It was an awkward moment when Lynne Saunder entered the IBM building in St Leonards that September day in 2007. It was the same building, with the same people, but there was something different. Then it dawned on her: she no longer had a team … or a desk for that matter.

 

Saunder was promoted from general counsel Australia to senior counsel global business services for the Asia-Pacific region at IBM. She now advised on financial and consultancy aspects for the regional businesses of the computer giant. But the reality was that her new team was now located outside Australia. “Obviously there are still Australian lawyers that I work with for matters on consulting and finance, but I went from sitting in the middle of my team to having no team,” she says.

 

She was now faced with the challenge of building a team that would not meet face-to-face but would communicate by telephone, email and instant messages most of the time.

 

Virtual team 

The emergence of the virtual team has been made possible by unrelenting technological development over the last decade. But managing these teams is itself a challenge. Studies indicate that the inability to observe a colleague’s body language or to see who is present during teleconferences can lead to miscommunication and even disharmony within teams.

 

Saunder agrees that face-to-face interaction is still vitally important in building successful relationships with her team members. “I had met most of our lawyers at our regional meeting that was held in Beijing last August, but it’s one thing to have met them and it’s another thing to then work with them fairly intensely on a deal or a legal issue.”

 

“Building up relationships through face-to-face meetings is really important. Whenever I travel for an external client meeting, or an executive meeting, I try to spend an extra day or two on the ground with the lawyers. In India, for example, we have masala dosa in the canteen and in Shanghai we often have a few dumplings. You get to see where they are located and the demand of the location; you get to know how far they need to travel to the office and how far they are from a client.”

 

Saunder acknowledges there are dangers in relying too much on technology. “Technology makes you more accessible, which on the whole is good, but you have to exert some discipline so that you are not just working 24/7.” Another challenge, she says, is that the speed of modern technology and demand for quick responses can lead to situations where advice is given without having the full picture.

 

“That was one of the reasons why I wasn’t keen on instant message early on. I saw a couple of instances where the business came to a lawyer and asked a question without giving all the facts and when they were answered the business relied on it, whereas if you make them stop and have them give you a proper briefing in an email you tend to get all the information you need. It’s like this with all technologies; you need to learn how to manage them” she says. She now is an instant message convert and makes much use of the so-called ‘ping’ function. “Instead of having to go through your secretary, [a lawyer] can just ping you and see if they can ring you. It is also really good when you have calls set up because you can see where everybody is, because some lawyers work from different offices, or from home, and you can ping them and say we have a call in five minutes are you ready to join. Yesterday I had a lawyer in Singapore who pinged me and said: ‘Can we call now, because I have to go back to a client this afternoon?’ It helps to have that flexibility.” 

 

Great distances often make it more difficult for team leaders to motivate staff and identify potential issues early on. But Saunder says the lawyers in the Asia-Pacific team are very driven and need little encouragement. Yet, she does have a few tricks up her sleave.

 

“What we tend to do is try to get the lawyers to training sessions and that helps to motivate them. We ran a fantastic summer school in consultancy this year. We had six people from around the region and seven Australian lawyers in Melbourne and we had them signed up and doing courses on everything ranging from negotiations, training, through to cultural sensitivity. And of course there are a lot of technical courses.”

 

While you can make the best of efforts, it is also important to recognise that people sometimes need a break, she says. “I think the rule of thumb is that you can do the same job for five years, but then no matter how much you love it, you need a break. The important thing is finding new professional opportunities that help people develop their skills, or it can be as simple as giving them a break.”

 

IBM has a program where lawyers go to New York for three to six months and work with the team there on a transaction. It also sends lawyers on assignments to other parts of the company. The Australian team will be joined by a Thai lawyer this year, who will cover for leave.

 

Ten months on the job and Saunder has settled into her Asia-Pacific role well. Looking back on her career she can’t help but chuckle about the irony of the situation she has found herself in. When she moved back from London, where she had been working for Baker & McKenzie, in the mid 1990s, she was keen to take on an Asia-Pacific role. But at the time you needed to be in Asia for such a role, says Saunder. “I’ve now ended up doing what I set out to do in the first place: working across the region from Sydney.”