Get Started: Step by step guide to your V-TeamCraft learning experience

 

How does V-Teamwork differ from other online programs?

Leading and teaming in the digital economy requires more than technical know-how and the ability to get along with people. It’s as much about developing our dispositions for learning, building trust, managing mood, coordinating commitments and solving problems together as it is about technical brilliance or individual charisma.

Our 21st Century  world of accelerating change and disruption has two features of strategic importance to any successful career.  They are ‘hidden in plain sight’ and depend on thriving workplace relationships

• The  value added by individuals entails collaboration in networks of relationships
• Collaboration involves learning together as we coordinate our actions.

To develop relational skills we need a deeper kind of learning: dispositional learning. It requires motivation, a great deal of recurrent practice, feedback and self-reflection.

That’s why V-Teamwork is entirely practice-based. It’s designed to cultivate your skills and dispositions for successful interaction: at first in the weekly team session, then in your workplace, where every conversation becomes your training ground and an opportunity to progress your projects and make your relationships flourish.

What are the four courses in the curriculum and how do they fit together?

The V-Teamwork curriculum is designed to rapidly develop your mastery of leadership and teaming skills, so you can get breakthrough results in your workplace, leadership or enterprise, and continue to build on these into the future. Read the full program details here.

Teamcraft Foundations is a comparatively brief but highly practical introduction to virtual immersive simulations.  A prerequisite to the other courses, TeamCraft Foundations builds the dispositions and practices needed to create a cohesive learning culture at work. With  8 contact hours spread over 4 weeks, it’s also the ideal introductory course for those busy professionals who want to test the waters of leadership development.

Core Skills and Core Skills advanced are more intensive programs to develop core competency in teaming and leadership. Building on the mindset and attitudes of TeamCraft foundations, they develop people into powerful leaders and collaborators, and include competencies in shifting the mood and morale of team, and delivering and receiving feedback powerfully, thinking interdependently, and adapting to change.

Teaming Dojo is an ongoing, low-intensity  course for graduates of TeamCraft and Core Skills to maintain and strengthen skills in collaboration and critical thinking, in a community of like-minded professionals.

Do I have to do the courses in a specific order?

While we recommend following the curriculum as designed, the only prerequisite is TeamCraft Foundations, which, as an introduction to immersive virtual learning and developing team learning practices, needs to be completed before all other courses.

See the program details page for a full set of course information and requirements.

What does each course involve?

Each course is a potent blend of learning technologies to rapidly develop and expand your dispositions for leadership and teaming. All courses involve a combination of these key components:

• Reading/videos of groundbreaking research and the key distinctions taught in the course (in TeamCraft, most reading is optional)
• One-to-one coaching with a professional coach to clarify your learning objectives
• Dynamic teleconference calls with a team and coach, to plan and debrief your work together and to setup the transfer of your learning to your real-world work
• Team game assignments, working together in the multi-player game environment of Minecraft, to practice teaming skills in a psychologically safe environment
• Personal reflection exercises to reflect on, reinforce and enhance your learning

See the program details page for a more detailed description of each course.

You will be working closely with your team to coordinate your time and accomplish the course work together (see Who is the Ideal V-Teamwork Participant to get an idea of the types of people you will be working with). Your teammates become a source of mutual support, encouragement, and focused feedback, as well as providing invaluable learning opportunities for discovering how to work with different people.

Most importantly, you will be expected to apply your learning week-to-week at work. This course is not for people just going through the motions; however, if you are committed to seeing your results manifest in your day-to-day business or workplace, you will surprised and delighted at what you can achieve.

What are the dispositions and skills developed in the program?

Dispositions and sensibilities we focus on

• Listening with understanding and empathy
• Thinking about our thinking (metacognition)
• Interdependent thinking to solve problems creatively with others
• Emotional awareness: aware of our own and others feelings.

Skills and practices we cultivate:

• Observing oneself in action – two things not one. You need to be in action and you need to cultivate the capacity to observe yourself and reflect on your action.
• Coordinating commitments. Speaking and listening to a shared narrative of value; and making effective requests, valuable offers and reliable promises that will produce a shared future. This is the heart of coordinating productively with others.
• Building and repairing trust by managing commitments accountably over time. The ability to be accountable and to be able to hold others accountable is always at the top of individual and organisational wish lists.
• Raising morale by producing individual and organisational moods for success. More and more research is uncovering the importance of moods in the workplace and yet it is largely ignored by management and only usually noticed by exception.
• Connecting, blending and moving well with the physical energy that others bring to the team. This is a huge challenge, particularly in geographically distributed teams where we cannot usually see those other bodies.
• Giving and seeking opinions and assessing performance. Being able to do this in the moment in ways that open up productive futures with others is a characteristic of many high performing individuals.
• Actively cultivating respect for diversity. When we face differences in culture, gender, language, generation or geographical location, we can cultivate respect by developing the capacity to observe our own history and how it interacts with the histories of others.

Applying

What are the important dates to note for upcoming programs?

See the Program Dates page for upcoming dates.

 

How do I apply to V-Teamwork?

Please find the application form here.

What can I expect?

V-Teamwork Core Skills is different from any other type of online or face-to-face learning that you are likely to have encountered. It’s not about knowledge acquisition, there are no multiple choice questions, webinars, case studies, capstone projects or research.

Instead, V-Teamwork is action-based group learning. You learn by doing projects with a team and a skilled professional coach in an immersive virtual environment, where you are free to learn from mistakes as well as from success.

Your learning accelerates because, whether you are succeeding or making mistakes, you are constantly learning from your teammates and they are learning from you. This supportive deep learning environment equips you with the skill and confidence to then put your learning into practice in real life: in the 10-20 hours you spend in workplace interactions each week.

Who is the ideal V-Teamwork participant?

In the 21st Century, the future belongs to those who can thrive on change and disruption by expanding their ability to learn and collaborate with others. The ideal V-Teamwork participant is someone wants to level up and work with others to create positive futures. Someone who understands that collaboration, leadership, and teaming skills are fundamental to success.

V-Teamwork is for leaders, entrepreneurs, executives, and managers: people who innovate, make decisions, design, build and get things done.  Here’s a snapshot of some of the people who’ve already done the program:

• Software and devops managers delivering complex products and deployments
• Founders in early stage startups
• Mid-career professionals seeking more rewarding and challenging assignments
• Doctors with senior roles in hospital intensive care units
• Young high-potentials accelerating change in not-for-profit environments
• OD and HR professionals with major responsibilities for managing culture change
• Leaders in the public sector and higher education tasked with coming to grips with new realities in systems, privacy and procurement
• Seasoned executive coaches and consultants working in disruptive spaces
• Senior managers heading up newly formed cyber-security units in financial services
• Product managers with demanding release schedules who need to get their teams working smoothly across multiple geographies.

Our graduates have worked for organizations like Autodesk, RioTinto, Effective Altruism, Nike, Leica, NASA, Apple and Facebook, as well as numerous startups and public sector organizations.

From millennials in their early 20’s to boomers in their late 60’s, they joined us from the United States, China, Singapore, Australia, South Africa, India, Canada, New Zealand, Germany, France, Russia, Poland and Ukraine.

No matter the profession, industry or job function, V-Teamwork is for leaders who thrive on change. It’s for people who want to expand their ability to motivate, influence and bring out the best in those around them.

 

 

 

 

 

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