Team Communication

Team Communication: The Heartbeat of a Team

It has already been established that the biggest hurdle that virtual teams will face is the communication between them. According to Beranek (2005), "a virtual environment fundamentally transforms the ways in which teams work. Virtual teams can form, apply diverse intellectual talent, and disband quickly and how well organizations manage this process can make the difference between success and failure. These new environmental characteristics make communication and collaboration even more critical to a team's success." A couple of critical tasks for these virtual teams will be identifying a group leader, determining an effective communications strategy, and ways in which too engage the team into reviewing and revising that strategy on a frequent basis. The question now becomes, how can we create and follow a strategy that will add value to our team rather than create overload on our team?

Thru the defining of both "team" and "communication", we can derive that the definition of team communication is the activity of conveying information between a cooperative unit. There are three things that contribute to effective team communication, they are the team's member's willingness to communicate, the active listening of all team members, and the understanding of conveyed information by all members of the team. Having and improving upon the team's communication, leadership, and problem-solving skills enables them to become a highly efficient and productive unit.

What, when, and how much will the team communicate? Due to the fact that a virtual college has an enormous variety of people attending it, all of whom have their own schedules, problems, and lives to deal with, the answering of what would seem to be a simple question actually becomes quite the obstacle. Another question, dealing very closely with what and when, is where and how will the team communicate. Because of the day and age that we live in this can be accomplished in a multitude of ways, such as, e-mail, instant messaging, video conference calls, phone conferences, one-on-one telephone calls, or if you're lucky you could find yourself actually meeting and conversing in a social environment. According to Kimball, "one way to start developing a communications strategy is to look at the nature of the different kinds of work the team will be doing and what kind of communication is needed to support that work. The manner in which you should communicate is better said by Dwyer (2005) "Sometimes it is absolutely necessary to be blunt. Depending on communication styles, it may be the only way to be heard. It may hurt at first, but when the person has a chance to digest things, typically the response will be a positive one." When you cut out the need for comfort and formalities, you tend to accomplish things quicker and more effectively.

Who will play what roles in the team and in its communication? This a very essential piece to the puzzle, because with out definition of the responsibility of each team member things tend to become unorganized, leaderless, unaccomplished, and unsatisfactory to those involved. "Originating from its lack of empowerment, a team can become confused, leading to a lack of consistency, this confusion on the team's authority is linked with the team's leadership (Applebaum, 2007)." Thru my research I found many references and tips suggesting two things for effective team communication, extroversion and introversion. According to WordNet (2007) extroversion is the concern with what is outside the self, and introversion is the opposite of that, and is concern with one self. In order to have good communication between the team you must have a balance between the concerns that you show for yourself and the responsibilities that you have, and the concern that you have for the team