Assessing the Effectiveness of Remote Leaders

Background & Intent:

As technology and access to high speed internet continues to increase across the state, so do opportunities to work in distributed teams.  Many of the larger entities across the state share resources and collaborate remotely to achieve project goals. While evaluation tools have existed for decades to address leadership capability at the collocated level, those tools may not be achieving the same goals for remotely located teams.  The goal of this discussion is to spur conversation on how best to evaluate the effectiveness of leadership on the remote level.

As a doctoral student studying organizational leadership, Kate is researching the effectiveness of remote leaders.

Prompt Questions:

·   How can a leader be effective even if they have never met their team face-to-face?

·   How can teams build trust in each other when they are dispersed across a large region?

·   What tools are most effective to promote trust and help teams collaborate?  

·   How can we measure trust?

·   What are the best tools to evaluate the effectiveness of work teams?  

·   How do these evaluation tools need to change when the team is dispersed?

·   Do you have any resources you would be willing to share?