The Distance Manager - Building Teams with Remotely Located Employees

Leading any kind of team is challenging, but managing a virtual team where you seldom can meet with your team members face-to-face is especially difficult. How do you focus and coordinate people from a distance? How do you do virtual team building? How can you motivate and inspire remote team members or people who only serve part-time on your project or natural work group team? How do you build trust from afar? How do you help employees who often work from their homes or in the field overcome a feeling of isolation from other team members? What are the best ways to use email, Webconferencing and other technologies to communicate with your team? Come listen to Kimball and Mareen Fisher, coauthors of the bestselling book, The Distance Manager, as they address these and other virtual team management challenges. Internationally acknowledged authorities in the field of team leadership, the Fishers have worked with about 1/4 of the Fortune 100 as clients and have personal, hands-on experience as distance managers.

Learning Objectives:

• Define the six types of virtual teams and determine which type(s) of team(s) you have.
• Describe the seven competencies required to be an effective distance manager.
• Find ways to use two tools for effective virtual team start-ups (charters, operating guidelines).
• State tips for using communication technologies more effectively (teleconferences, email, voicemail, videoconferences, and Webconferences).

Presented By:

Kimball Fisher & Mareen Fisher
co-founders,
The Fisher Group, Inc.

Kimball and Mareen Fisher are co-authors of the bestselling book, The Distance Manager: A Hands-On Guide to Managing Off-Site Employees and Virtual Teams (McGraw-Hill, 2001) and the critically acclaimed The Distributed Mind: Achieving High Performance Through the Collective Intelligence of Knowledge Work Teams (Amacom, 1998). Kimball is also the author of the best-selling classic on team management, Leading Self-Directed Work Teams (McGraw-Hill, 2000). They are cofounders of The Fisher Group, Inc., and have worked with clients across North America, Mexico, Europe, South Africa, and Asia.