Mission Statement

Ensure participants appreciate the forces fundamentally driving the way we work, now and in the future, especially when working virtually and digitally. Identify mindsets, new practices, and digital processes for participants to transform themselves, their teams, and their organizations for future success. Provide participants with the processes and tools to successfully lead change and transform their organizations by adopting modern practices. Layout a journey to support participants in their leadership development journey to make a positive difference in the lives of their employees, colleagues, and customers.

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Objectives

1. Define and examine the framework, process, and personal expectations of this course.
2.Learn the VUCA framework and the leadership response to each component to effectively lead employees through volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous situations.
3.Understand the context and aspects of Industry 4.0 to read the world and develop effective competitive strategies for the future.
4.Identify working from home style and implications for personal communications for communications mastery communication in a virtual world.
5.Become more conscious of and improve personal presence, specifically in the domain of virtual communication
6. Improve personal productivity in a virtual environment.
7. Increase personal and team productivity with best practices in email and meetings
8.Explore and experiment with new ways of collaborating using modern tools, particularly with asynchronous methods
9.Build Relationships and networks in the virtual workplace and organizations
10.Discover and analyze possibilities for virtual offers. Develop ideas for new offers to make to colleagues and customers that are innovative, relevant, and valuable.
11.Learn the fundamentals of leading with influence and leading change. Experience making a personal/physical change, reflect on the experience and extend to lessons for influencing
and leading others through change.
12.Create goals and new personal habits required for change and commit to an individual plan for successful adoption.

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Strategies

1.Engage and elicit expectations for the course, introduce reflection and possibility exercise
2.Present history, context, VUCA framework, and associated leadership behaviors for each component
3.Illustrate Industry 4.0 phases through video, presentation, and articles, create learning assessment. Introduce “reading the world” practice
4.Have participants take “working from home” style report, debrief with class
5.Provide coaching for communicating virtually and projecting a leadership presence over video conference.
6.Provide resources and case studies that exemplify new practices for personal productivity
7.Assess current practice and develop more efficient and effective communication practices and collaboration with employees and teams in a virtual workplace.
8.Experiment with asynchronous practices for better productivity
9.Relationships and networks
10.Share case studies of virtual offers and successful pivots from businesses during the 2020 pandemic.
11.Experience making a personal/physical change, reflect on the experience and extend to lessons in leading change.
12.Identify new personal habits and change plan (start/stop/modify): Implement a solid change plan.

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Tasks

1.Participants to participate in expectations and possibility exercises through reflection and sharing in small groups during the workshop.
2.Participants identify specific VUCA response behaviors they need to work on as a leader and identify particular situations to bring them more into play when leading a team through volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous situations.
3.Participants to successfully complete the Industry 4.0 quiz and compete with each other via the leaderboard. Develop a “reading the world” analysis of their industry/market and company
4.Participant to take the personal assessment, identify new practice based on learning
5.Participants to demonstrate personal presence, get feedback, and make a plan for further development.
6.Participants to review resources for productivity and identify at least one new tool for adoption from the provided list.
7.Participants to assess current practices for meetings and emails. Identify the most significant time wasters and new methods for engagement.
8.Participants to identify and adopt new asynchronous practices to introduce to their team. Accelerate the adoption of asynchronous tools for more efficiency and effectiveness.
9.Participants to develop relationship map and follow through with actions
10.Participants to create a new offer, design based on customer needs, and make the offer to colleagues or customers relevant to virtual workplace or marketplace.
11.Participants to experience the difficulty of change and apply learnings to the philosophy of leading change.
12.Participants to complete their project by identifying and implementing changes discussed throughout the workshop.

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Introduction

Welcome to the Virtual Transformation course, where we will establish what it takes to survive and thrive given the significant shifts we have experienced within the last generation and, even more notably, this last year as the global pandemic forced the issue of working remotely. The need to lead employees and businesses in new ways has been gradually evolving over the last several decades but sped up dramatically during 2020. The future of work has accelerated. That means who you are as a leader must rise to meet this challenge. You must reinvent yourself as a leader, guide your employees through the new expectations of working in the new normal and transform your processes, operations, and business strategy for long-term competitive advantage.

