In today’s organizations, more and more teams are divided across borders, offices, home based contracts etc. This form of organizations provides many benefits for the people involved, but it also calls for more attention to the leaders´ abilities to become visible, reactive and attentive, despite the distance. One thing is determining goals, desired results, milestones and scope of assignments, but how do you ensure the same level of trust, and personal relation you have in the office, which proves essential for the cooperation in your team? How do you secure involvement and commitment from everyone when your communication isn´t face to face, and which communication channel is best for teams and individuals across borders and cultures?

Leaders and Managers who either have, or will have the responsibility to lead a team or individual employees on a distance, including project managers.

Individuals who are working on a home-based contract or similar, with a limited physical contact with their team or team leader are also part of this course, since the learnings will benefit them in their relationship with their leader.

The purpose of the course is to enable the participants to lead and manage teams or individuals across a physical distance, including achieving company goals and results, along with the personal and professional development of their employees.

This includes:

• Defining Leading on a distance, virtual leadership and virtual teams.
• Benefits and challenges when leading on a distance.
• Expectation management and perception alignment.
• Silent deviation.
• Communication methods and applications.
• Cultural differences in the team; working with high/low context cultures and power distance between cultures.
• Planning, setting goals and follow-up.
• Time management.
• Touch points.
• Misunderstandings and conflicts on the distance.
• Creating trust and team culture across a distance.

Upon completion of the course, the participants will:

• Know how to establish trust and securing a good relation across the distance.
• Know how to secure high quality of communication, and the ability to utilize the appropriate communication form.
• Know how to secure common goals and values in a team across a distance.
• Be able to cooperate with different cultures.
• Working and communicating with high/low context cultures and between cultures with a difference in power distance.
• Be able to create personal and professional development across a distance.

The content of the course will be a mixture of theoretical topics such as trust, perception and culture, through to practical topics as email and personal communication. It will all be provided in a work related context to the participants, with the intent to provide knowledge and skills to be used directly after returning to the workplace.