Your business is overwhelming you — it’s finally time to hire a VA (virtual assistant). You hire the first good candidate, and start training them and delegating tasks. Only to find out that they don’t have the skills promised, aren’t available when you expect them to be, or they like order where you live and thrive in chaos.

In some ways it’s a lot like dating. You meet a girl in a bar; she expected you to call her the next day, while you thought Thursday was soon enough. Or he still expects to play poker with the guys every Saturday night — or maybe he IS a successful computer programmer, but still lives with his mother.

It all comes down to differences in expectations. And we often don’t do a good job of sharing our expectations upfront, sometimes because we don’t even know what they are! Melanie Benson Strick’s recent blog post, 5 Key Elements to Quick-Start a High Payoff Virtual Team, provides the groundwork to setting and sharing expecations so you can get off on the right foot with your next virtual hire.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Virtual Teams, Alliances/Collaboration, Delegation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.