Workshop Objective

During this workshop, we will examine what it takes for leaders to be successful in a virtual environment, identify the capabilities and practices required for success, and support participants in their transformation journey. We are living in spectacular times; business and leadership are at a significant turning point. The great reset- working from home, social equity and relations, and the economy’s uncertainty- converge as a perfect storm. The silver lining is the quickened pace of digitization and the new models that characterize the future of work. Virtual workers are here to stay. In the future, teams will consist of members working from different locations at different times. The traditional hub and spoke team led by one manager in one physical place will be a rarity. Undoubtedly, some of the fundamentals of excellent management and leadership will persist, but future success will require a shift in mindset and capabilities. Success in a virtual world requires building an effective virtual workplace, leading constituents through complex transformation, developing new offers, and optimizing operations with technology enabled by the fourth industrial revolution. Although there are benefits to virtual working arrangements, the inherent distance creates specific challenges for leaders. When leaders and employees rely on electronic communication to connect and complete their work, there are more possibilities for misunderstandings, significant barriers to fostering trust, and greater difficulty in coordinating. Virtual leaders must BRIDGE THE DISTANCE for themselves, their own team, and connections to other groups and organizations.

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Thriving in Our Disruptive and Distributed World

This course is for all leaders seeking to lead their employees, teams, and businesses through the haze of change we face to develop organizations that can survive and thrive in our increasingly disruptive and distributed world. The future is accelerating towards us faster than ever; in fact, many aspects of the future of work arrived on our doorstep in 2020 as we collectively struggled to figure out how to navigate the pandemic. There isn’t a company or business that can escape the significant shifts we are undergoing in the business world and our society today: globalization, technology, remote working, multigenerational workforces, and cultural issues. These changes impact the local five and dime as well as Fortune 500 enterprises. We need leaders to guide us into the future, which will be dramatically different from our past. Making matters even more complicated, getting ready for the future requires changing the way we work. It means unlearning what we think we know, being in the uncomfortable space of having to learn something new to get your job done, and coping with volatility, uncertainty, complexity all at once.

Research has shown that distributed work can be productive and collaborative. Things that we could not even imagine doing virtually are now commonplace: learning, collaborating, coordinating. Leading employers are declaring that they will never return to the 5 days a week physical workplace, and customers will demand new interfaces for interactions that don’t require a physical presence. The virtual workplace is here to stay. We need savvy leaders to guide us forward.

Virtual Transformation is a one-year leadership program with monthly workshops that will transform leaders and build resilient teams to adapt, evolve, and thrive in the new future of work. Each month leaders will learn and cultivate new ways of working with practical, game-changing concepts that can be immediately applied to transform themselves, inspire and engage their team to be more innovative and productive. Through three core phases, leaders will first focus on themselves, then their team and finally their entire organization.

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Bridging the Distance

Our conversations and work will focus on Virtual Transformation. Virtual refers to the virtual, hybrid, or distributed workplace. Work is no longer a 40 hr week proposition where you coordinate with employees working just down the hall. The reality is that there will be distance between you and your coworkers. Physical space, structural distance in terms of your reporting lines, relationship distance, and more. Our most pressing challenge is figuring out how to bridge that distance and make our distributed teams and businesses effective, meaningful, and rewarding.

Transformation focuses on the work ahead. Leading and managing in the same ways we have been for the last several decades is not going to work. Leaders must make personal shifts for future success and bring their teams and businesses through the journey.

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Envisioning Success

Imagine it is a year from now and you have completed this course. What impact would there be on your business if you had succeeded by:

● Equipping your team to work effectively in our new normal

● Extending your “team” to include a broader group of people with the resources and willingness to help you achieve your goals.

● Creating new habits and practices for your own personal productivity in a digital world

● Freeing your team from the yoke of ineffective communication such as email overwhelm and poor information flow

● Building and sharing your Roadmap to the Future clarifying where you are going, what’s needed to get there, and who is doing what.

● Practicing and applying the tools in our Transformation Playbook to transform yourself, your team, and your organization in a substantial way.

● Developing a healthy high impact team and organization that is functioning well in virtual/hybrid workplace

● Getting a head start on even more digital transformation

● Building your capability as a leader and ability to repeat this success over and over!

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Leading Into the Future

You will achieve this success by investing time and effort to explore new domains, shift your thinking, adopt new practices, innovate for your organization and lead change. In workshop one, we will begin our journey together, delving into critical success factors.

