employees: The scope of delegated work packages increases linearly with the trust in the employee’s work performance

• 5th Basis: Mistakes and bad working days are seen as part of a construct and are allowed.

• 6. Primary characteristics: Leadership at eye level, trust in employees,

• 7. Secondary characteristics: real-time feedback, modeling agility, participation, motivation for change

• 8. New skills: anticipate new trends, use agile methods and new work concepts, evaluate employee motivation and technologies.

• 9. Learning by Doing: Adapting the leadership model to everyday work

Leadership for virtual teams at a technological level
Virtual management is not just about dealing with employees, but also about providing the right resources for a functioning work rhythm. This particularly applies to ensuring that tasks are completed within a virtual space, because this requires the right software tools. This is the only way to present work performance in a uniform and transparent manner. And, in particular, due to the spatial distance that working in virtual teams inevitably entails, the distribution of tasks and roles as well as the processing status of individual tasks and projects can no longer be communicated as casually as at office level.