Virtual Collaborative Goal Setting

You’ve been assigned to work on a virtual team. The team has met virtually once to get to know each other and begin to build rapport. Now it’s time to get to work.

The first order of business: Agree to and set a goal for the project.

You’ve worked on team projects before, so you know that any time you have more than two people working together you introduce complexity and a variety of perspectives. Now you are adding another factor: virtual collaboration.

Virtual collaborative goal setting is about blending perceptions, cultures, and distance to come to an agreement on the one thing…the goal of the collaboration. Follow these steps to set yourself up for a successful goal setting meeting.

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How to ‘read’ the virtual room

Throughout your career you have acquired these uncanny skills to read a room. Colleagues and clients alike marvel at your ability to read their minds. Suddenly, after years of being the master of the room, you are sitting in a room – alone – about to have a meeting with 20 other professionals – virtually. Isolated from the signals you’ve tapped into for years, you are a foreigner in your own conference room. You are now part of the virtual work world – you are an anywhere worker.

How are you supposed to read the room when there’s no one in it?

Don’t panic. Adjust your dials – tune into other signals beyond the visual by listening differently.

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Get RACI with collaboration

Whether you are working on a project, delivering a presentation, or just doing your daily job – having clearly defined roles and responsibilities is the number one element of success.

If you don’t believe me, ask any project manager, manager, or mother! Without clear responsibility for tasks and decisions – things don’t get done, work is not distributed to the right resources, decisions are not made, blame and stress increase, and productivity gets flushed down the drain. Not a pretty sight.

RACI – the power tool

Increase your chance of a successful collaboration but using a project management tool in all areas of your life of business. Though the first time I used this tool was for a large project, I have since used it for group work ranging from a single event with two people, to a large cross functional multi year project. It’s called the RACI chart. Not it’s not RACY (as in risque) but R.A.C.I.

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You’re a coach? What’s that?

Unless you’ve experienced professional coaching first hand, you may be wondering what exactly is coaching?. It’s one of the most common questions I receive when someone introduces me as a coach….what is that, exactly?

It surprises me every time, but maybe it shouldn’t. I’ve always been an early adopter of things, and coaching is no exception. I’ve been interested in and studying coaching for over 2 1/2 decades. I thought by now, coaching as a profession would have had more exposure. Publications like Fast Company and Harvard Business Review, not to mention corporations like Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dell Computer, and Charles Schwab all promote and praise the power of coaching. But coaching still remains a mystery to many.

That’s why I want to shed a little light on the profession. Starting with a basic overview and then getting into some specifics. Today it’s about the definition of coaching and the types of coaching that are available.

coaching is…

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