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