As we all know, managing people is hard. This is because each individual has a different and very specific set of skills, experience, education, viewpoints and beliefs. And in most cases, people work together on teams that bring together diverse personalities and skill sets.

Incrementally then, we can assume that if managing people is hard, managing teams is harder still.

Teams drive organizational progress. Yet forming and leading high-performance teams is one of the most complex challenges facing any leader.

This becomes even more difficult when your teams are:

• Cross functional
• Globally dispersed across different locations and time zones
• Multi-generational (Net Gens, Gen Xers and Baby Boomers)
• Culturally diverse
• Mobile

The growing trend is toward a new virtual world of team work. So obviously, people need the right tools to work together as part of a high performance team. Fostering a work culture that values and cultivates collaboration is the backbone of team building. True to the Web 2.0 philosophy, the values of collaboration and cooperation lie at the heart of today's high performance teams. Organizations are looking into a more diverse and flexible set of tools that can help bring together distributed teams. Tools like blogs, messaging, commenting, micro blogging (i.e. Twitter) and online communities. It is still too early to tell or measure the business impact. But one thing is for sure, the nature of team work is changing.

Tune into my next blog for some tips on how to use social software to foster your high performance teams.