Reading the World: Explore and understand the world we live in, and interpret what that means for you, your team, and your business. You will start this process by completing the preliminary analysis section. It is critical for anticipating what is next and formulating a plan to deal with the challenges and exploit the opportunities you see.

Future Shaping: Prepare for a future unlike the past by building the structures, resources, and practices required to thrive. Embrace today’s challenges and decide what to do to create a better tomorrow. Ask yourself how you can proactively shape the things you can control and translate your insights into an action plan.

Collaborative leadership: Expandyour team and influence, work across boundaries, building interdependence among peers, colleagues, and stakeholders for alignment and more inclusive thinking.

Transform yourself, your team, and your organization. Business Transformation is different from linear process improvement and incremental change. It requires s whole system transformation that renders what we know as so substantially different, it is almost unrecognizable. It will feel radical to you and the people involved in the change. Overcoming resistance and inertia to get the organization to shift and move requires vision, planning, and persistence. You will create a strategy to support the team as they transition and adopt new ways of working.

All of this takes extraordinary leadership. But there is simply no choice. To go forward, we need leaders who are willing to step up to the challenge. This course’s mission is to guide you, accelerate your progress, give you a heads up for the speed bumps, and let you in on the proven best practices for transforming organizations so that you are well prepared to lead into the future.

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The Three Lenses: You, Your Team, Your Organization

The Virtual Transformation course will be the catalyst for driving and adapting to the new workplace’s complexities for you as a leader, your team, and your business. We begin with a thorough exploration of the virtual workplace, focus on what leaders must do to transform themselves, and prepare to lead their team forward to the new normal. It requires disrupting old practices as well as managing your personal energy and commitment to be as effective and productive as possible for the challenge ahead. Leaders must shift themselves to the new realities of work and become experts in leading others through change and move their constituents towards the future.

After spending time shoring up your leadership mindsets and capability, we will focus on bringing your team along on the journey. What do they need to do differently to thrive in the new normal? How do you build a high-impact team in a distributed world? How do you manage and create accountability in a distributed world? Developing vital for self-awareness, empathy, and resilience is critical for all.

Lastly, we will focus on the enterprise or business level. What does it take to creating an effective virtual workplace? Transform operations and processes to enable the virtual work and leverage next gen technology? How can we use real-time data so that operators, managers, and leaders make better decisions? We will discuss how to develop vital cross-functional collaboration to reinvent products, services, and customer relationships.

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Optimal Results Require Your Full Participation

As a participant, you will experience world-class virtual learning through a digital learning model designed to adapt to each participant. Your instructor, Ms. Ennis, is an expert in digital business transformation, leadership, and high-impact teams. She will introduce each concept in ways that trigger insights for you and provide practical ways to put the idea into practice. These micro-changes add up over time to help leaders change their teams, organizations, and lives for the better. Through social learning, participants will learn from each other and build strong relationships with peers who can continue to learn from one another after the program. Each module includes interactive exercises and activities. Monthly assignments serve as the foundation for the course project, a complete business transformation plan for the virtual workplace and digital marketplace.

There are several phases to your work each month:

1. Preparation – learn the fundamentals so that you can participate fully in the workshop

2. Conversation – robust dialogue with the course leader and your fellow participants to gain a deeper understanding and perspective

3. Practice – apply what you learned to achieve small wins and embed the learning.

4. Sustaining the change – building long term habits and structures to support ongoing transformation

You cannot do this work in isolation. Your monthly projects will involve collaborating with your team and stakeholders to build alignment and interdependent solutions.

Workshop One Preparation:

● Complete the Preliminary Analysis
● Review the Executive Summary
● Review the Mission, objectives, strategies, and tasks required for completion of Module 1
● Take the assessment on your “working from home” style
● Reflect and document what you intend to achieve in this course and the predicted impact on your
organization or business.
● Organize your digital learning space
● Be ready to introduce yourself to the cohort with a two-minute introduction of yourself.

For course completion, you will learn and adopt new ways of working for yourself, institute new working practices for your team, create a plan to reinvent your company processes and operations using digital tools. We will support you with world-class methods you can use and guidance on leading change and transformation within your organization. Over the next 12 months, we will work through the following topics, guiding you through a process of reading the world, identifying new practices and change for each, culminating in a master plan for the virtual transformation plan for your business.

