Rick Brenner, Chaco Canyon Consulting
Virtual teams are now officially the way of things. Everything about such projects or operations is more difficult than face-to-face teams – including figuring out how to declare victory when failure is what actually happened.
You’ll find various definitions of virtual teams if you surf around a bit, but their main features are what make them so difficult for everyone – the people are dispersed geographically, they meet infrequently or never, and they come from different cultures. These factors conspire to make what’s usually easy, difficult – and what’s usually difficult, impossible.
This workshop helps people who sponsor, lead or participate in virtual or global teams. Participants learn to appreciate the true challenges of virtual teams, how their economics differ from the economics of face-to-face teams, and how the picture conveyed by conventional organizational cost management system distorts our view of these differences.
Most important, they learn strategies and tactics for making the dispersed environment productive and effective. Based on attendee interest, topics will be drawn from this selection:
- The nature of global and dispersed teams
- Building and maintaining trust
- Planning communications
- Dealing with dispersion
- Accounting for socio-cultural and political differences
- Accounting for language differences
- Allocating the work with dispersion in mind
- Dealing with voicemail and email in virtual teams
- Making face-to-face meetings count
- Celebrating achievements
- Leading telemeetings
Whether you’re a veteran of virtual teams, or a relative newcomer, this program is a real eye-opener.
When the workshop is completed, the attendees will be able to:
- Build trust in a multicultural team where “trustworthy” means something different to everyone.
- Lead a telemeeting effectively when attendees are speaking the meeting’s language with varying degrees of skill.
- Minimize errors when critical documents are translated from one language to another.
- Divide the work so as to minimize turf battles and battles over budget.
- Minimize resentments when only some team members can attend worldwide meetings.
Target Audience: All
2010 Workshop, Rick Brenner, Paper, Slides, Notes, Video.
