Trust, Passion and Responsibility - How to Make Virtual Teams Fly

While building high performance teams in physical spaces has been a subject of academic research and managerial practice, the dynamics of virtual teams are yet to be understood. The virtual world is not a substitute environment of the real world; it is a complement and requires new and complementary work processes, behaviors and mindsets. This workshop will outline

• how virtual teams can build trust in a short while,
• how resistence to virtual work is replaced by passion and inspiration,
• which are the preconditions for people taking up responsibility for contributing to the virtual team space,
• how to make virtual teams more effective than physical teams.

As a participant in our workshop, you will experience virtual team-building in practice. All too often tool adoption reports and user perspectives on virtual collaboration are deficit-focused. They concentrate on how social media is resisted instead of engaging in the unique opportunities possible only in the virtual world. Participants of this workshop will learn concrete methods to use Web 2.0 tools as a springboard to change old mindsets and explore new possibilities. We will examine how to engage people in making use of new work flows that make virtual teams more effective across traditional organizational boundaries including, continuity of interaction, anonymity and autonomy, and the value of multiple time spaces. We will also show how to design blended processes for teams that work both virtually and face-to-face. In this interactive workshop we will use principles from social psychology and group facilitation to access the unique opportunities of virtual space.

Holger Nauheimer has twenty years of professional experience as a consultant, trainer and coach for private business, the public sector and non-governmental organizations. He has worked in more than 50 countries of Europe, North, Central and South America, Africa and Asia, and specializes in the facilitation of personal, team and organizational transformation.  As the author of The Change Management Toolbook, the best known and most cited web-reference on Change, and the founder of the international Change Facilitation Associates Network, he has shown his talent to gather experts and their different approaches and to provide them with a common language to explore their clients’ needs for appropriate strategies to organizational change. Holger has recently shifted his focus to the principles, mechanisms and tools of virtual collaboration as an extension of his previous work. He lives in Berlin, Germany.

Radical Inclusion is a virtual global company that is re-imagining collaboration. Team members (from US, Canada, Brazil, and Germany are grounded in facilitation and organizational development processes and they have tested, expanded and transferred their knowledge of face-to-face team dynamics to the virtual world. In their own team building journey, which was entirely based on virtual collaboration, they have discovered the underlying principles of effective team work. Radical Inclusion team actually lives virtual collaboration, and has developed unique human based processes and virtual tool-use skills to make virtual teams effective. The company provides customized collaboration strategies, virtual and blended work processes, and virtual facilitation for profit and non-profit organizations. Radical Inclusion is also facilitating virtual conferences, coaching global project teams in virtual work, and developing systems for virtual collaboration.

Suresh Fernando is specializing in developing open collaboration frameworks to assist organizations to use the principles of open collaboration more effectively. His focus is on both the enterprise space as well as the social service space. In addition to his work with Radical Inclusion, Suresh is co-founder of OpenKollab, an open collaboration initiative that is developing a community of practice as well as tools and processes to foster collaboration amongst organizations with aligned missions. Previously Suresh built and managed a private client investment advisory business, managing $30 million in private client assets. Subsequent to this he founded and ran his own corporate finance group which provided financing and strategic advisory support to early stage entrepreneurs.