Leadership Development Plan Creating, staffing and managing a virtual team to results presents a very unique set of challenges both form a logistics and leadership standpoint. Creating a state-of-the-art new packaging product that is inexpensive to ship yet durance enough to not get damaged will take cross-functional teams of experts in packaging, physics of containers, logistics, and supply chain systems, in addition to costing and financial analysis. Each of these aspects of an organization are critically important to the development, successful launch and sales of the new packaging product. This paper details the greatest obstacles a team leader would face in completing the project and delivering a profitable new product. These challenges and their recommended solutions are the foundation of this paper.

The Many Challenges Of A Virtual Team

The foundation of effective virtual teams is the insightful selection of its members, the ability to quickly create communication and collaboration throughout the geographically-dispersed group, and the definition of a compelling vision every team member can see their contributions making a difference in attaining. The most effective virtual teams that take on complex technology-driven challenges, such as the creation of an innovative packaging material, often have team members with deep expertise in a given technology...

Often these individual contributors have definite opinions and are accustomed to working alone or having the ability to frequently influence design decisions to their own. Over years, these experts in their fields can often become galvanized their views of the world, becoming inflexible to new ideas and at times threatened by new technologies and techniques in their field.
This presents the single biggest challenge to the leader of the virtual team creating the state-of-the-art packaging for a new product. Getting experts in their respective field to freely share information and collaborate with one another in a virtual team requires exceptional transformational leadership skills and the ability to create trust (Felfe, Schyns, 2004). The first priority for managing this team is to get a solid foundation of trust between team members and the leader. Studies have consistently shown that trust is one of the most potent accelerators there are for streamlining communication throughout a virtual team (Purvanova, Bono, 2009).

For the virtual team to succeed, trust must dominate its culture and all electronic systems for communicating, from the Intranet sites to e-mails and text messages, must have this attribute of trust and fidelity if the team is to galvanize together and share information. Resistance to change and lack…