Liz Wiseman is one of our favourite authors and the principles from her bestselling book Multipliers: How The Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter have been very popular with our team at Bluewire.

Liz was in Sydney recently and I had the chance to ask her a question that had been on my mind for while.  “Do the strategies of a Multiplier apply in the virtual web world (where people are often in separate locations and time-zones)?”

Here Liz explains why it is even more important to apply the leadership traits of a Multiplier in the virtual web world.

Liz Wiseman’s video transcript

So I’m Liz Wiseman and to my friends at Bluewire, in addressing this question, “do the strategies of the Multiplier apply in the web world?”

I’d say, not only do they apply, but they apply even more so; because when we work on virtual teams and in the distance, it’s very easy for us to get project focused, task focused. Here’s the set of work that needs to get done and we delegate it out, call people up, we go through the deliverables and we often forget to figure out what people are really good at and ask questions “are we utilising them, not just for some tasks but are we utilising their deep genius?”

Biotech example

Multipliers

It reminds me of an example of a biotech company and there was one employee in Washington DC and the rest of the team in Silicon Valley. When one of the managers read the book “Multipliers” he asks this new employee out at DC to what extent he was being utilised and he said about 20%.

So he just started to hook him in via Skype to their meetings, let him go first in meetings, kind of gave right of way to this employee out in DC and in a matter of weeks he said his utilisation had gone up to about 80%. All because he identified his genius and started to focus on asking him questions that utilised his deep skill.

Thanks Liz!

You can follow @LizWiseman on twitter or check out her book at www.MultipliersBook.com