Managing Multicultural Virtual Team

As a manager of a virtual team, you need to get your communication and management style right to work virtually. When that happens, you have the great advantage of diversity. People’s different cultures and experiences will lead to new and better ways of doing things so the virtual team can become much greater than the sum of its parts. Yet it cannot be denied that the leader of a virtual team faces additional challenges on top of the challenges of a "traditional" team leader.

According to various studies there are four key elements for successfully running a virtual team:

• Building trust & loyalty among the team
• Ensuring effective communication
• Managing conflict and handling misunderstandings, creating a feeling of being fairly treated
• Ensuring that the team members have a shared, common understanding of the task and of the way to do it

This training concentrates on how you, as the manager of a virtual team, handle these professionally in multicultural working environment.

This training is designed for professionals, who are managing one or more virtual teams spread out to different locations. This training is beneficial for you also, if you are managing managers who have this kind of teams. Since a virtual team is very widely used concept in all areas of business, you can be working e.g. in purchasing, finance, logistics, HR, sales, administration, R&D, marketing , maintenance, IT etc. or running various kinds of projects.

Structure of leading virtual team training

This training is run virtually in three parts, each 2 hrs. Each of these sessions is lead by a trainer and consists of multiple short lessons, group discussions and personal exercises. The training is very interactive, participants get personal feedback from the trainer and also have opportunities to share each other's experiences and best practices. Only internet connection and a standard PC with microphone are needed to attend.

Building a winning multicultural virtual team, 2 hrs

• Creating trust virtually: how to build and maintain loyalty in virtual team members
• Effective ways of creating common assumptions for the multicultural virtual team
• Choosing the right communication structure for your team, considering different communication expectations
• Defining decision making process: power based on expertise, not on status

Running virtually a multicultural team, 2 hrs

• The art of being explicit in communication virtually
• Best practices for productive virtual meetings: being activating, but clear
• Encouraging assertiveness in virtual team members
• Maintaining fairness, e.g., in the distribution of the work load
• Monitoring the status of agreed actions, i.e., ensuring right priorities on actions

Leading virtual team members  across the Globe, 2 hrs

• Moving through the four leadership styles (situational leadership model) to ensure goals are clear for everyone and that everyone is sufficiently supported
• Utilizing SCARF model in creating a high performing virtual team
• Virtual feedback – both constructive and positive
• Attitudes to leadership around the world, e.g., power and hierarchy & how to inspire different types
• Best practices for a virtual, multicultural leader

• Improve your skills on how to create trust online
• Understand better differing cultural expectations (key cultural variables): how cultural background affects communication and expectations in virtual teams
• Obtain new ideas on how to ensure common understanding in the whole virtual team
• Learn to be better at facilitating virtual meetings and team work
• Polish your skills on how to communicate effectively online: being positive, organized and concise both in written and oral communication
• Tips and tested ways on how to deal with conflicts and misunderstandings in virtual context
• Get better at giving and receiving feedback online