Virtual Leadership: Practical Tips to Build, Engage and Manage Remote Teams

Overview:
Virtual team is the new reality of 21st century workplace. Owing to the increasing competition in the marketplace, decentralization and globalization of work processes and advances in information and communication technologies, companies, to remain competitive, require flexibility and agility in their delivery of products and services.

Virtual teams play a key role to meet these demands. Also, these companies are adopting the virtual team approach to reduce their operating costs, encourage knowledge sharing among their employees to promote organizational learning and expand their business hours to 24/7.

Unfortunately, having solid business reasons for implementing a virtual strategy does not mean that strategy is always going to be executed well. The problem is that too many companies treat their virtual teams the same way they treat teams that share the same physical locations.

In other words, virtual teams may be increasingly popular but they're not necessarily successful. Large number of HR practitioners as well as organizational leaders has come to realize that virtual teams are different from traditional teams. They now must shift their attention towards devising and utilizing new tools and techniques to manage the unique leadership challenges posed by virtual and dispersed teams.

Why should you Attend: Many companies recycle the same guidelines and best practices they use for their co-located or in-person teams and hope for the best. That just doesn't work. Virtual teams and face-to-face teams are the proverbial 'apples and oranges' - and leaders who recognize this fact are the ones whose teams succeed. Virtual teams regularly fall victim to four pitfalls:

Lack of clear goals, direction, or priorities - Because it is tougher to communicate with team members who are geographically dispersed, it is often difficult to keep all team members focused on the same goals, especially over time.

Lack of clear roles among team members- In virtual teams, it is especially important for members to clearly understand their individual roles and how their work impacts other team members.

Lack of cooperation and trust - Because there's limited or no face-to-face contact the process of establishing trust and relationships that lead to group cooperation will be more difficult and can lead to a silo mentality.

Lack of engagement - With virtual teams, people can easily become bored and "check out" because there is a lack of dynamic face-to-face interaction and because there are more distractions.

Also, research has shown that the leadership style of the team or project leader has greater effects on the productivity of virtual teams as compared to that on the traditional collocated teams. It's important for all the virtual team leaders or managers to revisit their leadership approach.

Areas Covered in the Session: The focus of this webinar is to help companies maximize their investment in virtual teams as well as helps leaders enhance their effectiveness in leading virtual teams. These seven points will be covered.

• Identify the Nine Critical success Factors for Virtual teams to get a higher ROI
• Review the four-dimensional model of Virtual Teams: Purpose, People, Link, Time
• Do a reality check: The five Advantages and Three Disadvantages of Virtual Teams
• Understand and put into Practice the Three Leadership Styles Essential for Virtual Team success
• Discover how to Manage the Social Isolation in Virtual team; Dealing with out of sight out of Mind Challenge
• Learn to set up a Virtual Team- Answering two Critical questions: What do we want to Accomplish? How do we do it?
• Identify Seven Critical competencies of Virtual Team members beyond Just good Technical and Communication Skills

Who Will Benefit:

• CEO's
• COO's
• VP of Human Resources
• Chief Learning Officer
• Directors
• Project Managers
• Operation Managers and Supervisors
• Team Leaders
• Staff Managers and Supervisors
• Human Resources Professionals

Instructor:Marcia Zidle, MS, NCC, BCC is the CEO of Leaders At All Levels and a board certified executive coach based in Dallas Texas. She works with executives, management teams and high potential professionals ON THE MOVE! They want to move up to the next level – ahead of their competition – into new areas – over and around obstacles – beyond business as usual – towards a sustainable future.