Virtual workplaces and virtual classrooms are increasingly replacing bricks and mortar. Online usage increases by double-digits every year. Traditional face-to-face contact is giving way to relationships and communications online. Whether in business, politics or education, this change calls for a new type of leadership. Tami Moskal is deeply immersed in online education as both a provider and a recipient. She's an instructional designer on the faculty of Cleary University in Ann Arbor MI, which has a number of online programs. She's working toward an EdD in higher education administration and leadership at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she completed her coursework online. Presenting at the University's conference on Women in Educational Leadership in October, she asked, “How can we provide virtual education that teaches our students to lead in a virtual environment?” Online teaching has gotten attention and so has virtual leadership, but she hasn't found any studies of teaching people to lead from a distance. Her coursework didn't cover it either. A lot more research and experimentation is needed before there's a clear idea of how to teach virtual leadership at all, let alone teach it online. Electronic communications offer tremendous advantages for the workplace. Workers gain time and flexibility by working from home. Companies can hire staff nationwide or even globally without requiring employees to move. Meeting by teleconference or videoconference saves time and money compared with traveling to gather in one room. Task forces can be made up of the most appropriate people instead of those who happen to work at the same site. Some organizations have done away with a central office; their staff work almost entirely from home. E-organizations require e-leadership, and so do hybrid organizations that depend on the Internet for many of their internal communications. Leaders in a virtual environment have the same basic responsibilities as face-to-face leaders, such as organizing and motivating a team, monitoring progress and developing team members. Many lists describe leadership responsibilities and the competencies leaders need, such as coaching, motivating, delegation and conflict management. Virtual leaders face added challenges such as monitoring at a distance and building teams drawn from different cultures. They need additional competencies, including: Disasters can result when emails are misinterpreted for lack of facial cues and immediate feedback. Effective leaders know when it's time to leave the keyboard and pick up the phone or the feet. While communication at a distance must be more careful, it needs to happen more often and in more different venues. It requires extra work to influence others at a distance, to establish closeness and trust and create a team. “Workplaces are looking for virtual leaders,” Moskal said. Can higher education address the growing demand? Years ago technology meant processing enrollment data on mainframes and using overhead projectors in the classroom. Leadership used to be transactional and top-down. Today's technology is participatory and interactive. It reshapes the organizational model from a pyramid to a net or web, blurring the lines between leader and follower. E-leadership needs to be transformational, engaging collaborators in the vision. “How can we teach our students to be leaders when the old models don't work?” Moskal asked. Instructors who teach online serve as role models to their students. That means they need to know the technology and treat students as colleagues or collaborators. They must work even harder—and at more varied hours—to stay in touch and build a sense of community. Faculty who stay engaged in bulletin boards, listservs and online forums help distant students feel connected. “There's a misconception that teaching online is going to be easier. You're answering questions all the time,” she said. For faculty to model online leadership to their students, universities need to help instructors develop the needed skills. Nebraska holds a five week Summer Institute for Online Teaching, with three face-to-face sessions and the rest online. Leaders of the institute get to practice what they preach. Moskal liked the Broadwater Simulation, in which participants watch a segment of video showing a leadership situation and analyze it for an entire week. “Leadership is behavioral, and we have to be able to view the behaviors to learn about it,” she said. Faculty need to learn and be able to demonstrate online leadership skills such as leading a meeting. The ideal would be to capture what virtual leaders do from day to day and build a curriculum around that. “If we could paint students a picture of what a virtual leader actually does, it would be really helpful,” she said. Then online tools would teach it, modeling the methods that are presented. “This is new. We are not great virtual leaders yet,” Moskal said. Given that technology changes followers into collaborators, we should let students know we need their help. Tami Moskal: tmoskal@my.cleary.edu or 517.338.3021