Leading Virtual Teams: Best Practices From Fortune 500 Firms

☑ Master the best practices in leading virtual teams used by Fortune 500 firms to seize competitive advantage

☑ Discover how to collaborate and innovate most effectively in virtual teams, while holding team members accountable

☑ Maximize productivity, engagement, retention, and morale for virtual teams

☑ Determine the most effective post-COVID work arrangements for virtual teams

☑ Feel truly confident about whether you make the right calls in leading virtual teams

☑ Learn the dangerous judgment errors called cognitive biases that undermine successful virtual team leadership and how Fortune 500 firms defeat them

☑ Develop a plan with specific next steps to adapt for yourself the best practices used by Fortune 500 companies for leading virtual teams

Leading virtual teams is the key new area that leaders must master for leadership success in the post-COVID world.

Unfortunately, our intuitive leadership style is adapted to in-office collaboration, and is poorly suited to virtual teams. Our gut reactions on virtual teams can’t be trusted, as revealed by research in behavioral economics, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. So how do the leaders of Fortune 500 companies make the right calls on leading virtual teams?

They follow evidence-based best practices on leading virtual teams and the future of work as revealed by such research. Below is a brief outline of the key contents of the course drawn from the data:

· The best approach to the future of work involves a balance of virtual and hybrid employees, with more of the latter for most companies

· Doing so will enable organizations to excel in retention and recruitment, boost productivity, re-energize company culture, gain substantial cost savings, and manage a wide variety of risks.

· In transitioning strategically to leading virtual teams, leaders need to benchmark to best practices.

· That involves first surveying your employees to get both information on their specific needs and buy-in for whatever policies you implement.

· The survey should serve as the basis for top leaders providing broad guidelines for the future of virtual and hybrid work arrangements

· Then, use a team-based approach to determining the details. Have each team leader of rank-and-file employees, in consultation with their team members and their peers, make decisions about what their team’s schedule will look like.

· Based on that, downsize office space. Reshape it to focus on collaboration versus individual work.

· Revise employee performance evaluation to focus on tasks, not time spent.

· Ensure a regular weekly evaluation process that provides both hybrid and fully virtual employees with a constant awareness of where they stand and what they need to do to improve.

· Adapt company culture to the new virtual and hybrid model strategically, addressing challenges of connection of employees to each other and to the company as a whole.

· Adapt your company culture to innovate successfully in hybrid and virtual settings, through virtual brainstorming and serendipitous innovation practices.

· Address diversity-related issues, such as technology-based discrimination, in virtual settings.

· Train your staff to succeed in this virtual and hybrid model by helping them understand how to divide their work between collaboration in the office and individual tasks at home; likewise, boost their virtual and hybrid communication and collaboration skills.

· Finally, offer appropriate funding for their home office needs.

· Taking these steps will maximize your competitive advantage in the most important resource: your people.

In this course, you will master techniques for leading virtual teams drawing on cutting-edge behavioral science and real-world best practices from Fortune 500 companies. After taking this course, you will:

· Master the best practices in leading virtual teams used by Fortune 500 firms to seize competitive advantage

· Discover how to collaborate and innovate most effectively in virtual teams, while holding team members accountable

· Maximize productivity, engagement, retention, and morale for virtual teams

· Determine the most effective post-COVID work arrangements for virtual teams

· Feel truly confident about whether you make the right calls in leading virtual teams

· Learn the dangerous judgment errors called cognitive biases that undermine successful virtual team leadership and how Fortune 500 firms defeat them

· Develop a plan with specific next steps to adapt for yourself the best practices used by Fortune 500 companies for leading virtual teams

Sounds too good to be true? These methods were successfully used by Aflac, Applied Materials, Entergy, Honda, Jones Lang LaSalle, IBM, Reckitt, Wells Fargo, and Xerox to dramatically improve the skills of their top executives, senior VPs, middle managers, and lower-level supervisors in leading virtual teams. Over the last few months, I trained the leaders at these Fortune 500 companies, as well as at numerous middle-market companies and quickly-growing startups, on virtual team leadership. More broadly, I served for over 20 years as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. Below is a sample testimonial from a recent training on virtual team leadership.

