In a recent webinar that Patty McManus and I led — "Three Strategies to Succeed at Change (and what to do if it goes sideways)" — many change leaders in the audience expressed concern about sponsorship. The short headline: "Lack of sponsorship can wreck a change effort."

"Thank goodness more and more business and team meetings are being held virtually." "Goody! We’re meeting by conference call!" "If only all of our meetings could be virtual!"

Sound familiar? I’m guessing not. The fact is that virtual meetings are demanding and, sometimes, are a downright painful part of our normal workday. Think of the last time you posed a question on a call, only to hear the drawn out silence of muted phones in response. I like to call this the "crickets moment" (even though the crickets seem to be on mute, too).

Virtual teams often face difficulties solving problems, making decisions, generating innovative ideas, and reconciling differences. When team members don't meet with each other face-to-face, it can be harder to build rapport, develop trust, and establish meaningful collegiality. Team members multi-task, leaders fall back to presenting endlessly, and the work goes sideways.

At Interaction Associates, we work with clients to achieve greater and more sustainable levels of business return on investment, by delivering a different ROI — Return on Involvement™. The primary way that we do this is by helping our clients to create cultures of involvement by developing a type of leader that we call the Facilitative Leader. They are best defined as leaders who demonstrate:

1) strategic thinking,

2) excellent collaborative skills, and

3) self awareness.

Collaboration is critical to business success. Not surprisingly, it's critical to success in the arts, too — perhaps especially to performing arts like theatre.

My writing collaborator, Andrew Black, and I appeared this month in a feature interview in The Dramatist, the monthly membership magazine of The Dramatists Guild. We were interviewed, of course, on collaboration. I say "of course" because that is the single most-asked question of Andrew and me — "You write plays together? How on earth do you manage that?"

Collaboration is a critical driver in business today, particularly if your business is global and your teams are far-flung. New technologies are promising, but the simple truth is: technology doesn't collaborate, people do.

What special methods do your people have to collaborate successfully?
How can you get strong results – and a truly collaborative workforce?

Download this free white paper —Bells, Whistles, and Blackberries — to learn:

I was intrigued by the recent New York Times article "An Internal Wiki That’s Not Classified." It seems the State Department --- not exactly famous for its openness and lack of bureaucracy --- has adopted the free-wheeling collaborative tool to keep abreast of everything from meeting agendas and biographies to how best to get lunch delivered.

A work team's productivity and performance are affected by the team's structural interdependence, and its team members' use of collaborative skills.

In his article, "All for One and One for All," Jay Gordon Cone provides a model and a simple checklist to help you assess if your team is performing up to par --- and decide what to do if it's not.

With the tools provided in "All for One and One for All" by Interaction Associates Senior Consultant Jay Gordon Cone, you'll learn:

If you were to survey almost any professional group and ask who is working in a formal or informal matrix organization, chances are you'd see most hands in the air. Even if their companies have a formal organization structure aligned to market segments, products, or functional groups, most people have to contend with satisfying competing needs from multiple constituencies. All too often, the result is finding the "least worst" option rather than building agreements and reconciling the differences to serve all parties' needs and interests.

Everyone encounters it at one time or another: behavior by team members that drives you crazy!

This article by Interaction Associates Senior Consultant Jay Gordon Cone equips you with a practical solution set to address this typical yet thorny problem. Since a successful balance of results, process and relationship is the end goal, you won't want to miss out on this "toolkit" for better team relationships.