In the past 15 years, the use of team structures has exploded across the organizational world, and teams have largely become the basic organizational unit. However, people use both “team” and “teamwork” loosely, and I've seen all nature of groups referred to as teams. With that in mind, let's say that a team means a group of individuals, bound by mutual direction and common goals, who interact interdependently to accomplish work, action and results. Using that definition, we might argue that the fire world is one place where the word team has been used accurately.

A 1993 survey by the American Society for Quality Control and the Gallup Organization found that more than 80% of the people surveyed reported participating in some form of team activity and that two-thirds of full-time employees indicated that they had played a part in some kind of team activity. Obviously, teams have become important parts of organizations. All indicators suggest that teams and teamwork will remain a critically important organizational concept in the foreseeable future, and research shows that organizations improve when they employ teams effectively.

In fact, many organizations rely on teaming as a key to their productivity and credit their use of teams with performance improvements such as increased efficiency, improved participation and innovation, error reduction, quality improvement, increased responsiveness, cost-effectiveness, better customer service, and improved employee satisfaction. In addition, organizations of all types are now turning to an even more flexible organizational form to structure their operations, the “virtual team.”

In their book Virtual Teams, noted teaming experts Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps define a virtual team as “a group of people who work interdependently with a shared purpose across space, time, and organization boundaries using technology.” Advantages attributed to virtual teaming include the ability to recruit talent without location constraints, enable employee flexibility and work — life balance, reduce the negative effects of commuting, and shrink infrastructure and utility costs. Virtual teaming advocates also cite improved cross-functionality, interorganizational interaction, and the capacity to assemble an organization's most qualified personnel to tackle a task without relocation or extensive travel as benefits of this flexible structure. In light of growing targets, downsizing pressures, and nontraditional work arrangements such as telecommuting and virtual offices, virtual teaming holds a lot of promise for fire agencies.

Despite the many advantages attributed to teaming, the concept is not without its challenges. Trust has emerged as an issue central to successful teaming. Successful teams must establish and maintain trusting interpersonal relationships if they are to function effectively and succeed. Trust may be thought of as individual's expression of confidence or optimistic expectation in the intentions and motives of others.

A person trusts a group when he or she believes that group members make good-faith efforts to stick to their commitments, are honest in their negotiations, and don't take advantage of one another even when the opportunity presents itself. At the bottom line, trust represents an act of faith, a willingness to take a risk that another person will prove worthy of one's confidence. Team members must know that everyone will fulfill obligations and behave in a consistent and predictable manner. Experience in many organizations shows that successful teams focus specifically on building relationships to increase trust, and that unsuccessful teams do not.

Trust develops through frequent and meaningful interaction. In the team environment, trust builds as team members experience the team's competency and integrity. When team members demonstrate those attributes, they prove themselves trustworthy. Trust deepens as members continue to experience the competency and integrity of the team and as they experience their expectations being met by other members. In other words, their level of trust in their team members increases. Teaming scholars contend that work teams rely on visual, verbal and non-verbal communication clues to gain insight into each other's intentions in the workplace, and organizational experts view these opportunities as sources of trust-based relationships between organizational members. There exists broad agreement among researchers that relationship-building occurs best in a face-to-face context, and that frequent and meaningful interaction allows a deeper kind of relationship to develop.

For virtual teams, the fundamental issue remains how a team establishes and maintains trust in an environment based on interaction that is not face to face. How can we grow trust when our interaction is via voice mail and e-mail? A virtual organization, because of the separation of members and reliance on communications technology, adds a degree of complexity that conventional teams do not experience. Some teaming scholars have even asserted that virtual organizations restrict or even obstruct the development of trust because they lack the opportunities for frequent and meaningful interaction, particularly the informal and spontaneous opportunities for relationship-building that members of conventional, co-located teams experience during the workday.

Traditionally, people establish bonds through physical contact and socializing. In virtual teams, these interactions may be absent or very limited. Teams organized virtually or in a physically separated manner typically communicate via technology and have fewer opportunities to physically come together to share experiences. Many people find it difficult to determine whether other people are trustworthy even when interacting with them daily. Obviously, it becomes more difficult to assess a person's trustworthiness when people are not physically working together.

My point is not that virtual teams don't work. On the contrary, I believe they are becoming an essential fact of organizational life. However, leaders must remember that establishing and maintaining trust presents a critical role for the members of virtual teams. Relationships based on trust are essential to the success and effective function of any team, but trusting relationships may prove difficult to create and maintain in a virtual workplace. Consequently, few successful virtual teams function in a purely virtual manner, and experts agree on the importance of face-to-face meetings to facilitate strong relationships between virtual team members, particularly early in team formation.

Leadership scholars tell us that teams and teamwork will remain critically important organizational concepts well into the future, and recent research suggests that virtual teams may indeed represent a necessary evolution of teamwork and a new way to work. However, remember that trust is at the center of successful team management, and establishing trust is particularly important in the virtual team environment.

Trust is one of the key ingredients necessary for a team to succeed, and teams of all types must remain firmly rooted in trusting relationships if they are to function effectively. For all teams, how they establish and maintain trust remains the fundamental issue.

Mike DeGrosky is the chief executive officer of the Guidance Group, a consulting organization specializing in the human and organizational aspects of the fire service. His interests include leadership, strategy, and bringing the concepts of learning organizations and high-reliability organizing alive in fire organizations. He currently is completing a master's degree in organizational leadership. He can be reached at info@guidancegroup.org