Bridging the Virtual Team Soft Skills Gap - Howard Esbin

Project teams are made up of people with diverse personalities and strengths. They must learn to quickly collaborate well to achieve a common goal. However, there’s a huge Team Soft Skills Gap. Skills like Empathy and Communication are too often undervalued and under-developed. This significantly limits team wellbeing and performance. US$490 billion is lost annually due to interpersonal conflict, bullying, disengagement, absenteeism, and turnover.

The key to effective teamwork in many fields is practice. Yet, for project teams this rarely if ever occurs. That is, new team members actually practicing being a team before they have to perform on stage. Without practice, teams can’t easily bridge the Soft Skills Gap. The negative results include the Absence of Trust, Fear of Conflict, Miscommunication, Interpersonal Conflict, Lack of Commitment, and Disengagement.

In this session, we’ll share an overview of the Prelude Suite, a compact 3-step online learning experience that helps project teams at formation to practice distributed leadership and strengthen soft skills together. It’s been aptly called a trust accelerator. We’ll also share stories about project teams that have benefitted.

Take-Aways A better understanding of a growing project team soft skills gap Special opportunity to learn how to facilitate the Prelude Suite

 Mark As Complete