Leading and Working in Virtual Teams

Virtual Teams are truly the ways of the future. Today, organizations are becoming global and making way for individuals from different cities, countries and continents to work with each other using digital tools for cooperation. This ‘virtual distance’ brings in a new set of challenges for both team members and leaders to successfully operate and ensure high performance with the lack of physical meetings.

A change like this brings in a need for a new way to communicate using new type of technology guided by new systems and processes. And all of the above has to be attained keeping in mind the personal and cultural differences within the team and the usual team formation struggles.

During the program we encourage the team to identify and assess their own success criteria of virtual cooperation. Then they are given real team tasks in 3 experiential learning cycles to achieve and through that work explore the implied challenges of working via digital tools themselves and also facilitate to find appropriate solutions to take home as a result.

Course objectives

• create an effective way of collaborating through chosen technology and determined communication norms
• become a trustful high performing team even within virtual environment

Topics

• definitions, benefits and challenges of virtual team
• differences between collocated and virtual team dynamics
• success factors: explore and assess the 8 elements of success on individual and team level
• 3 Experiential learning cycles: perform relevant team task as a physical team, then as a virtual team
• debrief and add concepts & models, use learnings
• create inventory of take home points, clarify progress & discuss missing aspects
• ways to build trust in virtual environment
• summary and implementation plan