Leading and Managing Teams Across Boundaries

Program Goal

This 1-day interactive program is designed to help anyone who works with and leads virtual teams to build key leadership skills in order to help their teams accomplish critical business goals effectively and on time. Best practices and key strategies for leading virtual teams will be covered in this action-learning session.

Program objectives

• Develop practical skills in leading multicultural teams.
• Understand the scope of global and virtual team dynamics and the expectations of members of the team.
• Adapt management skills to suit the use of digital communications technologies to reach team objectives.
• Realize the impact of each distinct set of cultural values and how they will influence the interaction and effectiveness of global team partnerships.
• Enable team members and leaders to recognize cultural differences of others and adapt skills to increase effective teamwork.
• Develop skills to promote a positive environment for teamwork, building trust, providing constructive feedback, and task assignment in a virtual team.
• Create personal action plans to boost virtual team effectiveness.

Approach

• Utilize a mix of both cognitive and experiential methods
• Encourage hands-on learning through the use of videos, small group discussions, role play, case studies, self-assessments, and the creation of action plans
• Enable participants to learn from each other

Sample Agenda

Following is an example of a typical Virtual Teams program agenda. However, we customize our programs to meet the specific business requirements of your company through detailed needs assessment prior to the program.

8:30am-5pm

Morning

• Welcome
• Program Objectives & Agenda
• Virtual Teams: Common Challenges and Issues
• Opening Team Exercise
• Setting the context
• Virtual Communications Technologies: Group discussion & Case studies
  - Conference Calls
  - E-mail
• Culture & Virtual Teams
  - Definition of culture
  - Iceberg model
        - Impact of culture on virtual teams
  - Key Dimensions of culture
  - Case study

Afternoon

• Virtual Team Exercise & debrief
• Virtual Team Management
  - Building Trust
  - Task Delegation
• Role Play: Relationship building
• Virtual Team Management
  - Giving Constructive Feedback:
        - Video case study
        - Skill practice: giving feedback
• Best Practices on Virtual Team
• Personal and Virtual Team Action Plan
• Close