You have been asked by executive leaders in your organization to use your experience and research to develop a training program for a group of newly promoted middle managers. This is a group of experienced and successful front-line supervisors who have been promoted, and now have front-line supervisors reporting to them. Almost all of the supervisors reporting directly to this group of middle managers are located in centers across the United States. The middle managers have limited travel budgets and large areas to control, making in-person meetings very infrequent.

Two areas you have been asked to specifically address in your training program are building trust and defining the principles of effective virtual team leadership.

• Approach the trust issue by identifying seven behaviors that build trust and seven behaviors that undermine trust. You will use examples from your own virtual management experience or examples that you have researched from current, relevant sources to illustrate each of the behaviors that build trust and those that undermine trust.
• Identify ten leadership principles (especially as they apply to virtual team leadership) and illustrate each principle with examples based on the successes and failures you have experienced or observed in virtual team collaborations, or examples that you have found in your research.

As you begin to develop the training, you receive one last instruction from your executive leaders. You are reminded that these managers are not new to supervision and already have significant leadership experience. They will not be engaged by training that treats them as if they are naive about leadership or trust in the workplace. Recognizing the sincerity and genuineness of the hard-earned lessons they have already learned is more likely to have a positive effect on their behaviors as virtual managers.