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Executive Summary

Virtual Transformation

The first workshop in our Virtual Transformation course focuses on you as a leader and the impact you have on the organization. We will examine the forces that are driving this critical shift, what it takes to lead in a virtual environment, identify the capabilities and practices required for success, and build the foundation for the journey you will be taking over the next twelve months to lead your employees, team, and business through a significant virtual transformation. We are living in remarkable times; business and leadership are at a significant turning point. The great reset- working from home, social equity and relations, and the economy’s uncertainty- converge as a perfect storm. The silver lining is the quickened pace of digitization and the opportunity to build a more competitive, effective organization prepared for the future.

Business Transformation Process

We start with an overview of our framework for accomplishing this work together. Business transformation is different from process improvement in two significant ways. First, the starting point must be a future-focused examination of trends impacting our lives and business, before moving onto the internal analysis and design phase. We will work with you to expand your awareness, insights, and ability to connect with what those forces mean for your team, business, and customers. Secondly, the investment required to transform for success requires multi-layer, complex change and communication strategies. We will explore this in-depth and iterate through our five-step transformation process several times during the course, moving from a focus on you as a leader, to your team, to your organization and operations to your offers.

VUCA

The acronym VUCA is a powerful way of understanding the challenges of the world we live in today: it is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. It was coined by the US Army College over 20 years ago to reflect the evolution from historical warfare and the emerging conditions that characterize our world today. Consider the shift from WW2 warfare to protecting ourselves post 9/11. We will discuss each of these components in more detail for clarity on what leaders can expect, what causes the phenomenon, where it occurs, relevance, and how it impacts the business ecosphere, your industry, and your specific situation. As with the military college, the purpose of this section is for you to understand the mechanics in order to develop strategies that are cohesive with the realities of our VUCA world, enhancing your likelihood of success. We will also view Virtual Transformation through the VUCA lens.

VUCA Leadership Response

For each of the VUCA challenges, there is a leadership response That is the good news. Deeply understanding the context provides an opportunity to quickly recognize when any of the challenges are at play, and respond with an effective practice that can make the situation workable. We cannot control the VUCA world we are in, but just as the military has we can create a new playbook to guide us in territory that is vastly different than it was in the past, adopt new practices for success. With this knowledge, you will start to rethink what you need to do to lead your employees through crises like the pandemic and deal with volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity as it is almost always a condition of our situation. You will reflection, and share lessons learned from your personal experiences seen through this framework and trigger insights on what you need to do to develop yourself as a VUCA leader.

Industry 4.0

Today, we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution. It began at the dawn of the new Millennium, catalyzed by our ubiquitous use of the internet and technology in our everyday work and lives. Virtual transformation is both enabled and accelerated by the digitization of the last several decades. The boom in the Internet and telecommunication industry in the 1990s revolutionized how we connect and exchange information. It also sparked industry-wide paradigm changes, drastically altering the boundaries of the physical and the virtual world. Indeed, how would business have ever been able to continue in 2020 during the shutdown if we had not adopted the core technology that allows us to work from home, connect with customers anywhere and even manage manufacturing plants remotely? Those were the advances of Industry 3.0- Digitization. In this section, we will look back to Industry 3.0 for opportunities to jumpstart our virtual transformation with existing technology.

Then we will look forward to the future by examining the components of 4.0 to anticipate what is coming, how it will impact fundamental business structures, and what we need to do about it. The most provocative and challenging aspect of Industry 4.0 is that we are still in the midst of it; we don’t know how it all works out. Compared with previous industrial revolutions, the Fourth is evolving exponentially rather than at a linear pace. Add to that the turbo boost COVID-19 gave to the remote workforce and the economic, social, and political turbulence, and we are in for quite a ride.

Virtual workplace

Virtual working arrangements have been around for decades for a small group of employees like sales professionals whose roles by nature depend on them being more present in the field than the home office. Globalization also sparked virtual working since teams needed to collaborate across geographies. However, the true era of the virtual workplace began in March of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic forced everyone but essential workers to work from home. We all became virtual workers. The forced experience went better in many ways than leadership expected. Physical presence technology like Zoom helped us collectively rise to the occasion. Businesses innovated their offers to embrace the need for virtual or “touchless” products and services. We leaped ahead toward the future of work because of our forced adoption of virtual tools, practices, and mindsets. It also created vast disruption and the realization that moving forward we needed to transform the way we work to a virtual model. Amidst all of the uncertainty, we know that the future workplace will be predominantly virtual.

