When your mission is “Helping Teams Everywhere to Grow the Human Skills of Collaboration,” then we could imagine that we need to do lots of travelling. After all, in the world of team coaching and team development, we often say we need to “meet the team where they are,” and so we’d better travel over to the teams, right?
Well, yes and no.
As a good friend reflected on the mission — “Everywhere… wow, that’s a big place!” — the practicalities of travelling everywhere are pretty limited… not to mention the other downsides of travel. Okay, I will mention some of them: costs, time, sustainability, jet lag, etc.
Of course, I’m a human-connecting-to-human guy, so I really love to be in “the room” with a team or with teams. I’m not arguing that we should stop doing this, but in the last few years, working virtually with teams has emerged as a significantly valuable alternative.
Working globally has been around for decades. Of course, the telephone has been around longer, but I remember starting work in the early ’90s when email first emerged, and all of a sudden, we could “communicate” instantly with many people around the world. This was a big shift. Then later, mobile and smartphones emerged, along with social media, and our “connections and connecting” have grown exponentially. Constant information sharing and instant reactions are now expected.
Perhaps one of the biggest shifts took place during the COVID epidemic. At this time, everybody was “forced” to “work online,” and using the tools to enable this — such as Zoom, Teams, Meet, Mural, Miro, etc. — became necessary and then second nature or habitual for most who work in organizations.
After COVID, many people still work in a hybrid fashion — sometimes in the office and sometimes from home — so our virtual world is the new normal.
And so, meeting teams where they are no longer necessitates visiting the teams in their location. Anyway, teams are often not located together but work together from different areas of the country, region, or globe.
I’ve been working on this Skillful Collaboration initiative since the start of 2025. So far, I haven’t travelled to any distant lands, although some teams have travelled to be together face-to-face in the Netherlands.
But I’ve worked with teams and team members who work in the following lands: Argentina, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Cyprus, Ecuador, France, Germany, Israel, Mexico, Netherlands, Panama, Philippines, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom.
In the ’90s and ’00s, I travelled all over the world when developing products in the auto industry. I thoroughly enjoyed those in-person meetings and visiting the many lands. At that time, we didn’t really have the technology to truly “meet” others in any other way.
Now we do, and I’m fully committed (and experienced) in meeting people and teams online or virtually.
We have the technologies and the habits of meeting online, and with the Skillful Collaboration assessment, we have a beautiful tool for teams to slow down and connect on each person’s perception of how a team is working together.
Yesterday for example I facilitated some teams based in both South and Central America and the Netherlands, we used Teams and Mural and had a beautiful conversation about ‘Change’.
And that’s also what I’m writing about here, what do I want to ‘change’ in terms of Meeting teams where they are, to enable our mission.
Our mission is: “Helping Teams Everywhere to Grow the Human Skills of Collaboration.”
I look forward to connecting soon — whether that is online or in person.
If you’d like to try the assessment, here it is for free.
