Do you need a communications coach?

Quite some time ago I star­ted to think about how best to help senior and gen­er­ally very busy man­agers improve their com­mu­nic­a­tions abil­it­ies when run­ning or work­ing in vir­tual team envir­on­ments.  These people usu­ally come from a world where they are assumed to know everything and yet never have the time to learn new skills or often even reflect on how well their cur­rent approach fits with their cur­rent role.

Most man­agers in senior roles today star­ted out in a world where pro­jects were executed with a co-located team, they learnt their com­mu­nic­a­tion tech­niques from a com­bin­a­tion of per­sonal exper­i­ence and obser­va­tion of their pre­de­cessors, all of who came from an even more tra­di­tional and gen­er­ally more com­mand and con­trol world.  As such, it is of little sur­prise that these cur­rent lead­ers struggle to man­age people they can’t see, people who are often just voices on a tele­phone or lines on a pro­ject per­son­nel list.

So, I con­sidered the usual sus­pects as far as how to help these man­agers, I con­sidered train­ing courses, both short intense courses and longer train­ing with inter­vals between units, these can be OK to address a spe­cific need but in my exper­i­ence tend to be treated as a “fit and for­get” exer­cise where the attendees leave the course and every­one thinks they now know it all, fine for tech­nical courses, not so good for inter­per­sonal skills which need con­tinual devel­op­ment.  I con­sidered train­ing manu­als and online courses, manu­als don’t get read and online courses are hardly help­ful if the par­ti­cipant is strug­gling to deal with a vir­tual world in the first place.  All of these forms of train­ing have one addi­tional prob­lem, the people it is aimed at are already so busy, where will they find the time to attend the training…

So, as an altern­ate, I am sug­gest­ing this approach, give your senior man­agers a com­mu­nic­a­tions coach, someone who can sit with them from time to time and help then nav­ig­ate the labyrinths of com­mu­nic­at­ing with per­son­nel with gen­er­a­tional, cul­tural and just plain tem­poral dif­fer­ences from them­selves, this coach need not be a highly expens­ive external coach, in fact it is pos­sibly bet­ter if it is not, but it does need to be someone who can help the man­ager in an ongo­ing way learn to lever­age all of their exper­i­ence and skill to get the best out of their vir­tual team.  I sus­pect there are poten­tial coaches in many organ­isa­tions, it is just a case of seek­ing them out and sug­gest­ing the role to them, they may be rel­at­ively senior or very junior employ­ees, they simply need to have an under­stand­ing of vir­tual teams and an abil­ity to help oth­ers learn to func­tion in the changed world in which they find themselves.

Now, this is just a concept to me at the moment, I ima­gine it has been thought of and prob­ably imple­men­ted in any num­ber of organ­isa­tions and I would cer­tainly like to hear from any­one who has been involved in it, good or bad exper­i­ences would be equally interesting.

Copy­right secured by Digiprove © 2011 Francis Norman

Related Posts:

• Provid­ing ongo­ing assist­ance in the devel­op­ment of inter­na­tional com­mu­nic­a­tions skills
• Tips for sur­vival in the deep end of inter­na­tional pro­ject communications
• Company’s options to sup­port inter­na­tional pro­ject com­mu­nic­a­tion skills

Tagged as: Communications training, international communications, interpersonal skills, Skills, virtual teams