Trust is absolutely critical to effective linking. Purpose is something that you return to over and over again. Whenever you get off course, pull out the purpose statement. Go back to the first principles and start again. Remember that it is very important to share leadership among people.
Virtual teams are leaderful organizations.
Communicate, communicate, communicate. When you are trying to keep distributed groups together, you can't communicate too much. As much as you communicate, you haven't done enough. All the great technology in the world cannot hold a candle to the importance of the connections among the people. The complications of getting people to work together remain our biggest challenge.