Here’s a recent testimonial from Dan Rooney, Senior Vice President at Jones Lang LaSalle, a company ranked #186 by Fortune, speaking about the impact of my training:

· “Thank you for taking time out of your schedule to present to our Consulting team last week. The content was spot-on and provided a unique perspective into building culture, driving innovation and brainstorming across virtual and hybrid teams (among other things). I appreciate your willingness to partner leading up to the presentation to ensure the content was tailored for the audience – it made the discussion that much more impactful. I have received positive feedback from a number of team members and look forward to collaborating more in the future!”

My best-selling book, Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage (Intentional Insights, 2021), will form the basis for this course. My expertise is featured in a total of 7 best-selling books, including global best-sellers Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019) and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020). Further attesting to my global renown, my work was translated into Chinese, German, Russian, Korean, Polish, and other languages.

This combination of business and science led to my expertise gaining global recognition. I published over 550 articles and gave over 450 interviews for prominent venues, such as Fortune, USA Today, CNBC, Fast Company, CBS News, Business Insider, Inc. Magazine, and Time.

Besides my real-world, pragmatic expertise training and consulting for Fortune 500 companies, I have a strong academic background as a behavioral scientist. I spent 8 years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, first getting a PhD in the History of Behavioral Science and then serving as a lecturer there. Then, I spent 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University, where I published dozens of peer-reviewed articles on this topic in high-quality academic journals such as Behavior and Social Issues and Journal of Social and Political Psychology. Thus, this course is thoroughly informed by cutting-edge research.

That’s what you can expect in this course: methods used successfully at even the biggest companies to seize competitive advantage, thoroughly informed by cutting-edge research, and featured in top media venues and best-selling books around the globe. The course features the following sections with videos and articles.

1) “Introduction to the Course”

Learn what the course will be about

2) “What Do Employees Want in Virtual Work?”

Understand the data from large-scale surveys, in-depth case studies, and peer-reviewed articles on employee and leader experiences and preferences on virtual work and the post-COVID future of work

3) “Why Do Leaders Make Bad Decisions About Virtual Work?”

Uncover the dangerous judgment errors that Fortune 500 firms identified as most likely to derail virtual work and the future of work

4) “Creating a Competitive Advantage: The Virtual and Hybrid Model”

Discover how forward-looking Fortune 500 companies are creating a competitive advantage through moving to a virtual and hybrid model

5) “Virtual Best Practice: A Team-Led Approach”

Master the Fortune 500 best practices of determining the set-up and structuring of virtual and hybrid models through a team-led approach

6) “Virtual Best Practice: Redefining Office Space”

Master the Fortune 500 best practices of reshaping office space to fit the needs of virtual and hybrid teams most effectively

7) “Virtual Best Practice: Innovation Via Virtual Brainstorming”

Master the Fortune 500 best practices of virtual brainstorming to maximize idea generation on preset topics for virtual teams

8) “Virtual Best Practice: Virtual Collaboration”

Master the Fortune 500 best practices of collaborating effectively in virtual teams

9) “Virtual Best Practice: Training and Mentoring”

Master the Fortune 500 best practices of on-the-job training and effective mentoring in virtual teams

10) “Virtual Teams: Next Steps for Lifelong Learning”

Develop a specific plan with next steps for mastery of the course content and lifelong learning

So why should you take my course rather than someone else’s alternative Udemy course? Simply because this course provides unparalleled value. No one else on Udemy comes even close to my level of credibility in the course topic:

· As a trainer for Fortune 500 companies

· As a behavioral scientist

· As a best-selling author

· As a globally-renowned thought leader

So if you want an alternative course that doesn’t offer top value and expertise, take someone else’s class. If you want the best, take this course.

As part of this course, you will get a complimentary copy of my book, Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage (Intentional Insights, 2021). It will contain the reading assignments for the course. Fortune 500 companies buy this book for their leaders to help them seize competitive advantage in leading virtual teams: you’re getting what they are getting.

I look forward to welcoming you into the world of evidence-based, science-driven techniques tested in the real world of many Fortune 500 companies and numerous middle-market companies and startups. To ensure that you master the secrets of Fortune 500 companies to help yourself seize competitive advantage in leading virtual teams, register now!