We can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Many companies like Twitter have already announced they will allow all of their employees to continue working remotely. Companies that choose to return to the traditional workplace will still be faced with managing work from home well into 2021 because of COVID-19. We also know that technology will disrupt the way we work and use products and services in ways we can’t even imagine today. Working virtually is enabled by technology and mandated by the growth that it creates. Industry 4.0 will continue to drive exponential change, artificial intelligence, a virtual workplace, and the need to continuously adopt new ways of working to remain competitive. With self-directed, tech-enabled, globally-connected teams, the work of managers and leaders will shift. We need to transform the way we connect, get work done, learn, transact and deliver products to customers, teach our children, and integrate work and life so that we can live productive and fulfilling lives.

Leadership Presence

In 2021 where leadership happens is very different from what you have experienced in the past. Instead of daily interactions with most of the people you are working with, you are likely leading the majority of the time over Zoom or Microsoft teams. Virtual transformation starts with you! How are you shifting the way you interact and show up to maintain the presence you had working face to face? Have you taken the time to set up your remote space in a way that lets you put your best foot forward? In the future, you undoubtedly will need to make an impact on employees, customers, bosses, and colleagues virtually more of the time if not most of the time. In fact, your leadership presence will become something that differentiates you and provides you competitive advantage. In preparation for the workshop, you will put your best foot forward to introduce yourself to your cohort colleagues and get some immediate feedback. Together we will discuss some simple new tools and practices that will quickly help you improve your performance for the work at hand. Become more conscious of and improve personal presence, specifically in the domain of virtual communication.

Virtual Communication Style

Your ability to communicate effectively as a leader is a critical success factor. Everyone has their own preferences and tendencies. Great leaders are self-aware of how they communicate, and how their communication style impacts the different types of people they work with. They also have a keen understanding of the communication style preferences that produce the best results. This work is bedrock for leadership and team development. Some of you may have used an assessment like DISC in the past.

Working virtually dramatically increases the need for communication style awareness given the lack of physical presence and ability to observe cues. When working virtually, we need to become more aware of our strengths and weaknesses and actively manage them. We don’t have our peers, leaders, and other influencers around us to help point out when we need course-correction. In addition, time and priority management are vital. Your communication style provides clues to what you need to create to be successful in a virtual or hybrid team environment. As prework, you will take the “Working From Home” style assessment. Your customized report will include suggestions to offer insight into how you might manage yourself when working virtually for the best results. We will also discuss how you can use this tool with your team.

Mindset Shifts and New Capabilities

We live in extraordinary times. There has never been a better time to lead or opportunity to lead from anywhere in the organization. Even before the pandemic, our world had become VUCA. We are well into the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Technology will continue to change faster than we can imagine. And the Covid10 pandemic has accelerated the virtual workplace.

How do we move forward and get through? Great leaders. Leaders are needed more than ever.

Today’s leaders face a dramatically different world moving forward. Transforming your team or organization starts with transforming how you work and lead. That entails adopting new ways of thinking, new behaviors, and new practices. If you have been a strong leader in the past, you will be able to build upon some of those capabilities to get even better such as communications and building relationships. In some areas, you need to literally “unlearn” some of your practices and habits to make room for the new habits of the virtual workplace. It may be the case that you have to shore up some fundamental leadership capabilities such as leading change.

So much has been written and researched on Leadership. We have synthesized the current research on t Modern Leadership and summarized it into four categories: Personal Impact, Growth Mindset, Teaming/Collaboration, and future focus. During the workshop, we will discuss specific skills and mindsets required for success in each area, and give you the opportunity to assess yourself, and identify areas to develop your leadership capabilities. The great news is that all four of these leadership areas are skills that you can get better at with effort and practice.

Leadership SWOT

A SWOT is a strategic planning tool used to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats a business, organization, project or competitor may have. SWOTs are high-level strategic planning tools to help organizations identify where they’re doing well and where they can improve. Knowing where you are starting from is essential for any strategic planning perspective. We will use SWOTs for several different purposes throughout this course, and we start in this workshop with your leadership SWOT. Using the spirit of this SWOT analysis – you are going to assess your own leadership skills and abilities. You will be taking the time, to be honest, and do a check-in with yourself on the quality of your work, motivations, and future self. This assessment will be critical for building your per