As promised, here is the first of my 3 Conversations You Need to Have With Your Team–virtual or otherwise.

To prepare for Conversation 1, write down the names of the people on your team.  Now, list everything you know about each person—beyond the team function he or she serves. Do you know anything about their family? How about previous companies they’ve worked for? Can you list any successes they may have had or failures they’ve endured? Do you know anything at all about their personal and professional hopes, needs, dreams and aspirations for the future? Assess how much you know or don’t know about each as a human being. The less you know, the more tenuous your trust and connection is with that person.

Each day for the next week, connect with as many people on your team as possible through a medium other than email; video conferencing is the best alternative to an in-person meeting, but you could use the phone too. And instead of getting right down to business, spend some time checking in on a personal level with the goal of learning as much as you can about who this person is and what makes him or her tick.

As uncomfortable as this might be at first, ask each person to share with you his or her number one business/career/work challenge. Now dig a little deeper, and try to uncover a personal goal or dream. And if the opportunity presents itself, learn at least one important story or event from his or her life.

With some, you may have to coax a bit — but you’ll be surprised how many will open up right away. And once they do…

Ask if there’s some way you can be of service — is there something you can do to help with their challenge or get them closer to their personal goal? Even if that person declines your offer, he or she will appreciate your asking.

At the end of the week, you’ll not only have a much deeper knowledge of each individual on your team, you’ll have shown each individual that you care. And then you’ll be ready for The 2nd Conversation.

Stay tuned for that, but first, give this one a try and let me know how it goes.

No matter the structure of your team, no matter the challenge your team is working on, and no matter the proximity (or lack thereof) of its members, there are three things all successful teams have in common:

1. They are all made up of human beings
2. Human beings perform better with great leadership (although not necessarily the traditional top-down kind).
3. Great team leaders foster meaningful connection among the members of the team.

Teams thrive on collaboration made up of meaningful connection with one another, and individual team members will perform better when they feel like they’re all in it together. You need to connect your team members to one another on a personal level. So, if you find yourself leading (or being expected to lead) a virtual team, your primary job is to go out of your way to facilitate the very interpersonal connection that remoteness tends to inhibit.

And while nothing encourages trust and connection better than good old locked-in-the-same-room, face-to-face, oxygen-sharing meetings and social time, assume that you’ll never have that luxury with your virtual team. Even though it is, arguably, easier to lead a team that lives under the same roof, that’s a rarity these days. The good news is you can still get your team to know, trust and commit to each other by using virtual collaboration tools like web conferencing and social workspaces to enjoy face-to-face conversations and continuous collaboration.

Connection is all about conversation, and, as the team lead, you’re in charge of making sure those conversations happen.

So, what do you think? What conversations do you need to have with your team to get them connected, on the same page, and ready to work together across time and distance?

I’ll share my top 3 conversations soon.