Virtual Teams For Dummies

Virtual Teams For Dummies provides rock-solid guidance on the essentials for building, leading, and sustaining a highly productive virtual workforce. Virtual Teams For Dummies helps executives understand key support strategies that lead virtual teams to success and provides practical information and tools to help leaders and their teams bridge the communication gaps created by geographical separation--and achieve peak performance. This hands-on guide written by Tara Powers, an award-winning leadership expert, is perfect for executives moving towards a culture of virtual teams, virtual team leaders who are managing a virtual workforce and team members who work on a team where people are in more than one location.  Powers includes her research findings based on a year-long study on the effectiveness of Virtual Teams that uncovered major barriers to virtual teams and how they can be more effective. Key topics include:

•  Benefits of virtual teams (including global reach, expanded influence, access to diverse talent and perspectives, recruitment and retention a strategic focus on deliverables and collaborative communication skills and flexibility in style, shift from positional power to influential power)
• The challenges of newly formed virtual teams vs. seasoned virtual teams
• Communication and relationship strategies for virtual teams
• How the frequency of in-person meetings effects a remote team’s success
• The biggest opportunities for leaders of virtual teams
• The best predictors of virtual team effectiveness
• The top 5 MUST HAVE tech tools for virtual team effectiveness
• Using e-mail, teleconferencing, and videoconferencing for maximum effectiveness
• Managing projects and leveraging team member strengths from a distance
• Building a cohesive team comprised of workers in different locations
• International challenges including cultural difference and language barriers and how to address them