Leadership in Remote Work

Overview

Class Central Tips

The dynamics of remote work present unique challenges and opportunities for leaders. This course offers remote leaders a comprehensive guide to harnessing the benefits and minimizing the drawbacks of remote work to foster greater collaboration and trust across their teams. Over four engaging modules, learners will explore effective leadership styles for remote environments, strategies to mitigate the silo mentality and communication breakdowns, methods to recognize and address isolation and burnout, and techniques for constructively managing remote conflicts. By the end of this course, learners will have the skills to foster open team communication, build trust, conduct difficult conversations, and transform negative conflicts into opportunities for growth.

Syllabus

Dynamics of Remote Work

Welcome to Module 1, Dynamics of Remote Work. This module focuses on the silo mentality and the challenges it brings to effective communication in remote teams. We will explore best practices to prevent the silo mentality, how to build bridges of communication across teams and strategies for mitigating communication breakdowns in the virtual environment. We will also reflect on our own experiences in siloed work environments and weigh the effectiveness of different remote communication strategies in real-world situations.

Leadership Styles in a Virtual Environment

Welcome to Module 2, Leadership Styles in a Virtual Environment. This module explores the six main leadership styles and how to adapt them to a remote work environment. We will also cover ways to build trust, avoid miscommunication, and give positive and negative feedback to remote team members. We will close the module with a discussion of our own leadership styles, their differences when face-to-face versus online, and strategies to bring out our best leadership qualities.

Handling Remote Challenges

Welcome to Module 3, Handling Remote Challenges. In this module, we will discover how to handle isolation and burnout in virtual team members, conduct difficult conversations remotely, approach common distractions, and address uncertainty in team member’s roles and expectations. We will then discuss the unique demands of virtual work that can exacerbate burnout and strategies to overcome it.

Conflict in Virtual Environments

Welcome to Module 4, Conflict in Virtual Environments. This module explores the different types of conflicts, their common causes in virtual teams, and the most common conflict management styles. We will also discover the dos and don’ts of conflict resolution, the positive outcomes of resolving conflict well, and how to prevent negative conflict. We will close the module by discussing what types of conflict we’ve experienced in virtual environments and how it was or could have been handled well.