Discussion: What are the challenges of leading a non-co-located/global/culturally diverse team?
Creating and Leading a Virtual Team
Short lecture: Composition of virtual team, skills to look for and build in team members; determining and establishing elements of effective virtual workgroup
Activity: Building trust and establishing your credibility with a virtual team
Activity: Setting group norms on a virtual team
Discussion: Delegating work effectively
Discussion: Keeping the team committed; recognizing the seeming saliency of local requests and facilitating relationships with local managers to free up team-member time
Activity: Applying coaching skills, tools, and processes to a virtual team
Virtual Meeting Leadership
Short lecture: Advantages/disadvantages of videoconferencing vs. teleconferencing and how to overcome disadvantages; what tools to use when criticizing, coaching, appreciating, delegating, etc.
Activity: Leading productive virtual meetings
Discussion: Using web-meetings, web-chats, RSS-feeds, wikis, whiteboards, other web-based collaboration tools for document dissemination and management, team maintenance, collaboration, and oversight
Leading upward Virtually
Discussion: Ensuring HQ remains connected to local projects, avoiding “out of sight, out of mind” syndrome
Short lecture: Responding appropriately to HQ anxiety around overseeing non-visible work
Activity: Ensuring virtual team “leads up” to you, surfacing privately held critical information
Cultural Competency
Activity: Cultural awareness, finding ourselves on culture scales; recognizing how culture influences how we collaborate, respond to conflicts, and assert ourselves
Discussion: Tools for gaining competence in different cultures
Activity: Adjusting (without changing ourselves) to direct vs. indirect communication and individualist vs. collectivist management
Discussion: How to manage conflict, evaluate, critique, and coach while “saving face” for other person
