Interview with Terence Brake

Citation

(2009), "Interview with Terence Brake", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 23 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2009.08123dab.001

Interview with Terence Brake

Article Type: Leading edge From: Development and Learning in Organizations, Volume 23, Issue 4

Terence Brake is President of TMA World – Americas, which specializes in talent development for global clients. He has worked on – and with – global virtual teams for over fifteen years, and has written several books and numerous articles on global leadership and cross-cultural management. His latest book Where in the World Is My Team?, is published by Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley. You can contact Terence on tbrake@tmaworld.com

Where in the World Is My Team? focuses on a central fictional character, Will and uses events in his social and working life to explore the issues surrounding virtual teams. As such it is quite a different format from the usual business book. What made you choose this particular approach?

The first reason I would give was pure selfishness and it stemmed from a fear of boredom! When a colleague said to me, “it’s time for another book Terry” I really broke into a cold sweat, I did not know if I could read another business book, let alone write one. I find so many of them sterile and formulaic and lifeless and I just could not see myself sitting down for a few months, toiling away at something that really did not engage me. The second reason was that so much attention when discussing virtual collaboration is given over to technology and all the collaborative Web 2.0 tools, they have a cool and sexy aura about them, but they are just tools and it is the flesh and blood people who are grappling with using the tools that interest me and how they succeed in using them. I wanted to put a little humanity back into that conversation.

The whole book deals with the various challenges facing virtual global teams, but can you identify the key challenges you see within that?

Yes, as I say in the book, I think there are three major challenges that I have experienced with these teams. The first is team member isolation which is physical, psychological and even cultural. It is very important that the team leader is able to really fully engage team members through frequent and rich communication across these teams in order to create a sense of intimacy. The second challenge is fragmentation; unless a virtual team leader has really worked with a team to create a strong sense of purpose, team direction, shared priorities and performance measures then it is very easy for team members to drift off into virtual space. On many teams I see focus drift where local priorities overtake the global priorities of the virtual team. In order to prevent this and be a cohesive unit, virtual teams need very clear navigational markers. The third challenge is confusion, the virtual team environment enables us to work across distances and cultures, where often the first language is not English, and so it becomes a kind of Petri dish for breeding confusion. As a result a great deal of vigilance is required by both the leaders and team members to ensure a shared understanding is maintained.

With the danger of fragmentation and focus shift prevalent in virtual teams do you think that virtual training such as Webinars can ever offer a satisfactory replacement for face-to-face training?

Webinars may become more popular because of economic forces and the fact that they reduce travel and accommodation costs, but can they deliver the same learning? I think it depends. From my own experiences of virtual training it is very good for communicating in a conceptual framework and because time in virtual classes is often limited then the delivery of the key message is often quicker, sharper and more precise than in face-to-face sessions. However the ability of the facilitator to connect with the participants and build trust is reduced, and the current challenges lie in skill development. I think it takes a very good instructional designer and facilitator to create the kind of virtual conditions for the development and application of skills virtually. There are many things you can do in virtual classrooms that you can do in face-to-face classrooms and the level of interactivity can be high but the problem with skills development is the lack of opportunities for observation and feedback. For example in a virtual classroom setting, I might be able to listen to you, but I probably will not be able to see how you and others behave and how others are responding to you. In terms of feedback and observation this is a major problem but the economics of the situation can certainly force vendors of virtual classroom technology to become more sophisticated in the future. I think it is going to be very interesting to see how these technologies develop, and I think we will be seeing more blended solutions with hybrids developing between real and virtual training.

Advances in technology and the facilitation of virtual global teams clearly offer a lot of advantages in the modern workplace, but how important do you think it is that people take time out from technology to get on without distractions?

I think now it is probably more important than ever; one of the things I always tell managers that I am working with is that they really need to distinguish between activity and productivity and between information and knowledge. Some of these people will say to me that they receive 100 or more emails a day and multiple phone calls as well as having to attend web meetings, or face-to-face meetings and many of them actually take pride in that. There is a book by Stephen Crane called The Red Badge of Courage about the American Civil War and the red badge of courage was a wound from the war. I think before some of these current technologies the red badge of courage for business people was Airmiles, I now think it has become volume of email or how many times you get on the BlackBerry each day. Many people are afraid of missing something important and so feel a constant need to keep up with everything coming in. It depends on the job and the individual of course but I do believe there is too much emphasis on moving information around and not enough on what you would call sensemaking and thinking. Many of the problems that business people face are very complex and those complex problems can not be handled just by exchanging information, they need real thought and analysis. I do think there is a danger in many businesses of losing that kind of silent, contemplative study of a problem.

Through the employment of technology people often create virtual personae that do not relate very much to their own personalities. Do you think that causes a problem in virtual teams?

I think the issue of personality and persona is a very complex one. Personas that we adopt sometimes, and we do it every day it is not something that is new across this technology, can be constructive as well as destructive and I see a destructive persona as one that seeks to deliberately misrepresent or manipulate. But if I demonstrate a persona and a behavior on a virtual team that is more collaborative than those I might in my local political meeting, for example, am I deliberately misrepresenting myself or seeking to manipulate others? I might be trying to get the job done as smoothly as possible in that work context. And I do feel that a lot is written about authenticity these days as if it were an absolute good. Does being authentic mean the collaboration between us will be better than if I adapted my persona to you or made some adaptations? When somebody is volatile and possibly abusive do we say “oh well, that’s just who they are, authentically themselves?” And I think when some people talk about authenticity, they have a kind of impossible ideal in their head which may not fit with any kind of reality of a human being. We are all very complex and from my own point of view I would rather work with someone who works hard at creating a collaborative persona than someone who is authentically, collaboratively challenged. So I think that there is cause for us to deconstruct this problem and think more about personas versus authenticity.