General Information
Promotional Video
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Target Audience
This course is intended for students who expect to work with people. It provides an opportunity to develop your interpersonal skills and develop a sophisticated skill set to leading teams. It is generally useful, and especially so for those who wish to enter management, consulting, or People and Culture divisions of organizations. The course goes well beyond students’ current exposure to effective teamwork.
Format
Anticipated in-class time to be eight 3-hour sessions. Format varies from a two-weekend intensive, eight weekly 3-hour sessions, or some mixture of both.
Course Mission
In many cases, organizations cannot function without teams (e.g., production crews, c-suite, boardrooms), but leaders struggle to lead them well, seeking to achieve high performance while undermining morale, or vice versa. This course focuses on how to increase a team leader’s success using the coaching mindset: this approach allows leaders to achieve high levels of team performance while sustaining morale. My goal for my students is to expose them to this knowledge – both time-tested and cutting edge – and give them opportunities for self-development, so that that they can become better personal leaders. The coaching mindset engages an observe-diagnose-do (ODD) approach to leadership. Students will learn to enhance their powers to observe teams, for example, by tracking team performance, reading micro-behaviors and expressions, and tracking communication processes. They will use those observations to fuel their diagnosis, where they will identify common forms of process loss. Students will then learn to use their observations and diagnosis to act in ways to help teams succeed. In this regard, good leadership depends on observation-guided diagnoses (observe-diagnose-do).
Course Scope
With the Leading Teams course, students will master four course learning outcomes. First, they will be able to coach teams to higher performance: Students will learn how different types of teamwork can create distinctive challenges (such as the role of culture and conflict avoidance when the team needs to have a good fight), and what they can do to improve performance, using tools to design the team, inspire others, and shape the team’s culture. Second, they will be able to manage conflict: Students will learn how to address disruption that might arise from personality, lack of trust, divisiveness, and identity (pros and cons – social identity and public image), and in doing so, learn to transform sources of conflict into team assets. Third, they will recognize sources of group-level influence: Students will learn how to think strategically about how they can influence entire teams of people, even when they might lack formal authority. Fourth, they will be able to empower themselves to lead teams: Students will learn about themselves as leaders, specifically how they can increase their confidence in assisting their teams to thrive. Students will do so through an online leadership self-assessment and by learning about and doing teamwork, through case studies, in-class activities, and a team project. They will also apply what they learn in an individually written assignment about their continued development as a personal leader.
Evaluation and Grade Breakdown
| Component | Due Date | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Class Participation | Ongoing | 20% |
| Consulting Assignment (Team) | Six weeks after start of class (typically) | 40% |
| Leadership Self-Appraisal (Individual) | One week after last class (typically) | 40% |
Required Resources
A book and selected course packet will be prepared for this course. The book, in my experience, is the best ongoing resource available for learning about leading teams. The readings will include a collection of the very best, most focused articles and chapters addressing issues of interest to the course as well as enable access to some exercises and simulations used for the course. The professor will distribute supplementary materials throughout.