Managing a Team Across Continents and Time Zones

A long time ago, in a company far, far away, teams were always co-located and if you needed to talk to one or more of your teammates, you just walked to their desk or called a meeting in a conference room. We live in a different universe now.  With the advent of the internet, e-mail, videoconferencing and instant messaging, managing a team began to require new skills, and teams began to acquire new faces.

Today’s project team is just as likely to be comprised of members living on different continents as it is to be co-located. Teams frequently span cultures and time zones, challenging managers. While you don’t need to bind the galaxy together, you do need to bind your virtual team together, which can be just as challenging according to “Managing a Geographically Dispersed Team” at Mind Tools. Define your team purpose using a team charter or roadmap to help your team unite around common goals. State your mission, everyone’s roles and responsibilities, goals, and objectives, and make this document available to everyone involved.

There is a great disturbance when you notice reduced output or reduced communication among team members. Teams take time to unite, following a forming, storming, norming, performing process as members learn to trust each other and work together, and it’s difficult to identify problems when you can’t see facial expressions or body language. Establishing good communication routines and task-related team processes (to generate ideas, identify problems and alternative solutions, make quality decisions and take effective action) help increase performance. Keep things clear and keep people talking.

The dark side feeds off emotions like anger, jealousy, fear and hate. Promoting team bonding and a “global team culture” can help you fight the dark side. Informal interactions can be just as important as formal interactions when uniting a team, so set up a virtual team lounge or team page to allow members to interact and socialize.  Establish ground rules around humor and language use, as a lot of misunderstandings happen when you mix cultures and communication.

Communication is the key to successfully managing a virtual team. But how exactly can an international team across continents and time zones effectively communicate and get things done? 

We will be covering the topic of international team management starting in February. Simon Specka, who conducted a study on the topic based on UFOstart's practices, will be our guest blogger. Stay tuned to learn more about virtual team management! 

Happy Holidays from the entire UFOstart Team, we look forward to working with you in the upcoming year!

To Fail and to Succeed

"Success comes through rapidly fixing our mistakes rather than getting things right first time." Tim Harford (Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure)

Small business owners, dreamers, and future entrepreneurs usually want to follow a straight and beaten path to success. Only few people with a vision realize the importance of failure, and that failure is a natural part of the development process. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, over half of small businesses fail within the first five years of their launch. 

Despite society's inclination to completely avoid failure, the truth is that no business owner, dreamer or entrepreneur has truly succeeded until they have failed; it’s only after a failure that we truly move forward and make our businesses live to its full potential. 

Failure is a part of self-discovery. After the Olympics earlier this year, TheGuardian.co.uk ran an article discussing how athletes often handle failure better than students in classrooms worrying about getting straight A+s. Why? Because athletes “have a greater understanding of their own personal psychology, which in turn leads to greater mental strength (to add to their obvious physical strength) and a higher level of psychological resilience.” In other words: knowing ourselves lets us push ourselves more effectively towards success; this applies to people with business ideas just as much as it does to students or athletes.  Failure allows small business owners and entrepreneurs to gain insight into their own psychology, helping them build a stronger idea of what they personally want and where they want to go with their idea in their future.

Failure teaches us what works and what doesn’t. There is always something new to learn or a new trend developing in the business world, whether you’re just beginning your own business or you’re an experienced entrepreneur. Failure is simply a way to find out what does not work and why it does not work in a modern day market. It’s a chance to adjust one’s mindset, goals, or company policies, which ultimately leads to a better plan for future business endeavors. In other words, failure is simply a social experiment or survey that plays into your thought-process when you begin designing the blueprint for your next idea.

Failure pushes us to improve and drives change. Failure can act as the ultimate drive to improve a business model. Not only does failure teach us what not to do when a problem arises – it pushes us to think outside of the box and find the solution that does work. Failure is what helps us realize what needs to change and be improved on, and it’s one more step down the road to success. Ask or read the biography of any inventor, from Thomas Edison to Bill Gates, and you’ll find this to be true.

"Startups don't only succeed because of their surroundings, they suceed because of their failures. It is all about their ability to deal with mistakes - their agility, flexibility and speed of pivoting." Thomas Hessler, CEO of UFOstart

The short rounds on UFOstart, usually three months in length, increase the awareness of failure, provide immediate feedback and give startups the freedom to pivot. Looking back at the lessons learned and experiences gained every quarter is the essence of a dynamic startup process -and the idea behind our Global Crowd Network.

-bmt

Join our first "Global Crowd Network" for Lean Startup funding! Connect with facebook on www.ufostart.com and calculate your Startup Value. Interested in how you can leverage the power of the crowd for your startup? Like us on facebook and follow us on twitter!

How To: Crowdsource Logo Creation

Creating and maintaining your corporate identity can easily be done through crowdsourcing, especially if you're on a limited marketing budget. It is a great compromise between over-paying for a professional agency and trying to do it yourself. Creating an appealing logo is the first step in establishing your CI - here are some tips to help you run an effective crowdsourcing contest for your logo:

Company, Know Thyself. First understand your brand voice, your audience, your business goals and how you want to use your logo. Knowing what you want, then articulating that clearly in the contest rules and process will get you a lot closer to a well-designed logo. 

Research your options.
Fortunately, you have a lot of options when it comes to crowdsourcing sites focusing on logo design. Sites like Crowdspring and 99Designs guarantee more than 100 submissions, sites like Prova will deliver at least 40. However, you might prefer to limit the number of submissions for simplicity’s sake.

Offer a good price and a clear design brief. Carefully think through and be as specific as possible on the site’s form so you make a clearer request to the design community. Use reference images and add language that clearly talks about what you want -- and don’t want (here's How To Create a Marketing Brief: http://ow.ly/fRto8). And if it’s in your budget, offer winning prize amount that’s in the higher range or at least above the minimum prize to make your contest stand out.

Choose your winner Consider putting out the call to your friends and colleagues to vote on the final design. They know you and your company, and could add some valuable input. Once you have a winning design, provide the winner with exactly the file formats you need (if you didn’t cover this in the design brief) so you won’t have to fool with Illustrator or Photoshop files after the fact.

On average, a crowdsourced logo costs between $250 and $350, -- that’s less than half what you’d pay for a professional agency to design your logo. By spending your budget wisely and by leveraging the power of the crowd, you will be able to design and redesign whenever needed. 

Redesign of UFOstart
We took some feedback into account and redesigned the following features on our platform: 

• cleaner layout for needs
• ability to apply on need item directly
• overview of involved people and the progress of each one
• improved social media integration (comment and share buttons)
• Invitations now include the whole context of a project or need

Join our first "Global Crowd Network" for Lean Startup funding! Connect with facebook on www.ufostart.com and calculate your Startup Value. Interested in how you can leverage the power of the crowd for your startup? Like us on facebook and follow us on twitter!