Workshop:
Leading Virtual Teams
6 Hours excluding breaks – 1 facilitator – 18 people Maximum
Get this course as an online live course
All Gugins course modules can be delivered as online live courses. Please get in touch to learn more
Who is this course module aimed at?
Gugin recommends this module to managers of virtual teams as well as their superiors as it is important for everyone to understand how challenging it is to form and lead these teams.
If you have employees in remote locations then this course on leading virtual teams is for you. Leading or managing people you have no physical contact with is very different and challenging.
It is challenging managing, motivating and directing a group of people who are not physically together and maybe never have seen each other before. To make it even more challenging virtual teams often exist for a limited period of time because they are often tied to a specific project or a temporary process.
There are many challenges for virtual teams, where some of them are outlined in this article. But the article is forgetting to mention the most important obstacle, name the cultural differences in the virtual team. It can be differences in corporate cultures, age groups, professions, level of experience, gender, nationality and much more. When we can’t see people we assume they share our norms and values, which they of course rarely do. That is the primary reason for virtual teams to fail or not be as successful as they could be. This course will help your team to improve virtual team effectiveness in just 3 hours!
The popularity of these teams is a function of the globalisation and they are necessary in order to keep down travel costs and increase flexibility. But how do we make sure that the saved costs and the increased flexibility are not diluted by all the disadvantages of having virtual teams?
What will you learn?
You will learn how virtual teams are different from having the team around you in terms of leadership, motivation and feedback. You will also learn how your virtual team members can get the feeling of belonging to a team, despite they are located remotely and maybe even alone.
Which topics do we cover?
- Get a clear understanding of the opportunities and challenges of having virtual teams.
- Adopt best practices on how to form, manage and measure virtual teams.
- Get the necessary tools to deal with the cultural diversity in these teams.
The workshop will be facilitated in such a way that the participants’ experiences will be blended with the academic content presented by the facilitator. There will also be individual reflection exercises when each participant is developing his or her action plan for change in order to become more culturally intelligent.
We will also do a few roles plays for simulation purposes and you will be given tools to exercise your role as a manager of non-physical teams.
What to do next?
After having completed the “ Leading Virtual Teams ” course it is time to practice. Practice what you have learned so that you get the concepts and tools under your skin. After a while, you can have a look at some of our other, more specialised cross-cultural course modules. We can also offer you just-in-time online coaching so that you can get the help right when you need it. Learn more about the online cross-cultural consulting here
Why should you choose intercultural training from Gugin?
From we started the company in 2001 we knew we would need an engine that could keep us ahead of the competition and constantly deliver world-class consultancy and training. The world is constantly changing and we need to change with it and ideally develop services that address the agenda of tomorrow. Gugin stands on 3 pillars: Consulting, Training and Research. They fuel each other with great ideas for innovation and service development. When, for instance, we are helping a company with corporate cultural change we might discover cross-cultural issues, we haven’t seen before. We then research it further and find a great solution to the client and we can upgrade our training portfolio. 
So you will NEVER experience us using 50 years old research, like Hofstede’s cultural dimensions that promote cultural stereotypes based on nationalities. In fact, our research has shown that these stereotypes don’t exist and that if you are promoting stereotypes like “the french are like… and the Canadians are like…” you will just create more conflicts.
In everything we do, we focus on how you can synergies from the cultural diversity and our approach is generic. Bringing different nationalities together is no different from bringing different companies, different professions, different age groups or different sub-cultures inside a company together. All our training gives you a generic tool for leveraging cultural diversity, no matter where it exists.
We develop generic cultural intelligence you can use everywhere
About Gugin Training Modules
All our corporate training modules are designed as intensive, interactive learning modules. You can combine the training modules almost as you like. They can also fit into your existing training programs or corporate university curriculum. We also have longer, more in-depth courses. Please see the complete list of standard courses we offer. We also design a lot of specialised training and coaching programs together with our clients if the existing courses don't meet the needs.
Prerequisites for attending
The attendees are expected to have personal cross-cultural experiences that include having been in situations where they were uncertain about what to do because they were outside their cultural comfort zone.
Practicalities
You will organise the venue - everything included - and manage the participants. Gugin will provide instructor and course material. Gugin can also be a full-service course organiser, but usually, our clients want to organise the practicalities themselves. You can invite 12 people to each course module.